I was invited to speak at the following event yesterday by JohnstonWells.  They’ve just moved into new offices in Denver so was a great way to show off the new digs.  The event was well run and well attended by a number of local companies so hats off to the folks at JohnstonWells.  The purpose of the seminar was to discuss how in a social media world brands are losing control of the message and what can or should be done about it.

There was a lot of discussion around authenticity and measuring results.  Times are particularly crazy for the traditional PR house since a lot of what they have done in the past is changing rapidly from an offline world with well known pundits and analysts to the online world of the masses where the pundits shift like sand in the wind.  Many companies are still afraid to allow their employees to publish blogs and the transparency that comes with it.  it’s going too far to say authenticity is foreign, but it is scary.  This is truly the point of the discussion.  Social media is about engaging your customers where they live, where they participate, with whom they discuss.  To enter into this community, this discussion, with the mantle of PR and legal loofa sponge cleaned copy is an invitation to alienation, or worse, flaming.  The communication must be authentic, in that it must come off as honest and concerned.  If the product has a flaw, admit to this, if there is a problem, fess up and tell people how you are going to fix it.

This is why we got into the discussion that customer service is the new marketing.  It is because this is where the conversation is occurring.  Scrub marketing down to the bare metal and where the discussion meets the consumer is the conversation around how well the product meets their needs.  This is customer service and where the battle for the hearts and minds of the consumers will be won in social media.  Someone (Efrem I believe) brought up the story about Timbuktu packs.  He had a clasp break off from a 5 year old pack.  Not completely gruntled, he contacted customer service.  They were able to get him a replacement clasp to fix his pack.  Even though it was at cost he was very pleased that they responded so quickly and solved his problem.  He wrote it up in his blog.  Marketing.

So how do companies manage their brand in this brave new online world?

• Monitor the conversation.  Where is it occurring?  Who are the key players?  Are they positive or negative?
• Provide prompt feedback to customers, offer solutions.
• Engage in the conversation.  Use this as an opportunity to gather customer feedback.  Listen and respond.  Be honest with people when you aren’t able to solve their problem.
• Be as transparent as you can.  And communicate with integrity.  Say what you mean.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

RT:  Great post by Remarkablogger Michael Martine outlining the top twitter faux pas made by marketers, summed up in the following paragraph.  The advice may seem like common sense but is a great reminder of why the word social appears in the wikipedia entry for twitter.

“If I could distill these five points down to one main message it would
be this: act like a normal person as much as you possibly can.
Providing value to your followers instead of sales pitches is the best
marketing you can engage in on Twitter (or in any social media
environment).”

Tags: Advertising/Marketing, Consumer-Generated Media (CGM), Social Media Best Practice // Add Comment »

It’s Election Day, and some pundits are predicting a landslide win for Obama, while others say that McCain has a slim but very real path to victory. In other words, no one knows anything for sure.

We decided to apply the same methodology we previously used to predict individual primaries, to gauge social media’s feelings on the two candidates. I won’t call these results a prediction– because there are too many variables this time around– but it gives a clear picture of who’s winning in the blogosphere.

We first looked at CI’s home state of Colorado, for the 7 days leading up to Election Day (10/28-11/3). We measured and averaged the mentions of each candidate, along with the sentiment, within a sample set of 30 right-leaning and 30 left-leaning Colorado-based blogs. When we translated these numbers into percentages (see methodology), Obama emerged the clear winner– 55% to 45%.

We also performed a national pulse-check, where we used the same metrics (avg. sentiment multiplied by number of mentions) and timeframe, but did not take party affiliation or location into account. This produced almost exactly the same result– Obama with 55%, McCain with 45.

Both metrics have their weaknesses. The Colorado sample set is very small; and on a national scale, Obama has been dominant in the social media space for over a year now. But the fact that both produced a ~10% point advantage for Obama, using separate sample sets, is definitely interesting.

Will this translate to the polls? We’ll see tonight (hopefully).

Tags: Blog Analysis, Event Tracking, Politics, Social Media Metrics // 1 Comment »

The recent malaise brought about by this month’s collapse of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and worsening economic conditions have brought into sharp relief the budgeting challenges marketers face in 2009 and beyond. Despite the economic doom and gloom, understanding who your customers and potential customers are and what they are saying about your company, your brand, and your products is as important ever. How do market research groups continue their focus on brand analyses and customer insight?

Leveraging social media by listening to, monitoring, and most importantly understanding the content and themes emerging from unstructured text (conversational) data is a cost-effective alternative to more costly primary research initiatives such as surveys and focus groups. In the best of times, social media analyses can play a supporting and synthetic role by augmenting primary research findings with insights derived from consumers about products or brands. Weaving social media research into traditional market research creates a more holistic approach to understanding customer attitudes and opinions, based on semantic analyses of publicly available content. In times of budgetary constraints and cutbacks, social media analytics can actually play a more prominent role as an alternative to more resource-intensive market research techniques.

“The world’s greatest focus group” is “out there” constantly discussing your company, your products, and your brands. Monitoring conversations through budgetary lulls enables companies to keep fingertips on the pulse of consumer brand and product discussions. Well-conducted social media research will also suggest areas of interest for traditional approaches to research once budgets have been restored to pre-apocalyptic levels. Using social media to research consumer attitudes has several advantages over traditional approaches:

1. cost-effective

2. no selection bias

3. cost-effective

4. no experimenter bias (these conversations are unsolicited and unedited and unaltered by response-bias associated with the presence of a moderator)

5. cost-effective

6. open-ended (conversations are user-generated content (UGC) as compared to conjoint analyses or survey approaches that fundamentally involve constrained choices

7. cost-effective

Finally, providers like Ripple6 specialize in integrating social media based consumer research within dedicated online communities. Price points for more comprehensive and rigorous approaches to online market research may vary but the point is that more, not less, attention being paid to online consumer content and sentiment.

So, if budgetary cuts have been handed to you and you’d like to keep an ear to the ground and continue to listen to your consumers and prospects, consider the Internet and the conversations taking place every minute as a bountiful and alternative source of consumer or brand marketing insights and data mining.

Tags: Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Uncategorized // Add Comment »