Web Business by Ken Burbary

Three Tips for Better Social Business

We’re in the era of building the infrastructure necessary for social business to succeed. Eventually it will bring benefits and rewards to both brands and consumers alike. However, there are some steps brands can take now to ensure they don’t confuse consumers as they evolve from social media to social business. One important perspective that can get lost in the buzz over social marketing, social crm, or social innovation initiatives is arguably, the most important one: the customer perspective.

Here are some tips to ensure you’re making sure customers are informed and aware of what your social business initiatives WILL and WILL NOT do for them.

Tell Your Brand’s Social Business Story

There are many departments and groups within a company. It’s now common for each of them to have social initiatives of their own, albeit they may be independent of one another, in a silo away from the rest of the organization. Do these provide value to the customer? Sure, but how does an individual really know about everything a company is doing in social that they may benefit from?

Companies have long published directories to help customers get in touch to the department they need via phone. In digital, they produce sitemaps on their websites for the same purpose. What can they do to help people understand their fragmented landscape of social outposts? Tell their social business story! This will educate consumers, raise awareness of their efforts, and remove any confusion over where/what/when their social business initiatives are.

An example of a brand that is telling their social business story well is Dell. Just visit the ‘”Dell in Social Media” section of dell.com and you’re able to learn everything about Dell’s social business activities, with links and descriptions to their social outposts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Slideshare, Xing), their communities for owners and clubs, or even Dell’s official global social media policy.

Share Service and Support Expectations

Many companies are realizing the benefit of social technologies for customer support and developing formal social business initiatives for doing so. It can be a great benefit, and provide better/faster/cheaper service to customers under the right circumstances. However, it’s easier said than done. Especially when consumer expectations are rapidly moving closer to instant gratification.

Social platforms never sleep. They don’t turn off (usually). They are constantly moving forward, with a seemingly infinite stream of activity, discussion and sharing. That preconditions consumer expectations when dealing with a formal brand presence via social, into near real-time resolutions of customer problems. And when a brand cannot live up to such a high standard, it sets the stage for a negative customer experience.

Brands can avoid this by setting expectations for service and response times up front. For example, if you’re supporting customers via Twitter, define hours of operation. The Microsoft Xbox and the Bank of America customer support teams have done a terrific job of this, providing support hours directly in the Twitter profile description, as well as the background image for their profile page.

Curate Conversations About Your Brand

Consumer trust is has evolved. Consumers are actively seeking “people like me”, to understand their opinions, preferences and perspectives on brands, products and services. Brands all have a story, and tell that story through branded content through paid and owned media. What can brands do to help provide consumers with what “people like them” are saying about the brand? Curate conversations that meet the consumer need and make it easily accessible for them to consumer and digest.

Ford recently launched the new, redesigned Explorer SUV. While they have been curating consumer reaction and conversation about their products for awhile now, I point you to the Explorer home page as an example of a brand curating content that matters. Visit the Ford Explorer Buzz page to see the curated results of reactions from media sites, blogs, forums, etc… about the new product.

Four Avenues to a More Focused Social Media Monitoring Strategy

This post is a collaboration between Ken Burbary and Chuck Hemann. It is being cross posted here and the Dix and Eaton blog.

Social Media Monitoring can be an overwhelming endeavor, requiring you to sift through potentially large amounts of data to separate signal from noise, all in the hope of finding key consumer/customer insights that a company can act on. The thought of getting started can be overwhelming for big brands with a broad reach. If you’ve made the decision to listen to what the market is saying about you (an easy one) and are ready to take the next step and put it into practice, then consult this guide on the 5 Ws of Listening and create a strategic listening plan first (more on this to come in a future post). Then, and only then, move on to tool selection. There are hundreds of monitoring tools in the marketplace today (In fact, Microsoft launched their own social media monitoring tool today, dubbed Looking Glass). Use the community resources available to decide which tool(s) are best for you, then move forward with the tool that has the best coverage for the media types you’re interested in, and meets the rest of your specific needs.

To make listening easier, try narrowing the focus on a subset of your business. This will make it easier to get started, and require less time and resources (typically, your mileage may vary), than trying to listen for every individual mention of your brand terms. Here are 4 specific areas that companies can focus their listening activities to do this:

• Campaign Specific – focus on the conversation driven by a specific campaign. Not only the volume but more importantly the qualitative components of the conversation. Target keywords, phrases and important details contained in the messaging of your campaign, go beyond generic terms and brand mentions. This can reveal a useful dimension of consumer opinion, passion. Tropicana recently learned this when launching a new packaging design for its pure premium orange juice. By listening around this specific campaign, they learned about the uproar from passionate customers, and ultimately reversed course and reinstated the old packaging design.
• Event Specific – companies invest significant time, energy and financial resources for all types of offline events. Use social media monitoring to measure and track the online conversation about an event. Integrate these the relevant conversation points with data from other channels to get a holistic view of an event’s reach, sentiment and popularity. MTV recently did this at the Video Music Awards with their Twitter Tracker.
• Business Unit Specific – for large organizations, with many businesses spread across the globe, narrowing down which business units you want to monitor is an essential part in trying to lessen the resources burden of social media monitoring. How do you begin to do this if you’re tapped with listening for your company (especially if you’re “housed” in the corporate communications or marketing department)? Start thinking about the process by using these steps:
  • Identify your company’s strategic business units – the companies with several different business unuts surely have some idea which of those are the real revenue drivers now, and in the future. If your organization has five business units, for example, but there are two that are the real revenue engines for the company, those would likely be suspects for your listening efforts.
  • Identify business unit leaders that can help share the burden – one of the central points of this post that we hope you takeaway is that monitoring isn’t an effort that can be left up to just one person. There has to be a decent amount of burden shared across the organization. Business unit leaders know their individual businesses better than anyone else. Tap them not only for their expertise of the business, but for the insights they’ll be able to lend in making sure the data you provide is at its most valuable.
  • Determine which terms you’re going to use – anyone that’s developed a listening program before will tell you that there can be a tremendous time investment in building the keyword/phrase monitoring strategy. That includes terms, which sources to track (if you’re using less sophisticated free tools), and even which topics associated with the business unit you’d like to include. Crunching the data is important, but this stage is often overlooked to the peril of the whole project.

It goes without saying, but after you’ve done these three things, it’s time to start collecting and analyzing data. If you’re interested in seeing how other companies have narrowed listening to a specific business unit, check out this presentation from United Parcel Service (UPS) at last year’s BlogWell.

• Product Specific – if you aren’t planning to monitor around a campaign, event or business unit, you can always monitor specific product and/or service sub-brand(s). The process is very similar to how you would monitor business unit conversations – identify the appropriate sub-brand expert (developer, leader, marketer, etc..), identify those at the product level that can help you share in the burden, develop your list of terms (a time-consuming process as you may already know), and ultimately gather and analyze the data. The folks at Verisign (PDF) have been doing this exact same thing (with the help of agency partners) with good success.

Time to measure consumer engagement

This is an entertaining parody, by Microsoft none the less, that illustrates the problems between advertisers and consumers today.