Comments on: An unlikely social (networking) success story

By: DH

DH — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:15:44 +0000

For a more scientific approach to these metrics, I used Googlefight to analyze whether more people love or hate Walmart.

The results:

“I love Walmart” = 851,000
“I hate Walmart” = 585,000

By: Alan Majer

Alan Majer — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:54:48 +0000

It’s by no means scientific, but here’s the number of results produced for google searches of several phrases related to Wal-Mart:
9,120 “I love Wal-Mart”
18,000 “I hate Wal-Mart”
11,300 “I love WalMart”
19,600 “I hate WalMart”

To be fair, there’s also quite a few fans that “like” Wal-Mart too:
3,780 “I like Wal-Mart”
28,800 “I like WalMart”

By: Ming Kwan

Ming Kwan — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:23:22 +0000

Ken, that’s a fair point. But on the flip side, if someone was to write “Wal-Mart, in general, is a very well-liked brand” could equally be viewed as “absurd”.
I guess, what I should have written in my post to make it clear is that Wal-Mart, obviously does have fans; but in an online environment – doesn’t do a great job at leveraging them. For example, on their Wal-Mart facebook group (that no longer exists) instead of being a space where people talked about how they love Wal-Mart (which there obviously are, as you point out – people are opening their wallets) where were they [those fans] when people were posting anti-Wal-Mart pictures on their page and writing anti-Walmart content on their wall.
Microsoft, on the other hand has focused on a positive aspect of their business that people get excited about and are willing to express that excitement on an online, public forum.

By: Ken Leebow

Ken Leebow — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:50:47 +0000

Your comment: “Wal-Mart, in general, is not a very well liked brand,” is absurd.

You must be paying too much attention to the media. Every day, people vote with their pocketbook and it’s obvious that Wal-Mart is winning by a landslide.

By: Dan Herman

Dan Herman — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:19:46 +0000

Hey Ming, I think there’s one key difference between these two examples – Microsoft, while indeed a behemoth, has had a thriving collaboration model / developer network operating since the 1980′s (online since 1993) that has endowed it with a following in the millions. Sure, it’s not the coolest company in consumer terms but for programmers they’ve built a following that can easily be mirrored on a Facebook page – i.e. the success might not be that surprising.