The Power Of Blogging

When I first started blogging I didn’t think about how well some of my posts would be received nor did I think of it as a vessel to portrait my experiences to other people whether or not they were good or bad. I primarily use blogging now as a way to talk about whatever I found interesting that I might thought other people would find interesting. The reason I got into blogging was so that I could learn the mechanics behind blogs and a way for me to practice my web development skills while learning better coding practices. Who knew what I wrote would reach people around the Internet.

Recently I’ve shared some of my misfortunes in the real world. My incident with Kal Tire and the fixing of a flat tire to the more recent incident involving one of my financial institution’s ATMs eating my money. After I wrote each article I received emails (or in the situation with the ATM a comment) from an employee of the company I wrote about. How they came across my posts I am not quite sure (nor did I ask) but it was nice to see that companies out there do look into what is going on about their online presence. I do it occasionally for my employer as more of curiosity than anything else to see what sort of things people are saying about us. I assume that other companies do this too since the Internet is a large part of marketing and branding these days.

I find that blogging allows people to express their experience with a larger audience. The more popular the blog the more people it will have an influence over in their decision making. Whether or not the people who write or even comment on a blog is truthful is up to the person reading it to decide.

I write about my experiences (good or bad) as a way to channel my thoughts out there to whomever will listen. I normally try not to be a negative person but sharing my negative experiences with other people will hopefully help them in their decision making process. I like to read other people’s experience with various companies or items. It gives me a better outlook on what I might expect to see. If I see more positive feedback of a company or service, I am more inclined to give them my business. If there is a lot of negative feedback, I will tend to shy away and hope the company sees this and tries to correct the issues. If I see a company tries to better a customer’s issue, it gives me a better impression about them by showing me that they care about their customers and want to keep them happy. After all a happy customer is more likely to remain loyal correct?

In both my recent experiences with the Quality of Service I have received after employees of the respected companies got in touch with me have been positive. Granted they did not quite offer what I thought might be a reasonable compensation for the poor experience I had, but at least they made the effort to correct the issue and to me that can mean more than not hearing from the company at all. Then again, perhaps my expectation of what I would say would be reasonable compensation was set a bit high, though how much damage was done to their reputation for having one of their customer’s write about their bad experiences which will now be on the Internet forever?

Do you write about your bad experiences with companies and or with their services etc? Do you think it is in good taste to write about bad experience in order to help inform the company or potential customers? Did I go too far to express my experiences with these companies on a public means such as my blog?