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.

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.

Yesterday I indulged one of my favourite hobbies – eavesdropping. God I love it! The conversation centred around Twitter and to a lesser degree Facebook. Without doubt it was a marketing discussion.

The important thing about this conversation was that the notion of strategy and relationships didn’t make it into the conversation.

Each of the social media components were referred to as though each was an end unto itself.

It occurred to me that this approach is fairly common – especially with larger brands. I have heard of a number of marketers lately who have been presented with isolated social media campaigns.

I can’t help wondering if some agencies are including Facebook or Twitter activity on media schedules in the same way as they would the trial inclusion of a new magazine – drive the rate down the card to lessen the impact, call in some favours & let’s see how it goes.

Without an underlying relationship management strategy underpinning any social media activity this approach presents some problems. I wonder what happens when the activity finishes?

If social media is intended to establish and nurture genuine relationships then a flighted campaign approach is the social media equivalent of a show romance – intense and focused for a short period of time…and then abruptly no one returns your calls.

Seasoned marketers grasp the implications of this immediately – they understand the brand message it sends if the conversation stops when the media flight ends. They also see that an obligation exists to maintain these relationships once they are initiated.

Here are a few things that you might consider before embarking on a stand-alone social media activity…

• Is there a relationship management strategy that outlines:
• The purpose of social engagement – what value does it add to the consumer and the brand?
• What skills and resources will be required to manage the relationships your create via the various social media initiatives that you undertake? Do you have them?
• Do you have a social engagement policy – who can / will speak on behalf of the brand?
• What is the voice of the brand? I know this sounds like “if your brand were an animal what would it be”, but the real decision is whether our brand “voice” is going to be practical, friendly, formal, casual, etc. Whatever the answer, make sure it is genuine and consistent with the brand.
• How will you respond to negative comments / feedback? Fixing issues publicly and quickly can build a lot of positive equity. Do you have a plan in place to ensure that you can intervene and resolve issues swiftly?
• Does the proposed activity fit into the broader strategy for engagement ?
• Does it fit into the resourcing plan within your strategy?

If our answer to any of the above was “no” then you may be in danger of “show romancing” your customers. This type of isolated activity can create an incorrect (or correct) impression of utility friendship.

Now, you might say that you can over plan these things. Absolutely.

Everything we read tells us that brands need to embrace social media and everyone needs to start somewhere. The case for social media as a means of extending the reach and understanding of a brand and engaging customers in dialogue is a strong one.

With that in mind, first impressions are important. Please…start with a relationship management plan – not a media plan.

A friend of mine recently lamented the amount of time that he spends Tweeting. For him there is a sense that he had become strangely enslaved to the harmless blue bird.

I endeavoured to find out whether he had started out with a plan but I couldn’t seem to get a straight answer. That tells me something in itself.

The conversation got me wondering how many other companies and brands have embraced web 2.0 in the hope that it would help their brand and somehow make life easier – only to find themselves chained to the wheel. Make no mistake – I’m a big wrap for social media. In its many forms it stands a good chance of restoring some humanity to the communications process and offers a list of benefits that is too long to list in this particular post. But once engaged it can be an extremely needy companion.

Of course, it used to be the same for websites, micro-sites and relationship-based email campaigns back in the web 1.0 days but the nature of the customer relationship has changed. Don’t be deceived by the air of friendly informality – the expectations placed upon brands that wade into the social media waters have increased considerably.

With due credit to Jaws 4, this time it’s personal.

Don’t forget that the whole web 2.0 thing has come about in part because people are looking for more than what they got under web 1.0 – more immediate information, more participation and ownership, and more responsiveness. These expectations are implicit in a readers agreement to be a fan, follower, and/or subscriber.

The personal relationship is initiated which is underpinned by two basic tenets:

• You have undertaken to provide an ongoing service, and
• You will provide a generally consistent service in terms of frequency, currency, depth and responsiveness.

Now before you close this email and bin your request to have WordPress loaded onto the corporate server – hold on! I am not saying don’t do it – I’m just saying that is important to have an understanding of the expectations that underpin social media before you set sail, work out if and how you can maintain the relationship and then formulate a plan.

In terms of formulating a plan, here are a few things (from a hundred possible points) to consider before embarking upon your chosen social media journey:

1. Clarity of Purpose

Do I have a clear purpose for your socal media activity (blog, FB, TW,etc)? Do you know what value it is intended to deliver to your readers? What will it deliver to company or brand?

A word of warning…if you are working for a large company or old-world brand, be sure to clearly articulate and document the benefits to the company internally and seek senior (ideally written) buy-in. Get agreement also that the brand can be personalised and that this is your role. Otherwise you may find your voyage cut short or plunged into content hell where your blogs are delayed and sterilised by risk-averse company policies that belong to the 1980’s.

2. Define the content proposition

Define the tone, style and theme of the information that you are planning to deliver. What can recipients expect to receive and why will it be of value?

3. Express the content proposition

wherever you can so that potential subscribers understand

4. Be genuine but not overly familiar

The genuine aspect of this is a resounding theme of advice from problogger.net. The familiarity point is mine and will undoubtedly draw comment. My view is that as in conventional relationships, closeness is earned rather than assumed. As such, just because I like what you say in your blog doesn’t mean that I want you or your brand to assume a level of fraternity that I reserve for close friends. I’m not advocating frozen corporate speak – just a comfortable level of respect.

5. Find your voice

I personally find this incredibly difficult and I know from personal experience that it can sometimes create great angst at post time. For what its worth my clients have had some success from setting a question that is relevant to the topic and then answering the question in a fictional email to a trusted colleague. This seems to provide a “reader” and ensures that the tone remains warm and human yet respectful.

6. Map your channels

If you are planning to use more than one social media channel work out which is the destination point. This is typically a blog or similarly content-rich area. Please don’t use a dynamic channel like Twitter to send users to a static home page and then leave them to navigate to the tweeted information for themselves – they won’t. This may sound obvious but this is exactly what happened to me twice in the last week.

7. Work out how you will deal with comments

This is especially important if you are the voice of a brand – and more so if the brand has a heritage of non-response. This is the sort of thing that can catch you off guard and is best contemplated before the fact. Remember that collaboration and comments are an integral part of the landscape.

A bit of pre-planning can save considerable pain down the track. If along the way you encounter material resistance from inside your company think seriously about whether the time is right to engage customers in a social media environment.

Whilst we all know that the day will have to come, some company cultures are simply not ready to open the door and will not thank you for doing so pre-emptively.