We are in the fast lane now, appeal to a market and in an hour the entire world will have read about you. It's the #hashtag era, it took the brand Obama mere hours to hit 1 million followers on his new twitter account.
So the advantage is that small businesses now have the opportunity to market themselves in a cost effective manner, all those that could not afford newspapers, TV and radio now have a chance in the market space, appear real and you have a chance to steal emotions.
But beware, there is a reverse of that. Ask my dear friends at KFC, whilst the naughty boys at Nandos are enjoying the mileage generated out of retweets and sharing. KFC is seeing flames, or need I say they are being deep fried?
We have always known that where a happy customer might tell a few people, an unhappy customer would probably tell 10, that was the then, a bad service will now be heard of by millions of people.
I ask myself, that sharpening of the knife on the concrete incidence, would that not have been a throw back in a typical African community? There is no excuse to washing chickens on the flow, but surely it may have been a practical error to take out that chicken breast seconds earlier than prescribed.
So what is the real problem here? Nandos is being run like a tuck shop where decisions are made NOW, so much to their advantage, whilst KFC might have a constipated policy flow that delays things, if they could loosen up and ask how Steve at FNB has done it, they might just survive further deep fries, unfortunately, they will be fried again and again until well done. Because an unhappy customer who has no 'human' face to speak with will go straight to millions of social media users.
We could only wish them the best of luck, and hope to see them up their PR game.
