JitterJam® Social CRM

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

In our past discussions, we have talked about how individual initiatives are the genesis of the use of social media / social marketing within a business or a brand, and that these initiatives are usually driven by a single purpose—a use case. The sixth use case in our Creativity Coffee series, Measuring Buzz and Sentiment, focuses on the “first steps” that many brands and businesses take when engaging in the social realm—listening for brand chatter and measuring the sentiment of that chatter.

In a prior discussion, we talked about how social media opens the door not just for “media impressions” (aka Building Brand Awareness) but direct engagement with consumers. However, many brands cannot close the loop between social engagement and retail sales (e.g. soft drinks) and media impressions are key towards understanding the ROI of their overall marketing campaigns. Many brands monitor social media and measure buzz and sentiment as metrics for their messaging through other media. Others monitor buzz and sentiment to ensure that they can act upon any negative trend or incident. In this Creativity Coffee, we discussed how brands are using the data they collect when monitoring social conversations and tackled issues around who SHOULD be monitoring their brand. Here are the ideas that sparked from the discussion.

1. Larger companies are already monitoring sentiment and brand awareness/buzz.
• Brands have traditionally used customer surveys to understand customer brand sentiment.
• Larger companies are often more comfortable doing surveys and keeping results private.
• But public brand chatter, including positive and negative comments, are going on regardless of whether the brand is listening and monitoring social conversations.
2. If a brand is monitoring buzz and sentiment, what should they be doing with this data?
• Evaluate whether their overall messaging (transmitted through social and other media) is taking hold
• Over time, see how the brand’s campaigns are impacting buzz and sentiment (more positive, more chatter, etc.)
• Risk mitigation: Identify a crisis threat/situation and identify key influencers to help change the sentiment or address the issue
• Use information (comments and ideas) for product development and improvement (that’s next week’s Creativity Coffee topic!)
• Identify areas for improvement (quality control red flags)
• Identify key influencers to help promote the brand
3. What is an influencer for a brand?
• There aren’t that many influencers for a brand; usually less than a dozen people are true brand influencers
• Buzz and sentiment for social media is driven by the 98/2 rule–the top 2% are going to have influence over a vast social circle
• Brands who engage and develop relationships with consumer advocates enable their message and brand goodwill to be propagated in an organic, natural manner in the consumer’s own voice; it carries much more weight than a brand-initiated message with other consumers
4. Is there a line where a business is too small to be monitoring buzz/sentiment?
• A mom & pop store…does it make sense for them to be monitoring social networks for buzz/sentiment?
• What is the tipping point for size of community and business that makes measuring buzz, trends, sentiment worthwhile?
• Quantity of conversation going on about a brand drives whether they should monitor and measure the buzz and sentiment.
• Even if a brand or company is below that ‘line of demarcation,’ they might want to measure brand buzz as a baseline for future growth.
• If a brand isn’t monitoring, they won’t know IF their brand spikes in social buzz. Also, you never know when a conversation is going to erupt; it may not be specifically about YOU, but it could impact you in some way (competitor, market, etc.)
5. A company SHOULD monitor its brand regardless of the technology.
• In a small business, someone in the company usually needs to “love technology” even for a minimal amount of monitoring to happen. But it’s easy to have even basic brand monitoring (e.g. Google Alerts).
6. Progression of social monitoring.
• No monitoring. Lots of businesses aren’t monitoring for social chatter about their brands. Why? Many are consciously or subconsciously afraid of getting ‘bad news.’ Company culture and methods may also prevent them from adopting new media and technologies.
• Data as reality. Businesses may think they know the cause of a specific result, but by mining data versus using intuition they can learn the real cause for an effect. But the brand must be willing to act upon that data (even if it’s not what they want to hear). E.g. Supermarket scanner data. After scanner data was available, the more forward-thinking food companies used that data to get an advantage–picking the “right” shelf space to drive more sales, stocking product by market, etc. That’s one huge benefit of social media–getting more data about consumer response and using that data to get a huge competitive advantage.
7. Consumer perception IS reality.
• What consumers perceive about a brand (versus the brand’s message) IS the brand’s reality. The whole idea that the brand has control over the consumer’s perception and conversation is an antiquated idea but deeply rooted in traditional business and media.
• But brands need to be careful. The vocal social person may not be representative of the brand’s majority of customers. They just might be the most vocal (squeaky wheel) but may drive the brand to make the wrong decisions overall.

Are you monitoring buzz and sentiment about your brand? How do you act upon that information? Let us know and join the conversation!

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

In our past discussions, we have talked about how individual initiatives are the genesis of the use of social media / social marketing within a business or a brand, and that these initiatives are usually driven by a single purpose—a use case. We identified a number of use cases that drive ownership and implementation of social marketing within a business. The third use case in our Creativity Coffee series, Customer Service, focuses on how businesses can utilize social networks to improve the customer service experience for consumers.

Comcast’s @comcastcares is the “poster child” for the successful use of social networks to provide customer service. Frank Eliason (@FrankEliason), who has since moved on to Citi, led a team of 17 people to provide customer care over Twitter. While some companies have followed suit, others are reluctant to provide “public” customer service. What’s clear from today’s Idea Spark Creativity Coffee discussion is that regardless of whether companies address brand issues and sentiment publicly, people will talk. So what should companies do—and expect—from customer service as a use case for social marketing? Here are the ideas and points from our discussion.

1. There are three core customer service opportunities.
• Reactive: Response to a direct customer complaint, comment or inquiry. For instance, a customer sends @ComcastCares a message stating, “I can’t figure out how to work this new interactive guide on my DVR.” @ComcastCares responds with a link to their online user guide.
• Proctive: Engaging a customer who has posted a complaint, question or comment about the company, brand or product on the real-time web. For instance, if a consumer Tweets, “I can’t figure out how to work this new Comcast interactive guide on my DVR.” While the remark wasn’t directed at the Comcast customer service group, they respond with an @ message to the consumer with the same link. This proactive approach shows the consumer that they are keenly interested in ensuring a positive user experience.
• Progressive: Engaging a consumer who is is having issues finding a solution to a problem or even having a problem with a competitor’s product and engaging them with the brand. For instance, a consumer Tweets “I can’t get more than 1Mbps of speed on my DSL.” @ComcastCares could respond with, “We’d love to help you solve your issue. What’s your zip code? Perhaps we have a better solution.” This could be a Sales or a Customer Care function.
2. The main barriers for companies to enact socially-focused customer care are fear and “lack” of resources.
• Fear. Fear of “airing dirty laundry” in public could be a significant barrier for a company or brand to enact real-time customer service. However, remember that consumers are going to talk about your brand regardless of whether you are listening and responding to those comments. Wouldn’t you rather have the opportunity to turn a negative experience into a positive one?
• Resources and Planning. Taking a reasoned approach to providing customer service via social networks takes some planning and coordination. How many hours a day will be covered? Who is responsible for coverage? Do those people cover social networks exclusively? Does this effort require additional resources, or can the business start with existing personnel? How does this overlap with sales/marketing? These questions are asked and answers for other customer service channels and should be addressed for social as well. Current escalation procedures, PLUS procedures for escalating critical public issues, should be known and in place.
3. Customer service is a form of Marketing.
• How does thinking of customer service as a Marketing function change the scope of the role of customer service for your brand?
• There is a huge opportunity for brands to enhance their relationships with their customers and develop advocacy through customer service. Comcast was able to change public perception of their brand through the positive public customer service experience. No all problems CAN be solved to a customer’s satisfaction; but the willingness of a brand to show they care about the customer’s experience is half the battle.
4. What can brands do to offer live social customer service?
• Test the waters. It’s more than likely that brands that are socially active are already fielding customer service questions and issues through their social accounts. Brands can begin by actively listening for customer needs, questions, issues, etc. and involving the customer service organization as part of the social marketing process. Those key individuals can be tasked with responding (in a timely manner) to the real-time customer inquiry and problem resolution. There needs to be a mechanism in place for coordination and assignment of social conversations and responses to make this a viable first step.
• Measure value. How does this shift in activity improve customer satisfaction? How has call/email volume decreased since enacting real-time customer service? Has the sentiment about the brand improved? Make sure that you have Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure the effectiveness of the effort. But also make sure that you give the effort enough time TO have an effect.
• Pick the right people. Make sure that you select the right people to provide this type of support. The people chosen should be well-versed in social media as well as your brand/product. The make-up of your work force can drive or kill the opportunity. choose wisely!
• Dedicate. Brands who have successfully tested the waters can take the next step—dedicating resources (personnel, procedures, social accounts) to customer service. But don’t forget that it’s just one avenue for customers to connect with the brand and have issues resolved. Don’t lose sight of the overall value of customer service and satisfaction.
• Be first. Brands that take this step to provide real-time service set the bar for their competitors. They are seen as forward-thinking leaders rather than playing catch-up. Being first in a brand category provides significant competitive advantage (press coverage, brand buzz, etc).
• Crowdsource. Part of the advantage of “public” customer service over social networks is the ability to crowdsource. Publishing useful information and great content to support the customer experience is a great way to have your customers spread the word through their own personal social networks. It’s a mind shift away from traditional customer service towards the development of a customer community. Your customers can help others, and you can point your customers to the community as a resource.

 
Customer service is never an “easy” function, and selling social media as a channel for customer service may be difficult in your organization. While saving money may be one goal, make sure you also think about customer satisfaction (and extending customer lifetime value), retention, developing advocacy and community, reducing the cost of customer acquisition, crowdsourcing and other benefits of good customer service (and good marketing) when pitching a plan to your company. And don’t forget that ALL your employees are your brand ambassadors. Even though they may be home and surfing through Facebook, it’s likely that they are still “on the clock” when it comes to advocating your brand or company. Customer service is every employee’s responsibility, whatever their job.
 
Has your company or brand engaged in real-time customer service? How has the experience changed your company?
 
Photo Credit: thadz

When it comes to listening in social media, searches on common terms can produce an ear-splitting amount of volume. Here at JitterJam, we’re trying to sell a product that incorporates social media listening and engagement, and that means that we’re searching social media channels for the term “social media,” which, it turns out, is a term that gets used a whole lot.

A human being can only participate in so many conversations per day, and a search on “social media” alone brings in too many results to be useful to us, so refining our social searches makes the conversation load much more manageable.

Possible refinements include adding words (like marketing and best practices), and modifying words (like searching on “social CRM” or “social marketing” instead of “social media”). But something I hadn’t experimented with as much before today was adding limiting words to a search to restrict results.

What’s the biggest cause of clutter for us when listening for mentions of the words “social media”? Links. Plain and simple, the amount of links being shared via social media about social media is immense. This is useful to us when we’re looking for great content to share. But, when we’re looking for people and companies who we think could benefit from the use of our product, the links get in the way. So, this afternoon, I did something simple and tried excluding “http” from a search.

The results narrowed substantially, but were still so vast that I needed to further refine them. I added the word “help” (figuring that this would bring up users searching for help with their social media efforts) and Bingo, I had a manageable search (about 300 results expected per day) to begin mining for potential customers.

What search terms are giving you fits or have given you fits in the past? How have you refined your searches to get more useful results? Let us know.

Every company engaged in social media should have a list of high-risk words they’re monitoring. And whenever your company or brand is mentioned in conjunction with one of the words on your list, you should be alerted. Responses to high-risk comments and conversations should be swift, but well reasoned. They should be consistent with company policy and tone, but should never be cold or emotionless. And your responses to high-risk conversations should always make it plain that you’ve been listening to the customer—your messages should never sound like canned or automated apologies.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

Bad isn’t always bad. Be aware of your audience and of how they speak and write. In certain situations, something that’s “bad” is actually good. And it’s always possible that the word in question is being used in a comparative way, casting a competitor in a negative light while promoting you (“Brand Y is a total fail! Brand X FTW!”).

Customers can forget you’re out there. In the heat of a rant about a bad cable installation experience or a failed DVR, it’s easy enough for consumers to forget that Comcast is out there. Remind them! Remind them that you are there to listen and help, even though they may have been unsuccessful in getting through to a sympathetic human being via your other customer service channels. And, if you can—and if it makes sense—do this publicly. That way you remind all of your other customers (or potential customers), as well.

Some things just can’t be fixed. Southwest Airlines found themselves in a no-win situation recently, after film director Kevin Smith was removed from one of their flights for being “too fat to fly” (Smith’s words, not SWA’s). Smith was so embarrassed and so upset that it was essentially impossible for Southwest to fix the situation. The director was all over Twitter within minutes of his ejection, recorded two podcasts on the debacle within the week, and publicly picked apart every blog post and tweet that SWA offered in response to his complaint. Could Southwest have handled things more honestly, more intelligently, and with more transparency? Certainly. But, even if they had, there are certain situations where things are so out of a company’s control that to try and control them might do more harm than good. Attempts should be made to fix any situation, but every company needs to establish parameters for when they absolutely must stop trying to fix the unfixable.

How do you monitor and react to high-risk conversations? If you have tips, please share them in the comments below.