Transform Your Organization Using Social Media
Step 1: Listen What are your Customers Saying
The key initial questions for anyone diving into the social media space are:
- Is anyone online actually having conversations about my brand, product or service?
- What are they discussing?
- Is what they are saying good, bad or indifferent?
- Who are these people having these conversations? Are they influential?
- Finally, where do they tend to congregate?
This type of listening requires a transformation of corporate culture that we havent seen since perhaps the introduction of the telephone. The traditional listen-and-learn process still employed widely today focuses on inputs from sales, customer service, and feedback from media coverage. There is an inherent time delay in this information pipeline and a high degree of filtration, thanks in large part to human nature. So what companies hear at the end of that pipeline can come too late for action and be distorted.
Listening to and learning about social media conversations eliminates the slack and the filter, but its a daunting task simply because of the volume of conversations. Casting a wide net to capture the majority of conversations that matter is key to listening and learning effectively. This sets the stage for the next step.
Step 2: Learn Analyze and Understand
In the second step, companies should digest conversations and ask:
- What is driving conversation of my brand?
- What are the perceived characteristics of my brand?
- What are the perceived characteristics of my competitors brands?
- Where is the white space?
- What are the opportunities to improve brand perception?
This is another crucial step in leveraging social channels and one that, again, requires business transformation. Social conversations tend to be viewed within two major contexts: time and volume. Louder conversations in a short period of time might suggest a company needs to act quickly. But not all conversations are created equally. A simple search may turn up an angry blog post or hyperventilating Tweet about your product or service. In and of itself, that post or Tweet appears threatening to the brands reputation. Clearly the customer is upset, but is the customer influential? Was it a post from a person with five years or 5,000?
The complexities of social conversations extend far beyond a single post. Analysis and insight, ideally enabled throughout an organization, can enable effective response decisions that maximize an organizations resources. Its also key to the next step in leveraging social channels.
Step 3: Engage Participate in the Conversation
In the third step, companies that have gleaned insight and understanding about consumer passions related to their products/service and who have organizational readiness can move into community participation. This can be a challenging transition for traditional marketing cultures used to having control. The volume and velocity of brand reactions today means that brands transform with consumer interaction and with the ebb and flow of conversations around them. Far from being a static entity, brands are fluid and dynamic, and the best a company can hope for is to guard its brand, rather than own it. Engagement is key to that success.
Although active participation can be organized and should be structured as such, your company likely does not want multiple interactions from people in your company responding randomly or without coordination. Supporting engagement initiatives with customer relationship management like software can ensure you dont under or over-respond while providing pre-approved content to handle frequently occurring situations. Additionally, companies must keep in mind that all outreach needs to be conducting in a transparent and genuine way otherwise the social consumer will backlash.
Some key groups will hopefully emerge out of engagement:
- Your product advocates are levers for your success. When you arm them with information, reward them for their loyalty and respect them by considering their input and using it, you magnify their energy on your behalf. Give them some recognition, and value and measure their impact
- Detractors need and deserve respect, too. Youll find many are irrational, not articulate, and struggle to support their argument with facts. Your social media monitoring tools can help you find the influential critics. Engage them directly, honestly and transparently. If your enthusiasm for listening and addressing issues comes through, you can turn critics into advocates.
- The people on the sidelines will see all of your efforts directed to the advocates and the critics. They can be positively influenced by your transparency and honesty.
Step 4: Integrate and Measure Results
The last step is to integrate the social media content, processes, and metrics across all lines of your business. This is not a simple task but your companys customers are your life blood and all department public relations, finance, product management, customer service, and marketing need to work together to manage and optimize what your customers are saying.
Social media listening platforms have emerged as powerful ways to automate and measure everything youve listened to and analyzed. In fact, as social media campaigns become part of most integrated marketing strategies listening platforms can aid in managing volumes, engagement and measurement.
Measurements can include:
- Brand buzz: Whos talking about your brand right now and whats the tone?
- Influence: Are complaints/praises coming from isolated individuals or people from huge following and influence?
- Reach: How far are your messages spreading?
- Virality: What is the speed at which a conversation moves throughout the social media ecosystem?
Listening platforms extend a companys visibility into a customers world beyond the sales cycle, and this is crucial as consumers today are 24-7 information sources for brands, both positively and negatively. Actively managing social media will enable you to understand whether a YouTube training series youre running has lightened the burden on your customer-support team or whether a Twitter campaign is driving traffic to your site.
The Uncertainty Factor
Skeptical marketers wonder aloud whether theres enough proof in the social media monitoring and measuring pudding. Not only does the unfamiliar social media landscape platforms as well as required cultural change seem daunting, but budgets are extremely tight these days. How do you sell management on relatively new platforms and processes? The question should be asked another way: How can companies not invest in platforms to understand the conversations swirling around them when the velocity of both good and bad brand news travels at the speed of light?
Skeptics seem to be moving into the minority. Recent data reveals that 95 percent of social media marketers will maintain or increase social media spending in 2009. The chart to the left reveals that online marketing, particularly social media and word-of-mouth marketing, are key areas of increased investment in 2009. One additional striking comment comes from P&G, who has stated that they will reduce spending on traditional research by half and devote the remaining 60 percent to online listening research in 2009.
How Visible Technologies Can Help
In theory, a brand could turn on RSS feeds or do Google Alerts and monitor real-time search engines in an attempt to read every mention related to their brand, but when youre dealing with literally hundreds or thousands of unique conversations going on every single day, that task quickly becomes overwhelming. A company would need to have employees manually poring through day and night to find insight and determine what may need to be interacted on. A company like Visible Technologies can help by taking this vast sea of unstructured conversations and through automated layers of collection, ranking and sentimentation, identify key issues and influential conversations for organizations. Once a company has structured data that pinpoint where to focus their efforts, they can then direct those conversations to people in their organization who can best engage in those conversations.
by: Lorraine Perry
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