Neville Hobson alerts us that Adrian Melrose has done a deal with Land Rover and is offering them the use of www.haveyoursay.com to use as a customer feedback forum. Land Rover’s Customer service chief Mike Mulholland admitted honestly that they have not been across online issues. It is a challenge for the guys there and a big opportunity for them if they choose to accept it.

They now have a willing audience of bloggers and blog-readers who know about the issue and are waiting for them to respond. If they take their courage in their hands, jump in and start talking to their customers, ideally via a corporate blog, they will reap a huge benefit in positive PR.

In the interests of openness I should admit that when this story blew up last week I got in touch with Mark Foster, their corporate affairs manager, and pitched him the Market Sentinel web monitoring and response service. The 700 visitors a day Adrian Melrose’s blog was getting represented (according to the calculations of our search optimisation partner Weboptimiser that 25% of the total Land Rover traffic via search engines and more than 100% of the “Land Rover Discovery” traffic. Proof, if proof were needed that, as our white paper points out, a blogger with a tiny budget but a big grievance can out market a very big brand in very little time.

However, now that Land Rover have the ear of thousands of interested and connected customers, they have un unrepeatable opportunity to change the climate of opinion about them, as they have started doing with Mike Mulholland’s response. As vlandro_1.php”>Dennis Howlett points out, a turned-round customer can be an amazing advocate.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 11:41 am and is filed under Reputation management, brand audit, Online detractors, Business blogging, PR, Market Sentinel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.