Week 3 Part 1

          Sometimes in a consumer and business relationship there can be positive and negative experiences. 

          First there can be difficulties communicating to a business as a consumer. In my own experience I have been in a couple negative or simply inconvenient situations. One of those involved the process of trying to return something through amazon. I had been trying to buy a good snowboarding jacket from amazon and it's difficult to find the right one because you can't try it on and don't know how it feels. I ended up buying a jacket that was too thin for snow weather. Then ofcourse I decide to return it and use the money refunded to buy another one.  Then I had to fill out a return form and specify why I was returning it. At this point everything was working fine and I set up the jacket to return and returned it expecting to get a refund. Online it said I would get a refund when amazon recieves the jacket. I then recieved a notification saying that Amazon recieved the jacket. There was no refund at this point. Then I waited some time. Still no refund. After about a week I call and I talk to someone explaining my situation. It took proof that I returned it and I had to give a lot of information and prove a lot of things before I could get that refund. Was this situation that big of a deal? Not exactly. Was it an inconvenience? Yes. 

  

        I also have had many positive experiences communicating with a business. Etsy does a great job at making sure the owners of the products communicate well. I've bought many things through there that involve something special for friends like an engraving and it has been really easy to discuss that with the owner. Also it is great because I have seen different ads through social media that has led me to that website. Etsy makes it an extremely easy process as a consumer. I'd say that social media does a great job of advertising to help get these options out there for people.  I don't think social media is helpful when I have problems like the ones mentioned before. Overall though I have had good experiences communicating with businesses and I think social media helps by providing information on the business and how to find and contact them.

          On the other hand, if I was the business owner I would need to figure out the best way to respond to these positive and negative situations or even comments on social media possibly.  I would most likely have some sort of place where people can put their opinions. Something that I would do is create some sort of link to a survey or maybe even a poll on Instagram to get people's feedback. This way will make people feel like their opinions are heard. It also gives me a way to talk directly to customers. If the comments are on the positive side I might provide a discount or coupon code or something like that that encourages their extra support. That would then lead to that person telling their friends about that and in turn adding more and more to the positive comments. The negative comments would be led more towards the survey.  That is how I would respond.