Wednesday 25 August 2010

Power to the people

Here’s a new service called pownum that allows customers to rate pretty much any organisation. Pownum say that “Whether its sheer frustration or absolute delight, wouldn't it be good to let such organisations know how you feel? Whether we want to express our feelings on organisations' attitudes towards customer service, the environment, their employees or society in general, the harsh truth is we are powerless to be heard.” The idea being that collectively, people can make a much bigger impact and make corporations listen and act.

I did a quick comparison of some of the betting operators to see how punters are rating them: Betfair (6/10), PaddyPower (7.5/10) and 888.com (7/10). I must stress that this is a very new service and the number of people rating these organisations is currently very low, but other organisations are beginning to get quite a few ratings from customers telling them how they feel about them e.g. Waitrose must be delighted that customers are rating it 8.5 (compared with 6.53 for Sainsburys and 4.7 for Tesco).

Social media is still very much in its infancy so the impact of it on companies and society will take time to evolve. But perhaps one day punters will be using services like pownum to tell the world which are the best and worst betting operators and why, which will bring a new transparency to how we choose who we bet with.