Bucks Blog: Is the Web Amplifying Consumers’ Voices?

First, Netflix dropped its plan to make customers have separate accounts for mail order and online movies. Now, Bank of America has reversed plans to charge a $5 monthly fee for some customers who use their debit cards to make purchases. Both decisions came after the original plans were sharply criticized by their customers.

Which leaves us at Bucks wondering: Is consumer power newly ascendant? Or was this just a coincidence involving two separate corporate moves, each of which proved so boneheaded that it had no chance of sticking?

Americans have always been able to make their opinions known by talking to each other and by voting with their feet — the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its “us versus them” theme, is a classic example of the take-it-to-the-streets approach.

But it seems that the new social media may have played a big role here, by making it easier for the masses to organize in-person protests and to voice their unfiltered outrage. (I, for one, first learned of the Netflix move when a Facebook friend vented her frustration.) And it also seems unlikely, if not impossible, that a young woman protesting a bank fee would have rated a personal phone call from a high-ranking Bank of America executive had she not first attracted thousands of supporters on an online petition site.

Yet in other cases, consumer sentiment hasn’t seemed to have much impact on unpopular changes–like, for instance, the addition of fees for checked bags by many major airlines.

What do you think? Are new ways of communicating giving consumers more power to change corporate behavior?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=80d9683a6d59f5a4d4584751f030623e