Category — Groundswell-listening

Ok, after playing with a dummy account in January 2008 I finally registered vanWilgenburgh last week and re-started my Twitter experience. Opinion so far? Damn, another distraction channel …..

Mainly listening in on some interesting people Twittering, doing very few posts myself, still figuring it out I guess. To be honest, I far less sceptical than I was a year ago, starting to see some value here. Got tips? Let me know!

I had an interesting (offline) discussion with regards to my previous post. The key feedback I got was that ORM focuses on the negative side of the online conversation, it is still triggered from organizations trying to stay in control of their brand. Fact is that the real value in the online conversation is only tapped if organizations focus on the opportunity. In simple words: if your brand/product is being talked about, learn from it, understand the opinion/perception and leverage it!

I partly agreed with this feedback, although the real life cases I have seen sofar quickly learned a key lesson: you can only tap the value of the groundswell if you forget about control. Your Customers are in control, and they are waiting for you to listen and react.

Why bother with brand monitoring or ORM?

The online conversation in forums, communities and other typical Web 2.0 applications is growing. This implies that the number of times your organization is being talked about is also growing. If you don’t know what’s being said, then the only thing you can do is hope that it is positive. But, if you decide to listen to (and even engage in) the online conversation than this offers a great opportunity to react and respond (e.g. crisis management), and even greater (but more difficult) opportunities to leverage the online feedback to pro-actively drive your offerings and propositions.

The current tools

Online Reputation Management, Buzz tracking, Brand Monitoring: an entire new area and related categories is being created. Most tools in these categories are solely focused on supporting organizations in tapping the online conversation. Obviously, it will require a lot more than just listening to actually do online reputation management, but listening makes a good start.

In my opinion the current wave of offerings can largely be divided in three categories: Services, Tool & product vendors and Traditional Players.

Services – These are the agencies that will do everything for you. They might use their own tooling in order to provide a competitive offering, but they do not have a separate product offering. Examples of companies in this category are: MotiveQuest and Umbria.

Tool & Product Vendors – This category consists mostly of startups in a wide range from very small vendors to mature products that challenge the Traditional Players. It is already getting quite complex to compare the different products, which leads to what reminds me of beauty contest like comparisons of what the different products can do. Examples of companies in this category are: Biz360 and Radian6.

Traditional Players – the most appealing example in this category is probably Nielsen, which has a separate division Buzzmetrics. It is obvious that Nielsen has years of experience in the field of marketing information. This is being downplayed by their competition that claims that new rules apply and that the traditional Nielsen organization is not ‘up to par’  for this new Web 2.0 world.

I’ll be back

I will take the above division in three categories and digg deeper, preferably I would like to create an overview that can be used as a guide to pick the right product/tool for the right objective. Any pointers towards good reference material, or any good additional information is more than welcome!

KLM Social Media Diagram

There are other write-ups on the 2nd social strategy talk, and its interesting to see the difference in take-outs and highlights that the different authors perceived in the same meeting. Take a look at Molblog and Enthousiasmeren for instance.

Also interesting to see that some people got a ‘negative vibe’ from the Vodafone presentation because the presenter articulated that the answer to the key question had to contribute to the bottom line (ARPU). I don’t see why this is a problem, or why it would create a negative association. I my opinion Social Media initiatives should be benefitial to both the Enterprise as well as its Customers. (Online) Self Service is a good example that illustrates this need for a mutual beneficial solution. Think of self service for an airline checkin, which is a great costs-saver for airliners, but, also a great time saver for customers. Organizations that have solely focussed on cost savings have failed miserably. The same goes for the Vodafone case. Of course a social media initiative should add to the Vodafone bottom line, but Vodafone should also have a keen eye for the direct benefits it brings to its Customers. If their aren’t any benefits for its Customers ….. that’s when I will agree with ‘the negative vibe’.

With regards to my earlier post on Listening to Twitter, I actually found two more things that I think are interesting to share.

ComCast

I referred to the interesting article in the New York Times regarding how Comcast is embracing Twitter as an additional channel for communication with and support of their customers. Take a look at this Twitter User: Comcastcares. This show the interactions that they are having and the responses from the Twitter users that this users interacts with. I think we can all learn from just observing the threads of the discussion this user/comcast is having.

Setting up a simple monitor for twitter

I overlooked this option myself, so figured others would suffer from the same problem. If you do a search on Twitter then in the top right there is an orange RSS icon  with “Feed for this query”. This is of course a very simple way to get automatic updates on the things you want to monitor on Twitter pushed to your desktop in an RSS Reader.

(originally posted in Dutch on August 20th, 2008)

Twitter is a nice example of innovation driven by technology. For those not yet familiar with Twitter: you can send messages (tweets) with a maximum of 140 characters, everyone that subscribed to your ‘tweets’ will automatically receive all your updates (most often via SMS).

My first encounter with Twitter left my clueless as to why anyone would want to use this. 140 characters? Receive updates via SMS? What is the use? Another great example of technology push: geeks will love it, but there is no broad adoption as the value is unclear to the average joe.

The value of Twitter for Organizations

I’m still not a real Twitter adept, but it is clear by now that organizations can no longer ignore what is happening in this new communication channel. Why not? As the the Cluetrain Manifesto already stated: ‘Markets are conversations’. Marketing and PR have changed by now, organizations can no longer simply broadcast their corporate message into the market. They need to engage in the conversation that is taking place. In order to do this step 1 is to listen (the Groundswell nicely elaborates on this as well). Key question of course is: how? With all the conversation taking place on Twitter, how can I monitor all these tweets to see who is saying what about my products or markets?

Step 1 – Listen: what’s being said on Twitter

Twitter is offering search functionality (after the acquisition of summize) which allows you to search through all tweets. This offers organizations the opportunity to regularly monitor what is being said about their product, markets and services. Take my old employer for instance, a query for Tridion will return a lot of results, here are two examples:

A positive example: “My apologies Tridion. One-hour support response for business hours only. Thanks to Andre for his assistance.”

A negative example: “Back from a usergroup meeting. Tridion is just as bad as it was 3 years ago….How can someone work with that crap?”

It does not take a lot of thought to come up with actions that you could take for these tweets. A good example of an organization that is actively using Twitter is Comcast. The New York Times has a good article on how Comcast is not just listening to the online conversation but also taking actions. The article also shows that the tone and style of the (re)action need to be carefully chosen. The online user might feel like ‘big brother is watching’, which will undermine the potential positive impact of the actions taken.

Step 2 – Joining the conversation on Twitter

This step starts by claiming your name on Twitter, which can be a challenge as anyone can register a ‘name’. As a result, many brand names have already been ‘hijacked’. This posting contains a good overview of brands and their presence on Twitter. As this post also shows, not everyone is making the distinction in listening and joining the conversation. My advise: get your name(s), actively listen, and use the POST method to determine if and in which way your organizations wants to embrace the conversation on Twitter. In short summary this means: first get the social technographics of your audience clear, then determine your objectives, and based on these develop a strategy & plan how you want to engage in the online conversation.