Just Google “Dell Hell” and you may never buy a Dell computer again. Just search “Kryptonite lock” into Google and one of the first listings is a video that demonstrates how to how to pick a $95 Kryptonite lock With a Bic Pen. Just search your company’s name plus the word “sucks” and you may be appalled by the results. While you are at it, just Google your own name and hope that people like you.
Unfortunately, most consumers are reluctant to give complements, but they love to complain. The Internet empowers consumers with new user-generated content sites that enable them to speak their mind anonymously and they do: More than 40% of all social networkers said they use social media to learn more about brands or products, and 28% said a “friend” has recommended a brand or product to them through social sites.
So why is this important? Peer reviews are more respected and trusted than expert reviews. Consumer Reports has lost its luster and consumers are turning to social shopping to shape their buying decisions. The popularity of Yelp! Amazon, Ebay and TripAdvisor are the proof in the pudding. Negative feedback in these channels can be lethal to any company, but a positive reputation can be the driver of explosive sales as word-of mouth endorsements become viral and organic.
So, how can you maximize social shopping and protect your reputation at the same time? There are many solutions, but may be to turn to the experts. BusinessWeek recently ordained the online reputation management field as an industry. Reputation management firms are popping up everywhere that purport that they protect and manage your reputation online. Here are some service providers that have built proprietary systems to monitor and manage your reputation.
While all of these companies claim to deliver the best results, their methodology is inherently flawed. Their systems are weak on the upfront information gathering and the social media monitoring phase. How can you know that there is a perception problem if you can’t adequately monitor Internet? The best social media and Internet motoring platform in existence is Google. It is no secret that Google’s search platform renders the most comprehensive results. On the contrary, the new upstarts base their monitoring efforts, not on Google search results, but rather on their own proprietary search technology. As a result, they are not able to capture all of the “chatter” being said about your brand and are not seeing the entire picture. Meanwhile disgruntled consumers continue to harm your hard-earned reputation. In addition, these “reputation defenders” charge a pretty penny for their service- in some cases making it cost-prohibitive to get in the game. While their platforms layer in value-added intelligence and analysis to their findings, such as, sentiment, reach, passion, strength, they lack a key component to any successful reputation management program: crisis communications. One could argue that PR firms experienced in crisis management are best positioned to handle these issues. After all, who is better positioned to use words to turn a sour grape into fine wine?
Revisiting Google, we have found that combining Google Alerts with a RSS reader generates the most comprehensive results and most effectively monitors online conversations. The first step is to conduct a thoughtful keyword analysis that aggregates all of the keywords that drive your business. Be sure to complement these keywords with derivations like ”sucks”, “bad”, “expensive”, “broken”, etc.. to view what the naysayers have to say. In addition, you can complement your online reputation management with a few free sites that specialize in tracking social commentary. Try these on for size: Social Mention, http://www.yacktrack.com, http://www.keotag.com/ and www.whostalkin.com.
Taken in combination, you now have built a solid social media monitoring service. Now, that your platform is established, be sure to man the ship with an savvy communications captain that actively monitors the conversation, surfaces negative feedback to the right stakeholders and takes action to right the ship. Many companies find that their PR team is best suited to handle this function being intimately familiar with your brand and messaging platform. Be sure to select a firm with combined experience in crisis communications, SEO and social media monitoring.
So, now that you have sent the bots to scour the Internet and blogosphere for feedback on your brand, what do you do when they return negative feedback and vibes? You’ll have to stay tuned for Part II as we reveal the brass-tactics to dodge the mud balls and keep your reputation spick and span.
September 22nd, 2009 | By Soren Gordhamer from Mashable. Click here to see original article.
Social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.
Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”
Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.
1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”
In order to change the context of customer relationships from trying to sell to seeking to engage and connect with customers, companies need to use various means, including sites like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter), to socially interact with people. The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Their goal is less about “selling” and more “engaging” — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.
Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.
Lesson: Release fewer “official statements” and more personal ones that help you make a connection to your customers and audience.
2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”
With sites like Facebook and Twitter, we all essentially have our own broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.
In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become super important.
Loic Le Meur, CEO of startup software company Seesmic (Seesmic), once told me that one of the most important jobs of a CEO today is to hear what people are saying about the company’s product across social media channels, and to respond to them directly. In fact, much of his Twitter stream is @replies to people commenting on his company’s product.
Bigger companies, such as Southwest Airlines and Comcast are using Twitter in the same way, making sure customers’ concerns are addressed. Because bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.
Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.
3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”
Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there is such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.
I am not sure how NBC directs the social media efforts of their employees, but in watching NBC newscaster Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) on Twitter it is clear that she is not simply trying to get people to watch her shows. Curry is someone who speaks out about women’s rights, deeply cares about justice, and likes to quote the Persian poet, Rumi — there is a person there, not a company representative, and as such, I am much more likely to pay attention when and if she does talk about any of her television shows.
John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Photoshop at Adobe, offers another great example. Adobe is a company that smartly encourages and provides the means for their employees to blog, and anyone who reads Nack’s blog will notice that Adobe doesn’t put many restrictions on what people write about. Nack’s blog is focused almost exclusively on his area of interest — graphic design and photo manipulation — but he doesn’t post solely about Adobe products. Many of the interesting art projects and articles he links to have nothing to do with Adobe and some may even have been created using software from competing companies.
Lesson: Forget the unified company image, give staff the freedom to be themselves, and trust that the relationships that they build will help the company in the long run.
4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”
To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction (Get Satisfaction).
If I want to communicate with a company, I tend to look them up on Twitter first. Knowing that I can communicate with a company on the networks upon which I am already most active makes me feel more comfortable doing business with them, because I know that if I have an issue, there is someone at the company I can communicate with through those means.
Companies like Dell, for example, have fully embraced multiple channels of support. Their community site lists all the ways customers can connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr (Flickr), YouTube (YouTube), forums, blogs, email, and more. Dell wants people to be able to connect with them through whatever channel is most comfortable.
Lesson: Rather than expect customers to communicate through your chosen means, allow them to do so through their chosen means.
The New Business Paradigm in the Age of Social Media
In this new era of social media, companies are asked to be increasingly transparent and personal. Of course, traditional advertising and press releases will still have their place, but social sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow a whole new type of communication to take place that has previously been unknown to most businesses. Possibly more important for businesses than getting a large number of followers on social media sites, is following through on the opportunity to forge more genuine and direct connections with their customers.
Businesses who choose not to adapt to the new culture will be at an increasing disadvantage, as their customers slowly build personal relationships with their competitors. We are now in the age of open communication, engaged dialogue, and transparency, and business success may now have less to do with the size of ad budgets, but on the quality of interactions with customers.
Social media is an excellent vehicle for connecting with consumers. But what about other businesses? This question has surfaced many times in the last few months, and I’d like to respond to it here because I think a lot of people can benefit from the answer.
Business-to-business companies, like business-to-consumer companies, still have decision-makers and influencers that contribute to a sale. They also have a need to be personable, responsible, and communicative. In social media, companies stand to reach media, current customers, prospects, and other stakeholders.
If your company has something to say, social media can be a vehicle for you. If you care about a relationship with the media, then social media can be a place for you to dialog with them. If you currently send promotional email to your customer and/or prospect base, then social media can be a direct shot to these people without interference from a spam filter.
Now, the concern generally has been that people might actually talk back and you’d have to respond. Or, they may have something negative to say. Both instances are true; however, the conversation is already happening, and you’re just not a part of it. People are talking about you, your industry, and your competitors right now in social media circles — you are on the outside if you’re not listening and participating.
If people are already saying negative things about you, then you’re currently not satisfying them with an answer that might squash further disparagement. With social media, you can answer negative comments with the truth or with a way to solve people’s problems. Consider that for a moment. What would it look like to prospective customers if you were to publicly display how well you solve problems for current customers? I assure you that few people expect you to be perfect, but they all expect you to take care of them.
Social media is necessary for your business if your primary target is regularly online. And while this is not everyone, I admit, B2B versus B2C is not the determinant. Social media is a place for feedback. (I believe it was Ken Blanchard who wrote, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”) It’s for sharing opinions and solving problems. Find the right mix of tools and vehicles and then put a communication strategy in place to use them efficiently and effectively.
In B2B, the most common tools I have seen used effectively are a combination of blogs allowing comments, as well as LinkedIn and Twitter. I have also seen Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and wikis layered in for others who are perhaps more web-savvy. Your appropriate mix and level of dedication will be unique to you, but getting subject matter experts talking in social media circles — if they truly fearlessly “know their stuff” — can only serve to enhance your position in the market.
Remember, you don’t have to have just one Twitter feed, one blog, etc. You might be able to have several subject matter experts with their own Twitter accounts in addition to the corporate account. The CEO can have a blog to talk about issues facing the company or strategic decisions, corporate communications can highlight positive community outreach, and the product development team can highlight company innovations. The company Twitter account could focus on news about the company, while a service account could simply deal with customer concerns. There are many ways to get creative in getting “in the game.”
In any case, you should at least monitor social media for your name, your employees, your competitors, and your industry. Useful information can be gleaned in real-time. In fact, what you learn might support rationale for jumping in and getting into the conversation by virtue of what you find. Some conversations may simply inspire you to take action. There are many tools that can help you do that, including Google Alerts, search.twitter.com, as well as other more sophisticated (i.e., expensive) software packages like Radian6, BuzzLogic, and Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics.
The myriad of options in social media are not exclusively useful for business-to-consumer companies. Some B2B companies are doing a great job engaging decision-makers and influencers, such as Hoovers, Intuit (in both B2B and B2C), Sun, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The point is that anyone can and should leverage these tools to host a conversation with their desired, mixed audiences. The key driver for success, regardless of company type, is that there is a strategy in place that cultivates a healthy, open, and productive relationship with complex audiences. The bar is getting higher as more companies are getting better with the protocol; it is time to jump in.
An intelligent social media program can increase product consideration and purchase intent in the middle of the purchase funnel, during the critical period when consumers are gathering peer opinions and listening to word of mouth recommendations. Additionally, social media endorsements greatly influence product trial. So, how do you create brand ambassadors and leverage social media to boost sales and elevate your brand? Here’s how:
Actively listen and observe before getting started
Establish clear objectives and success metrics
Evaluate opportunities through your unique strategic lens
Create a unifying concept or theme
Construct your social marketing architecture
Aggregate and/or build social media assets
Develop a plan for monitoring and responding to consumer discussions
Roll out an integrated earned and paid media promotional plan
Nurture your fans and community
Measure against objectives and optimize continuously
Our social media practitioners know this playbook back and forth and help our clients score big with consumers and influencers. We also work at the grassroots level to spark conversations and positively influence the online dialogue to meet your goals.
Social media has simplified the art of the soapbox shout. Information is shared with the masses now using easy-to-use Web 2.0 tools and is recorded and cached for infinity. A shout out loud in social media has no geographic boundaries and is not time-limited. These two points make the non-stop monitoring of social media an important to-do for any brand owner. And monitoring social media does not just mean blogs. It should include video and image sharing sites and microblogging sites like Twitter, along with opinion and discussion forums.
As a provider of the tools for monitoring hundreds and even thousands of well known brands online, we’ve found a multitude of reasons for paying attention to what’s being said in social media. Here are the top ten:
The complaint - Watch for posts complaining about your products or services, company, and staff. Catching something early means getting a chance to show how responsive you are. A complaint is an opportunity to demonstrate problem-solving abilities. A posted complaint may also draw out other comments from people with the same concern, which provides an opportunity to reach out to them as well. And who knows, impressing customer with great customer service may generate some positive posts about how you resolved the problems.
The compliment – Compliments can come in many forms. It could be a congratulations message about a recent award. It could be a customer raving about the experience they just had with a product or with customer service. Social media compliments are the online equivalent of those old school references or testimonials of days past. Create a delicio.us account or use another social bookmarking utility and save all of these compliments in a list for future use. Potential clients looking for reassurance on a purchase decision would love to see what others think of your company and products.
The expressed need - The best way to watch for expressed needs is to look for keywords often used to describe those needs. People shout out what they are doing and ask the general public for advice occasionally when they are about to make a purchase. Both of these situations provide an opportunity to reach out with an offer of assistance or a free demo for example. While this may seem intrusive at first glance consider that great retail clerk who offers to help when you are trying to locate a pair of shoes in your size. A social media poster often appreciates that someone is listening and does not mind an offer of assistance expecially if it’s done in a helpful way.
The competitor - If you are watching your industry and the keywords used to describe it you will probably be the first to know when a new competitor appears on the scene. From a competitive intelligence perspective you may also wish to be alerted any time a competitor’s name is used. Knowing this may highlight opportunities to reach out to potential customers who have indicated they are trialing a competitor or dissatisfied with a competitor’s product or service. You may also discover which industry players are advocates for competitive brands giving you the opportunity to reach out and see if they are interested in knowing more about what you have to offer. Competitors will also often talk about subjects they are strategically interested in and being able to stay on top of those discussions allows you to anticipate potential future moves.
The crowd - Topics will often pop up online that draw huge crowds from a page visits or commenting perspective. There is a lot to be learned in discussion threads especially when they have the potential to affect your brand. Following the swarms can give you a better understanding of current sentiment and thinking towards a certain topic and who the players are that have opinions on it. It also may point out a topic that you will need to monitor going forward. Tracking a topic’s viral nature and how long it lives can give you an idea of its relative importance. You may also decide to participate in the crowd discussion thread early in the process, giving your company exposure to those currently involved in the discussion and to those yet to join.
The influencer – Influencers within a space can carry a lot of weight. They gain there power either from the number of times they post on a topic, the number of people who link to their posts on a topic, the number of people gathering to comment and how engaged visitors to their posts become. The hive that forms around an influencer helps spread an opinion on a brand faster and that opinion express potentially carries more weight. Often an influencer’s post appears prominently in a topic’s Google search results thus affecting the views of even more potential customers. Knowing who these influencers are and their opinions of your brands helps you determine who to reach out to for help as advocates or to understand why they currently hold a negative view.
The crisis - Discussions happening in social media can serve as an early warning system before an issue goes mainstream. By using advanced tools you can observe new words popping more frequently about your brands. If you were an airline, as an example, the sudden appearance of the word “cancellations” along with the words “bad” and “customer service” would immediate trigger a need to drill into the posts driving them. Tracking these “crisis” words over time on a go forward basis would also then help gauge the effectiveness of any outreach campaigns to address the underlying issues.
The ROI - There has been a lot of buzz lately on how to successful measure online marketing and outreach campaigns. Much of the focus has centered around the topic of engagement. While a universal engagement metric has yet to be agreed upon there are still a number of effective ways to measure engagement and ROI in general. Track the mentions of a brand in user-generated content before, during and after a campaign. Isolate positive words associated with a particular brand and gauge the number of times they were used over a period of time. Alternatively, you could sort all posts mentioning a particular brand or topic by number of comments or views to uncover the top 50 discussions where potentially engagement was the highest.
The audit - A brand is the sum of all conversations and is no longer completely controlled by the corporation. By analyzing social media a corporation or agency can score a brand’s overall user sentiment, determine which words are commonly associated with it, understand which competitors rank closest in buzz or online mentions, uncover which sites are advocates, and rank which social media channels contain more discussion versus others. By isolating which sites are discussing your brand or a competitor’s brand, an audit can also help pinpoint possible ad placement opportunities for reaching the most valuable and engaged audiences.
The thread - With so many social media channels to shout out on, conversations often become splintered. A discussion can start within one channel and quick leap into another making it rather difficult to follow. Following discussions using keywords associated with it can help bridge the thread across all types of social media. This thread would then appear as a connected conversation for easy analysis.
Customers, prospects and peers are discussing your brand, your industry and your competitors right now in social media: with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. Actively listening means protecting brand reputation, discovering opportunities, staying competititive and avoiding runaway crisis’.
In order to make money with social media, you need to follow some critical rules of the road. RockYou shares some tricks of the trade.
Have you ever heard someone say, “Let’s socialize the idea” and nothing ever happens? RockYou’s Lisa Marino offered some suggestions at the iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, Tex., on how to socialize your brand. But in order to make money with social media, you need to follow some critical rules of the road.
First, recognize that the audience is there. People belong to social networks, so you have to embrace the action. Additionally, social networks are not just for kids anymore, adults and income decision-makers are there, too.
The average time spent/visits on the top social networking sites are:
Facebook: 19 times per month, with 10 minutes per visit
MySpace: 10 times per month, with 14 minutes per visit
Social networks are still commonly used for photos and updates, but people are also using them to communicate. Tone is critical, and one of the most important things you can do is go beyond traditional display methodologies by understanding key points of use.
Marino cited the example of BudLight’s fan page on Facebook. This particular page illustrates the type of engagement brands should be seeking with their audiences. The Budweiser page is similar to its website with an obvious significant investment in creative, but contained specific elements like viral gift components and videos engineered for the Facebook audience.
When going after this type of engagement, one has to decide how to engage by considering the audience and following the same principles of a web strategy: define and design for your audience and be willing to make an investment in the space.
Social cross platform is another important aspect of the social money-making schema. When selecting partners to help you along the way, consider what content works well. Among these tactics are delivering penetrations, offering viral features, and bringing custom content opportunities. Viral sharing features across platforms (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter) are a must.
Most of us know at this point that video content is highly viral. Marino reviewed case studies from Axe body sprays and Hanna Montana — both of which are targeted to teens.
It’s not just about video, though, Marino added. The Gap “Vote for Flair” campaign delivered more than 240,000 shared pieces of Gap Flair, and nine million people came to the custom Gap vote section. Engagement points and integration of key ideas are critical to successful social campaigns.
As video is integrated, so are applications. When considering using applications, it’s important to know how and when to use them. Microsoft Office 2007 used a branded poke initiative using the Facebook Slide application. Slide delivered 4 million branded pokes in the first 60 days, and months after the initiative ended, there were 250,000 branded pokes per month.
When selecting a partner, or thinking about monetizing social media, RockYou suggests paying close attention to the services offered by each provider and making your ads social, while keeping things simple.
RockYou offers six great suggestions for successful social executions:
Audience: You should be able to get access to audience data
Direct Customer Communication: Collect information on your audience
Engagement: How you choose to interact with the audience will determine success
Virality: Every campaign should have viral components
CTR: For social ads, clickthrough rates are two times that of regular display
Social Ads: They work especially well when driving traffic to fan pages, contests, or application downloads
1. Build relationships first — they’re called social media for a reason. You can sometimes work in a “call to action,” but make sure you’re very subtle about it. “You must add value to the experience,” says Eyal. “You have to give the user something that’s valuable if you want them to give back to you.”
2. Rethink your product or service, if not your entire brand, to make it more exciting for people to watch and follow. Eyal suggests that advertisers “sit down and figure out why people buy the product.” With method, AdNectar’s cleaning products client, people buy not just cleaning, but the environmental angle, according to Eyal. “So we made messages that have an environmental angle and are inherently giftable. In another case, we saw people giving virtual boxes of chocolate. After we added the name, people gave their friends 1.2 million virtual boxes of Godiva chocolate. Getting branded impressions and individual endorsements like that, the brand benefits greatly.”
3. Fight any internal pressures to use social media for hard-sell pitches; this is a place for the soft sell. People want to feel like they’re a part of something. Make your audience feel so involved that they don’t feel they’re being sold. Never go with a “buy now” message. Instead, be more suggestive than commanding. Your goals need to be very clear.
4. Spend more time listening than talking. People come to social media because they’re interested in each other, and they want to see what their friends are contributing. When brands pull people away from focusing on their friends, they generate a backlash. You want to win over fans, break down resistance, and create community. Before you can sell anything, you have to create movements around the brand and the product. Good brand awareness and reputation provide huge advantages.
5. Maintain as much transparency as possible. Today’s consumers are skeptical about messages coming across their screens, and they respect authenticity and honesty. For some, especially smaller companies, it makes sense to have one dedicated social networking person who is the voice of the company. For others, it’s better to reveal the depth and breadth of the people in the organization.
6. Earn your audience’s loyalty and endorsements. Recognize that within social media, each person sends a product endorsement only when it’s deserved, and will tell a friend about your product only when they perceive the friend is receptive. That’s usually an ideal combination for an advertiser. Strive to be worthy, and you will build a loyal audience.
7. Be nimble and quick without being hurried or harried. It’s no longer enough to conceive a launch for your campaign. You must also monitor, react, and respond in real time to the public’s reactions and counter-initiatives. Think in terms of a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time to learn how your audience reacts to various messages, and feed that back into the creative process.
8. Customer service goes on 24/7. You can’t afford to leave anyone underserved or disgruntled for very long. Mark Twain famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Within today’s social media, marketers can no longer afford to allow any negative information that kind of head start.
9. Your creative is even more important within social media. If you can capture the imagination and interest of your audience, you can give your message extremely long legs. According to Marmelo, “There are certain things that can be replicated across the board. But because each business is different and has a different target market, in social media you approach things and phrase things without a template.” You want to find the language your audiences are eager to hear.
