Just discovered this story at Brandweek about consumer interaction with company sponsored websites, Facebook pages, and more.

They found consumers nearly twice as likely to visit a company’s website than to seek them out on Facebook. But looking deeper, they found more consumers saw Facebook as their first approach to customer service issues. This makes tremendous sense. Facebook is a pathetic environment for delivering information, but a great world for posting complaints or reading about other customer’s problems.

The really scary truth comes when we add up their numbers. The majority of people are not seeking ANY company sponsored content on the web (accounting for multiple answers).

Ipsos needs to extend their questioning to discover truths to get at this very critical issue:

1. What leads to consumer dissatisfaction about brand websites? How useful do consumers find the information they get from company website? How often are they satisfied with what they learn from a company website? We have only ourselves to blame – the website strengths or weaknesses we create are training consumers in these habits.

2. What elements lead to satisfaction with brand websites? We can guess. But I’d bet that most marketers and advertisers would be surprised by the real consumer answers.

3. When going to the web for product issues, what are the things they really want & how often do they want each? There’s lots of options. Confidence? Facts? Demonstrations? The fine guarantee/warranty print? Comments from neutral consumers who own or use the product or service? Authoritative reviews from third parties? Speeches by the CEO? Purchase locations? Price shopping?

Maybe a future study can dig a little deeper and help us deliver better value to consumers a little faster.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett