I recently made the observation that consumers increasingly expect the brands that they interact with to answer back within the social media context. More and more, we find evidence of growing frustration and a new kind of social consumer expectation. I recently posted this to our company website. Whilst its not the sort of content that I normally deal with here, social brand monitoring is generally topical at present so I thought it might be worth posting here as well.

At Affiniti Digital we see tweets asking if major homeware retailers are listening (and find that they are), blog posts questioning the relevance of finance companies that don’t respond to negative blog posts and Facebook groups whose 7000+ members have one thing in common – a poor customer experience at the hands of a leading Australian telco. Its no surprise then that brands are beginning to look at various methods of social media monitoring to pick up on brand references as they appear across the social landscape.

With this in mind it is worth considering the following points if you are exploring the possibility of monitoring your brand…

1. Not all social media monitoring tools are the same

All social media monitoring tools have their specialties and their particular idiosyncrasies. We use a mix of free and paid tools. Some offer better blog coverage, others have broader news coverage whilst others are attached to vast data farms and allow for greater historic searching than networks like Twitter offer via their own search facilities. Some offer convenience by creating an aggregation platform of the native search tools of the various networks. Some crawl the web broadly like search engines and store what they find.

Others are dependent upon primary directories such as Technorati. Many tools are very Euro or US-centric which can be an issue for Australian brands. It is important to understand the strengths and shortcomings of the social media solutions that you select. Tools with blind spots can create a false sense of security.

2. There is no such thing as free

Even if the tools are free, the spongy organic matter that interprets it generally isn’t. You will need staff to monitor and respond to the brand references that you find. Bear in mind that tracking takes time – especially if its not a core activity and if you are using manual tools.

3. Machines don’t always get emotion

Be cautious of relying too heavily upon automated sentiment tracking. Australians – particularly angry or dissatisfied ones – love sarcasm. Machines generally don’t. Machines classify dominant emotion on the basis of keyword combinations. Most times this works – but consider posts like this…”I just love being screwed by my (utility) company”, “I enjoy nothing better than spending my Saturday night on hold to my ISP helpdesk”, or “Another example of the high esteem with which my telco views me”. Positive words – not so positive sentiments. Often it’s contextual and needs a human eye to tell the difference.

4. Some things can’t wait

If you think that social media monitoring is historical (like getting the day’s press clippings) just ask Dominos Pizza. Disgruntled customers can generate enormous momentum and issues can escalate quickly – especially when their calls for attention/action go unheeded. Be prepared to check your tracking frequently and act if you need to. Predetermine contact points at each of the relevant internal areas – legal, PR/Comms, Marketing, even Executive if warranted -who understand the need for swift response. Issues left hanging might return the favour.

5. Give your monitoring the resources it needs

Staff your monitoring like a good customer support desk. If you are going to seriously listen and respond to to the views of your customers, make sure you assign the task to someone with sufficient experience and maturity to take the task seriously and to understand that their actions and responses speak on behalf of your brand. Note that this is about maturity – not age. As Nestle recently discovered, moderating a brand’s Facebook brand page in the same way as some might manage their personal account reflects badly on the brand. While its important for brands to have a personal voice, that voice will reflect the real level of respect and importance with which your brand holds its customer relationships.

6. Plan your responses in advance

If you have come to this point then you understand the need to listen to your customers and to hear what they think about your brand. You’re probably wondering what happens if the news isn’t good? It’s worth beginning to consider now how you would respond to negative comments or, more importantly the process required to intervene to solve a customer’s problem. It will give you comfort to map the process in advance rather than have to create the process and solve the problem on the fly.

Remember that social media doesn’t rely upon your participation to exist – conversations about your brand are happening around you whether you are listening or not. Listening can be confronting – it takes courage. Good luck.

Those involved in social media – myself included – naturally view it as being of major significance. However, viewing it that way doesnt necessarily make it so. And in some quarters there is tacit scepticism surrounding the extent of that significance.

So I thought it worthwhile to throw out some questions (see below) and to collect views beyond the social media blockades. If you have suggestions about other topics that we might collectively explore, please leave a comment or let me know by other means.

They are simple but important questions – and I’d appreciate your thoughts.

Question 1:

Question 2:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’ll update results along the way in future posts.

Image: CJohns – Fotolia.com

Fear of the unknown seems to be a handy leverage point for many companies in the social brand monitoring space.

Ive been doing quite a bit of due diligence on various social media brand monitoring solutions of late. As a result, I recently posted an article on my corporate blog www.affinitidigital.com.au regarding what seems to be an emerging polarity in the way that brands are being “sold” the notion of social media – and of brand monitoring in particular. Sure, in any emerging media there will always be extremes. Zealots, like those espousing the virtues of the internet in the late ‘90s, will inevitably ring in yet another new order and tell established marketers that everything they know is wrong. Despite the extreme nature of this approach, it is atleast positive – and is infinitely preferable to the zealot’s evil twin who instills paranoia and fear.

Unfortunately, there are a growing number of companies who seem to view and encourage their clients to view social brand monitoring purely for damage control and without any intention of customer engagement. There is an inherent risk with this approach. It focuses attention upon tools rather than outcomes. Brand monitoring often falls victim to this. Whilst it forms part of a broader strategy, monitoring the “social conversation” is not an end unto itself.

The problem with a fear-driven approach is that it treats monitoring purely as a defensive tool and therefore encourages brands to simply find new ways to be evasive, protective and guarded. This conventional PR lock-down thinking is the antithesis of what the social ethos is about – and it gets brands into trouble.

Read the full post on www.affinitidigital.com.au.

Image: Fotolia:© Charles Dykstra

(Tip of the hat to Adam Singer’s Fear Nothing post for adding fuel to the fire whilst I was writing this.)

Recently I stumbled upon Seth Godin’s typically erudite definition of brand value. According to Seth…”a brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives.” Hmmm.

It struck me that expectation and relationship are particularly relevant to those charged with managing and enhancing a brand’s digital presence. As each is a full post in itself, this post deals with the notion of expectation.

The digital environment is remarkably caustic – it can strip away the wishful thinking of brand managers or board members in an instant. It can efficiently remove years of expensive branding from the surface of your product in seconds. As such your digital presence can provide a brutally honest reflection of the real nature of your brand – and the online experience that it provides can have a considerable impact.

How considerable? According to the findings of the 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report, 65% of consumers in the study reported that they have had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand. 97% of them report that experience influencing whether or not they purchased a product or service from that brand”.

This is not necessarily bad news

Depending upon your perspective this can be good or bad news. Done correctly, your digital presence can extend the relevance of a brand and ultimately engage a whole new segment of prospective customers.

However, the blade cuts both ways. Provide an experience which is inconsistent with how the customer would expect your brand to behave and you may end up with the customer using a blog post, a tweet, or a negative post on a review site to rally support and define your brand for you.

Employing new methods to engage customers is only part of the picture. All too often it’s the basics that let a brand down. The choices you make about seemingly benign web content can send powerful messages about your brand and what it really stands for.

It can be what you don’t say that counts…

For example, absence of meaningful brand credentials (a favourite of brands that dominate their home jurisdictions) can be taken as arrogance. Similarly, failure to provide sufficiently detailed product information can be viewed as closed and defensive. Limited or outmoded contact methods say a great deal about how approachable, helpful and customer-centric a brand really is.

If you don’t think that these things affect the way your brand is perceived, ponder this…

1. 41% decided not to make a planned purchase because they couldn’t readily find a piece of information about the product or service. (JupiterResearch, September 2007)
2. Online businesses lose as many as 6% of consumers due to a lack of online product information. (Allurent, January 2008)
3. 94% of UK shoppers leave sites with inadequate customer service. (Econsultancy, July 2009)

The features, options and content that you include say a lot about the nature of the relationship between your brand and its customers. With this in mind it is good practice to regularly review the components of your digital presence individually and collectively to see if your brand values are truly reflected.

If your brand is meant to be helpful do your offer features and options that are consistent with that position? If friendly and responsive, do you actually provide genuine feedback options to allow customers to tell you what they think. If your brand is truly innovative, prove it with examples and blog posts about your latest innovations instead of just telling your customers.

It always pays to remember that it is often what goes unsaid which speaks loudest about a brand and its true values. It is important to be aware of the messages that you send.

Ecosia, ecosia.org a new search engine which claims to save 2 square metres of rainforest with each web search officially launched a few days ago. According to the progressive display on the homepage, searches to date had notionally saved 668,000 square metres of rainforest.

According to the WWF, “On average internet users can protect about 2000 square metres of rainforest very year by using Ecosia”. Ecosia queries the Bing and Yahoo indexes and provides options for passing the query through to Google, Wikipedia and youTube. However, according to the Ecosia FAQs the commercial arrangement (and thus the revenue split) only applies to native Ecosia searches.

Check out the FAQ video. Whilst I suspect that presentation of shareholders as evil profiteers is perhaps a tad naïve, it’s an interesting idea at a time when every bit helps. If the forecasts included in the WWF press release are true, then …”If only 1% of global Internet users accessed Ecosia for their Web searches, we could save a rain forest area as big as Switzerland each year.”