Social Media Monitoring - Putting Marketing and Public Relations at the Centre of the Flow(s)
Presentation from Online Information, 03 December, London Olympia
http://www.online-information.co.uk/online09/seminar_description_online.html?presentation_id=842
"In traditional consumer and audience facing businesses, marketing is often viewed as secondary activity, far from the core of the business. When attempts have been made to measure the direct impact of marketing activities on the bottom line, the results have been less than convincing. It's difficult to determine whether that increase in sales was attributable to an advertising campaign or simply down to consumers being encouraged to go out and spend by good whether or other uncontrollable and unmeasurable influences. To make the impact of marketing activities measurable requires a shift, possible through the use of social media, towards the centre of the organisation. No longer does marketing have to be just about pumping out messages, but can also be about monitoring what audiences and consumers are saying, engaging with them directly, and involving them in business innovation such as refining or creating new products and services, the impact of which is measurable. It's time to bring marketing in from the cold, and to enable marketers be the power brokers at the intersection between involved consumers and the core of your business. This is what we at Headshift call Social Business Design. "
4. Awards
• New Statesman New Media Awards 2008: • Forrester Groundswell Awards 2008: Finalists
Winners
• HEIST Awards for Education Marketing: Gold
• Prospect Magazine Think Tank of the Year
• Marketing Week Best Packaged Goods Web
Awards 2006: Best website
Site: Top 10 placement
• New Statesman New Media Awards 2006:
• Legal Business Best Legal Website: Top 20
Highly commended
placement
• International Information Industry Award 2005:
• Internet Marketing Attorney: Global Top 10
Innovation in Knowledge Management
placement
• New Media Age Effectiveness Awards 2004:
• Revolution New Media Marketing Awards:
Best Public Sector Website
Best use of new media for customer service
• International Information Industry Award 2003:
• IVCA Awards: Two Runner-up positions
Best intranet / extranet
• New Media Age Effectiveness Awards: Finalist
• CRM Industry Awards 2003: Innovation of the
Year • New Statesman New Media Awards: Finalist
• International Visual Communication • Central IT Unit, Cabinet Office: example of
Association Awards 2003: Commended best practice
24. West Midlands Police using social media
"had it not been for twitter and
facebook, we wouldn't have policed
that operation effectively... it's
core to our business" - Gordon Scoble
http://www.youtube.com/westmidlandspolice http://www.facebook.com/westmidlandspolice
25. “Nick… is one of the BBC people who is prepared to get
stuck in and engage with his critics on this site… We
generally don’t agree with him, but he argues courteously
and cogently… It’s not done to try to get a blogger into
trouble with their employer, and if you really have done this,
then I for one deplore your action.”
full story: http://nickreynoldsatwork.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/my-friends-at-biased-bbc/
38. 4. output to
3rd party
sites as
widget
3. display and
enable
simple
participation
5. pull in
participation
from 3rd party
sites via widget
2. curate /
editorialise
1. find,
monitor and
aggregate
Most companies still have a mass mentality. The individual knowledge, skill and creativity held by staff is hidden behind processes devised in the image of the assembly line.
Products and services are viewed as a source of profit at the point of sale, not after - so talking to customers who have already spent their money is seen as a cost not a source of value.
"Customer Relationship Management" is a system used to identify the next Jeff Jarvis, who famously kicked of the DellHell campaign many of you will be familiar with, and placating him whilst driving the cost of dealing with the remaining 80-90% of the mass market down.
The result? Companies spend a fortune on call centres that make their customers hate them.
When I was at the BBC, I looked after a range of online communities created around programmes and services. It was obvious very quickly - and Headshift's experience of working with a range of clients in different sectors bears this out - is that the reason people complain is they feel let down. They expected you to do better. They want you to do better. Turning that energy into something quite positive can be surprisingly easy.
People are using a whole range of social networking tools and discussion platforms to discuss your products or services. The first step to understanding where the problems are, and extracting the value this feedback can bring, is find it and listen.
Let's look at how...
Bombs in Jaipur - http://www.cybersoc.com/2008/05/twitter-proves.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinhamman/2489117629/
You can start doing this yourself for free or on a shoestring budget. Tools like pageflakes, netvibes and yahoo pipes let you - for example - pull together key word searches you've created to monitor mentions on youtube, flickr, blogs, twitter and elsewhere. More specialised tools exist - we're working with several and the results are insightful.
#iranelections on twitter
Acknowledge... that you've seen it, that you'll take responsibility, that you actually do care...
Once you start to listen, you may want to think about what to do with the conversations you find. Here the BBC used delicious to store and organise the bookmarks and, going a step further, set delicious up to publish directly into the side bar of one of their blogs so that readers could see what the editors were reading.
(note: With that simple to make link between what was once an administrative process they're suddenly generating and sharing content.)
[The BBC is a Headshift client]
Comcast Cable in America is often lambasted for it's poor customer service. Now they're using twitter as their early warning system. They acknowledge issues quickly and, where possible, resolve them.
140 characters seems a pretty efficient way to deal with customer issues - perhaps it's a better way too?
We've already spoken a bit about engagement or, at least, small bits of engagement by the right people. What I want to talk about here is direct engagement...
Responding to consumers and stakeholders isn't something everyone in your organisation will want to, or should, do... it's almost certainly not the job of the IT guy in the basement, yet many organisations still put him in charge of their corporate website...
BUT it is a real opportunity to push your most talented people - the people you've hired for their creativity, knowledge and skills - out the door and let them, with a bit of training, shine.
This is David Hone. He's Shell's Climate Change Advisor - a leading scientist in the area and, now, a frequent and vocal contributor in the search for a solution to the climate disaster facing us all... you, me and people who work at Shell alike.
[Shell is a Headshift client]
The BBC Manchester Blog, a project I dreamed up and ran with Richard Fair at BBC Manchester, was an attempt to engage a bit differently. Instead of asking people to participate on our website, we asked them to create there own - which we then linked to and quoted from. BEFORE we launched, we set up the social media antennae we needed to track mentions of the blog so that - as happened off the back of the first post - bloggers wrote about the project or questioned our motives. In this example, we heard Kate of Manchizzle, quoted and linked to her comment, then responded in full. We also posted a comment on her original post pointing people to our response. Her response? She wash shocked the BBC had bothered to respond and we won over her support. She later became BBC local radio's first ever blog correspondent, doing a 10 minute weekly audio review on BBC Radio Manchester.
Getsatisfaction.com provides a platform for companies to engage with consumers. All complaints and comments appear publicly and users can see which companies bother to respond. Using a site like this acts like a magnet - it pulls all the people who might otherwise blog or tweet about their bad experience into a single place where they can be more easily and effectively be responded to.
Engaging in their space....
- brave
- potentially risky
- often done by employees who care, not employees who have to
- guidelines can help support those who do
- always understand and respect norms and conventions of the community space you enter
Something we built for Compass, the political think-tank... users contribute ideas to better society and others help refine those ideas by commenting alongside individual sections of the document. We did this very inexpensively using Wordpress, some custom style sheets, and by further developing an open source plug-in.
iPM on BBC Radio 4 - it's "a blog with a radio station wrapped around it" - Eddie Mair
They've opened their entire programme making process up to scrutiny but, more importantly, are involving their audience at each step of the way - asking for story ideas, feedback on suggested running orders, contacts who might be good interviewees, etc.
Spot.us is a San Francisco based journalism project where users and journalists submit story ideas, journalists then pitch to do the story by quoting experience or unique angle, users then select a journalist to do the story and donate money to make it happen. The articles are published under a creative commons license so that the community that funded it can share it and use it as they like.
There are many different modules for the display and, in this instance, easy creation of content.
ClimatePulse has three main layers - aggregation, curation (editorial) and social (with a particularly promising model being the use of simple participation on site and deeper participation offsite but being pulled back into the aggregation).