Category: Social Media

Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media

SNCR Research Presentation

Paul Gillin begins with a profile of Consumerist:

  • 18 million monthly visitors
  • 30-40 daily articles
  • no fact checking
  • full-time staff of 7
  • 500 references in WSJ and NYT
  • more than 34,000 references on Digg

Ripoff Report is a similar websites. These sites are the new “kings” of customer advocacy – recently featured in Business Week cover story.

Consumers have found that they get more results if they complain through these channels rather than contacting the company directly. These websites, along with the attention they get from both mainstream media and digg, point to new dynamics in customer care and brand reputation. Old tactics no longer work. Stories can spin out of control and become storms in a matter of hours. The worst thing you can do: Send in the legal team.

Customer service has moved from a private, one-to-one communication with a disgruntled and unhappy customer service representative to the public domain.

Julia Ochinero, Nuance – a company working, among others, to improve customer self-service technologies. The phone remains the preferred customer service channel and people prefer talking to a live representative rather than an automated system.

Customer care interaction has become a marketing opportunity – a way of differentiating products.

Paul Gillin presents the results of a 400-respondent survey about consumer opinion and complaints websites.

Key findings:

  • customer care impacts purchase decisions and brand impressions
  • experiences expressed in social media influence purchase decisions
  • consumers use social media to protect others
  • one posting by one consumer can trigger a storm of posts on same topic
  • consumers feel one person can influence many about a product – but are companies listening?
  • 35% use social media to research products often & always
  • verbatim comments show a sense of responsibility to leave feedback on shopping sites – people like to recommend good experiences to others
  • 84% take customer care reputation into consideration in purchase decisions – peer reviews more valued than professional reviews
  • Verbatim: “I ALWAYS research online any purchase over $300.”
  • Sources of information: search engines, online rating systems, discussion forums, blogs, company websites: “Social media sites that aggregate ratings like Yelp or TripAdvisor have the most impact. I’m more likely to listen to the combined opinion of 25 people over the rantings  of one angry customer”
  • 75% agreed they choose companies/brands based on other customers’ experiences
  • Most respondents had NO response from companies on online complaints

John Cass presents two case studies:

Comcast on twitter

Mike Arrington from TechCrunch twittered his poor experience with Comcast. The Comcast customer service exec. happened to notice, intervened and solved the problem. This incident triggered Comcast twitter outreach program: 5-7 people monitor and conduct outreach on twitter.

Comcast had been monitoring blogs, but Comcast feels twiter is proving to be more direct and quicker to respond than blogs.

Dell case study

If you’re not familiar with it, please review the notes from the Dell Conversation post.

Dell has provided a useful model of how companies can use blog monitoring to identify customer issues and respond to them online.

Perspectives on the Social Media Release

[Notes from session with Todd Defren, SNCR Fellow, SHIFT Communications, and Maggie Fox, Social Media Group.]

Will SMNR replace traditional releases?

Todd and Maggie are in “violent agreement” – why not add social media features to your release?

Do RSS-enabled news releases have the potential to take over the wire model?

Todd: Probably not; there are regulatory and legal requirements for certain releases that require wire services.

Maggie: If I were a wire service, I’d be very concerned about my business model. All media need to know is the URL the releases are coming from.

Discussion: Corporate America wants the reliability that only wire services can provide. But the RSS technology might improve over time and become reliable. Wire services are much more than distribution – there are other services they offer that RSS can’t compete with.

Todd: The problem with an RSS-only model is that as a journalist you lose some of the accidental discovery piece, you only get the feeds you’re subscribing to.

Comments on SMNRs are not necessary or even desirable.

Maggie: I agree. Companies do not always need to host a conversation. Sometimes they need to provide comment to enable those conversations.

Todd: I disagree. If it’s social media, it has to be social. Richard at Dell is a walking case study about the importance of conversations. I believe in moderated comments, to avoid spam, but why wouldn’t you want as many of the conversations to happen at the SMNR? There you have a better opportunity not to control the conversation but to engage in it, rather than chasing down every single blog post. You can aggregate the conversation at the SMNR site and respond there in an official way.

Maggie: Corporate blogs are where the conversations should take place. If you allow comments on a SMNR, why not just start a blog?

Todd: I see SMNR’s accumulating and being a blog. You link to flickr, YouTube, etc. People can comment there. So why not aggregate the comments and let the conversation happen there?

Maggie: Good point. In the releases we’ve issued for Ford, although there’s a very active online fan community for F-150, we only got about 25 comments. So there’s not an appetite for commenting on news releases. Had we allowed comments on the SMNR, we would have gotten comments from PR people: “nice release!”

Todd: Everyone has an invisible sign that reads “make me feel important.” By allowing comments right there on the SMNR you make people feel important.

Ultimately, the purpose behind creating the SMNR was to help journalists and make it easy for them: easy to find the fact, include all the links they need to research their article, etc.

Maggie: Many people who blog are not used to reading and digesting traditional press releases, so SMNR’s make it easier for them to sift through the information.

Todd: Using bullet points is a way to strip away the baloney  and cut through the facts. Press release writing has often buried the facts in poor writing, so now when journalists see the bullets they go “oh, so THAT’s what you meant!” The SMNR strips away the “story” and provides just the facts.

Whitney Drake: At Ford, we’re doing both. We’re placing the bullet points at the top of news releases that need it, for journalists who only look at that. We’ve seen that journalists look at one, the other, or both.

Jiyan Wei, Vocus: Google News blocks some SMNRs because if they’re fragmented they’re not considered real news stories.

Maggie: Our digital snippets template doesn’t go into Google News, but it is findable through keyword search.

Should you have both SMNR’s and an online press room?

Maggie: No, they’re redundant.

What are the characteristics of the most effective SMNRs?

Maggie recalls the Chris Anderson story and how difficult it is to pitch to Wired. Howevered, Wired pulled information and images from a Ford SMNR.

Todd: ultimately, it all comes back to content. If the content is bad and not newsworthy, it doesn’t matter if you do a SMNR or not. You won’t get coverage.

If you’re doing SMNRs, is that all you need to do in terms of social media strategy?

SNCR audience snickers 🙂 The entire conference is about social media strategies, which Todd sums up as listening and participating.

Google corporate communication officer in the audience explains that relevant news will be posted on one of Google’s 150 corporate blogs, by an employee, and will reach the appropriate, targeted audience. Google issues very few press releases for a company its size.

Employees ARE the brand

[Notes from Shel Holtz’ session at SNCR New Comm Forum

What is “brand?” Who owns it? Brand is an aggregate of perceptions & feelings based on all previous experiences with a company. The fact is that employees are participating in social media in ways that affect your customers’ brand experience. Examples: Credit card employee responding unofficially to online forum about late fees; Hellmark facebook group for people who hated working at Hallmark.

Organizations should position employees to represent the brand online and contribute to creating positive brand experiences. How?

  • You don’t necessarily have to ask employees to blog. They can comment on others’ blogs. Empower employees to reach out to dissatisfied customers and help them. Every single employee has the potential to engage in customer service – not only those working in the call center.
  • Employee-generated content: Turn to employees to produce content you used to pay other companies to do. Example: Deloitte asked employees to produce videos about why it’s great to work there, then posted the best ones on YouTube.

Strategies for engaging employees in branding. Consider:

  • the role of internal communication – make sure they have the information they need and they understand the issues
  • the role of content “owners”
  • the role of management/leadership
  • policies on employee behavior & access

New Communications Measurement and Evaluation

[Notes from Track1-session1, New Comm Forum]

Blake Cahill, Visible Technologies overviewed a couple of case studies of Visible Technologies clients and their online conversation analysis efforts.

Janet Eden-Harris, Umbria. Umbria was created to tap into and aggregate “unstructured text” and mine conversations. Umbria analyzes patterns of conversation – different groups of people speak differently. Umbria focuses on 4 areas:

  1. Tell me about my brand – not by doing surveys, but by listening to spontaneous conversations taking place in social media
  2. Tell me about my industry – are there trends I need to be paying attention to?
  3. Tell me about my customers – many people blog, and they say a lot about things they care about. Blogs can help you understand what your customers care about. For example, Umbria analyzed blog posts by dog lovers. Interesting patterns emerged: Gen Y talk about pets as accessories “How do I look with my pet?” Gen X talks about how to integrate the pet in family life. Baby Boomers talk about pets as people/companions – they talk to them, dress them up, etc. 🙂
  4. Tell me about my product – online conversations produce ideas about new products. Many new products fail, but if you build a product based on existing conversations, it might be more likely to fill a need. Umbria grouped online conversations about pets into smaller topics. If the conversation is positive, this means that particular need is being met: e.g. organic food, pet daycare. Negative conversations revolved around traveling with pets. Umbria’s client, DelMonte, saw a product idea there. They created a line of products for traveling with pets and created online content and information about traveling with pets: tips, pet-friendly hotels, etc.

Q&A

Q: Is what you’re talking about monitoring or measurement?

A: If you track monitoring over time, it can become measurement. You don’t track (only) eyeballs anymore. You track the change of sentiment in online conversations, and ultimately, you need to see if the social media campaign ties back to sales.

Q: What is Umbria’s data universe?

A: Umbria has the tools to collect tens of thousands of blog conversations. You can never get them all, but for one client, you might analyze about 10,000 blog posts.

Q: Is traditional business segmentation falling apart? Can you trust computers to analyze the data and come up with categories?

A: You cannot trust computers. You have to oversee the data. But it’s not feasible for humans to analyze every single comment. Segmentation is not dead, but you have to understand that one person fits in different segments for different contexts. The same person might be a bargain-hunter when shopping for cleaning products, but think nothing of spending $5 for coffee at Starbucks. So segmentation makes sense in specific contexts. It can be a useful and powerful tool.

Q: How do you code data? Is “positive” the same for Dell, Ernst & Young and dog food?

A: Jane answers: At Umbria we use natural language processing algorithms to analyze comments and identify: age, gender, and sentiment. If you show comments to people and ask them to identify sentiment, inter-coder agreement will be only 65%. Algorithms can only get close to that, but they can’t get better than that. Sentiment is really hard to identify and code. So you have to keep working on teaching the software how to code and score. Also have to keep in mind that language and language patterns keep changing.

Q: What’s it going to take to move these technologies to analyzing more than text?

A: You don’t look at comments individually, you have to look at interaction and conversation threads. For audio and videos, we look to transcribing the audio to text and having it analyzed.

Q: Is there a way to assess if blogs are increasing or decreasing in importance?

A: K.D. Paine: Don’t ask me, ask your audience. There are all these tools out there, find out what your particular audience is using.

Q: If I’m a nonprofit and don’t have $10,000 to spend, what do I do?

A: Do a quick keyword search on technorati, etc. and look through the conversations. Even if you don’t do the detailed segmentation we do, you can get a very good idea of online conversations on topics you care about. If you don’t use any tool or technology, you just have to read the posts & comments. So, what do you look for when you read them? You can note sentiment, visibility, themes & trends that emerge from those conversations, etc. Richard (Dell) explains you shouldn’t be afraid of going through comments manually. If you have the right searches set up, it takes 60-90 minutes to go through about 1,000 post. Richard responds to about 15% of blog posts. It’s likely that a nonprofit doesn’t have the same volume of comments as Dell, so reading comments using a feed reader is entirely feasible.

Q: Have you thought about open-sourcing your algorithms so smaller companies can use them?

A: Blake: We’re still working on improving those algorithms. We’ve been focusing on perfecting our technology. We’re operating at the enterprise level, but there are many people out there who provide basic services at very low prices. Jane: Companies will probably not do this, but there are tools being developed in academia which will become public domain.

SNCR New Communications Forum opening keynote: Joseph Jaffe

[cross-posted from New Communications Review, I’m live-blogging the 2008 SNCR New Communications Forum]

Notes from Joseph Jaffe’s opening keynote:

There are millions – millions of conversations going on around us: powerful, engaged, influential conversations: Isn’t it time we join them?

The world has changed. The consumer has changed. Why hasn’t marketing?

Is the consumer in control? Are organizations in control? Nobody’s in control – this is total anarchy. We seek order and control, but that’s a fantasy world, a false sense of control. Some organizations, such as P&G, are trying to give that control to consumers – but consumers don’t want control. They want to be listened to, respected, engaged.

Marketing theory is very outdated – based on simple top-of-mind associations. Would you rather have 10 quality relationships or 5 million impressions? Most marketers want the impressions. See the Comcast example – the first thing that comes to mind (and in search rankings) is the video with the Comcast technician falling asleep. That gets a lot of impressions, but are they valuable? If you cultivate 10 quality relationships, those will branch out and in the long term will bring much more value than impressions.

Moving marketing from 4 P’s to 6 C’s: Content, Customization, Commerce, Conversation, Community, Content – all revolving around the Consumer.

The history and future of media: Moving from the one-to-many model to the one-to-one model (personalization), to one-from-me (search). But the model that characterizes social media is the many-to-many model. The model can work, or can suffocate you if you don’t know how to listen. In some ways, social media has gone to a reverse one-to-many model, where the previous targets (consumers) have become the broadcasters.

Communication vs. Conversation: Communication can only take you so far. Communication gets your foot in the door, but conversation gets the consumer to open the door and invite you in. The way you do it is not to spend lots of money: “Don’t outspend… outsmart.”

SNCR survey: What does conversational marketing mean to you? Some definitions include: less hype, faith & trust in your brand, partnering with consumers, etc. Going back to the Cluetrain Manifesto and the ancient bazaars, those people knew conversations: those markets were conversations. Commerce was a social experience. But we’ve moved from the bazaar/market model to impersonal malls. It’s time to put the social & sociability back in media – and in marketing. Marketing doesn’t have to remain a spectator sport. It’s time to entice consumers to come out of spectator/lurker mode.

In a recent SNCR survey, 41% of respondents anticipated spending 10% or more of marketing budget on conversational marketing. Many CMO’s right now get it, and are ready for conversational marketing. You want your customers to trust you – but do you trust them?

The answer is not to spend absurd amounts of money on fireworks displays (advertising) – how many Superbowl ads can you remember?

It’s time to blend and mesh the worlds of marketing, PR, and advertising, to achieve transformational change. The biggest risk is to spend $4 million on a campaign no one notices. 90% of advertising is wasted. It’s time to reconsider our strategy.

The problem is we don’t nurture the young, fresh smart ideas and we don’t invest enough time in them. The seeds of conversation are not magic beans. Conversation will not happen overnight. Companies need to invest long-term in conversation and maintain that commitment.

At the end of the day, I’m a storm chaser. If you want to understand change, you have to be in the heart of the storm. I stick my neck out. It’s been chopped off a couple of times – but it keeps growing back.

Predictions based on recent SNCR research data:

  • by 2012, companies will have conversation departments. They will listen to customers. They will allow employees to engage with customers. They will sponsor the sand box – and create spaces for customers to engage with each other
  • campaigns will change radically to include influence outreach, blogger activation, conversation monitoring & optimization, etc.

So, where’s the catch?

  • talent: not enough people in the business right now. Advertisers are part of the problem. They’re not the creators; customers are.
  • measurement: not ROI, but return on experimentation; or return on infinity. Right now, there are 4 categories: sales, good PR, improved brand health, more intimate knowledge of customers – the last 2 are the most interesting.
  • integration: 55% of survey respondents stated that conversation should be a combination of marketing, PR, & advertising.
  • organizational buy-in: right now, change happens at the individual level, not at the organizational culture level; but that often means that change happens at the tactical level, and it does not radically change the way the organization operates
  • control: you lose it. Recall T-mobile claiming they own trademark on the color magenta and issuing a cease & desist letter to engadget. In response, many bloggers displayed “T-mobile sucks” magenta badges. 3H: humanity, humility, & humor.

Edelman Digital Bootcamp

I’m live-blogging EDB, look for several updates throughout the day.

Other EDB updates: twitter, EDB website & blog

Session 1 – Social Media 101

Erin Caldwell kicks off the day with her personal story. As an Auburn student, she became familiar with the PR blogosphere (see this blog’s blog roll for a start), she started the Forward Blog and built her reputation online. Edelman contacted her and by the time she interviewed, they pretty much knew they wanted to hire her. Being able to use social media & building your professional reputation online can help you get a job in public relations, whether you want to practice online or offline PR.

Team Edelman introductions and personal stories about social media a-ha moments. Different stories, different people, with technology backgrounds varying from tech guru to “barely able to turn on a computer” – but all share passion, curiosity, and love for their work [9:05 am].

Who’s here from Edelman: Chris Broomall, Erin Caldwell, Steven Field, Phil Gomes, Jena Kozel, Monte Lutz, Stephanie Wasilik. Bios here.

Educators’ track

Session 2: How PR practice uses social media

PR educators introduce themselves and talk about: helping students establish connections between social and professional uses of social media; motivating students to learn social media; disparity between expectations (students know all about social media) and reality (students are not familiar and even intimidated by new communication technologies – RSS what?!) [9:50].

Phil Gomes provides the big picture of current social media use in PR.

Phil saw blogging as the ultimate media relations tool – you can demonstrate journalists that you’ve read them, and have reacted to their work.

Don’t think of it as a technology problem; the technology in social media is easy to learn.

Phil describes his approach to teaching social media in the Chicago T4 lab. They spend one day immersed in online conversation analysis. Phil doesn’t believe in teaching products, so he teaches his students to use free tools to analyze existing conversations about a client. Tools you can use: bloglines, technorati, alexa, blogpulse, etc.

Job description for an entry PR job (assistant account executive):

  • administration
  • coverage + conversation tracking
  • list building + community & member-list generation
  • editorial/speaking calendar building + identifying client conversation-entry opportunities
  • list & opportunity qualifications + deep-dive analysis
  • team knowledge mgmt
  • AP + web style
  • etc. [10:20]

Phil loves the advanced search in technorati that identifies all links to a specific URL. For example see who links to this blog.

What Phil looks for in a job candidate:

  • intellectual curiosity
  • up-managing skills (free of CLM -career limiting moves-)
  • an examined, omnivorous media consumption life (facebook or myspace? why? WSJ or NYT? why?)
  • basic knowledge of social media tools

== Tired : Pitching :: Wired : Engagement ==

Don’t write self-referential posts (what I did/wore today) – be useful.

 

The ideal job candidate would have:

 

  • perspective; understanding of online communities – Phil loves this Wired article
  • good online writing skills: concise; interlinked
  • online law & public policy (DMCA)
  • communication, technology & society
  • critical consumption of media
  • an understanding of rules/culture of online engagement [10:40]

Session 3: Social Media Tools in the Classroom

Session 4: Social Media Assignments

Educators shared assignment ideas that make use of social media in various PR and communication courses. [4:15 pm]

Session 5: Wrap-Up – Best Practices

Students sum-up some of the lessons that stood out:

  • transparency
  • there are many free social media tools out there!
  • update your site/blog often
  • blogger relations require a different mindset

Edelman practitioners were impressed to see students taking time out of their weekend to learn these skills – there’s hope they’ll have new colleagues with the right skills set.

Phil Gomes wrapped-up the day.

Congratulations UGA students for organizing a great event! You’ve worked very hard and it definitely paid off, it was a very successful day!

[5:30 pm, signing off]

Triple astroturfing cheeseburger

So, what exactly is wrong with the anti-counterfeiting campaign run by Heidi Cee? Or was it run by Hunter College students? Or was it actually run by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC)? Or was it actually run/paid for by the corporations behind the IACC?

That’s exactly the point. If figuring out who’s behind a public relations campaign feels like playing with Russian dolls, you’re most probably dealing with a case of astroturfing. Here, I see a triple case of astroturfing:

  1. IACC is a front group for corporations. Creating front groups or coalitions to campaign publicly and lobby for corporate interests is a textbook astroturfing tactic. See Beder, Sharon. “Public Relations’ Role in Manufacturing Arti?cial Grass Roots Coalitions.” Public Relations Quarterly, Summer 1998.
  2. The campaigns that students have run on many campuses, not only Hunter College, are in fact a public relations tactic for promoting IACC’s goal, are supported by IACC, and paid for by corporations. This relationship, even if it were fairly implemented and did not interfere with course content and academic freedom, is tainted by many shades of gray. To sort through them, let’s think of the publics on those campuses. Do they know that they’re targeted by an IACC campaign? Is it clear to them who exactly is behind the message? Are they fully informed and able to make a decision about the message’s credibility, which includes its source? Some campaign materials I’ve seen on IACC’s website do list IACC and a corporation (Coach, Perry Ellis, etc.) as a source of support. But is supported by a clear disclosure of interest and authorship? The shades of gray are getting darker…
  3. Finally, there’s the issue of a deceptive campaign that uses a fictional character (Heidi Cee) who engages social media. On her blog, “Heidi” writes that it’s her initiative to run this campaign and that she approached the IACC and raised funds from Coach for the campaign. It’s not until the very end of the campaign that a press release and a one-line blog post reveal that Heidi Cee doesn’t actually exist. Some people might find humor in this campaign, but the social media savvy will know that social media culture does not tolerate deception.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a similar case of astroturfing layered upon astroturfing (layered upon astroturfing). It’ll make a neat example in a public relations lesson, one that the poor Hunter College students are learning the hard way.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here are some links to help you catch up on what happened.

First, read this post that summarizes the story: A public relations campaigns class at Hunter College was closely directed by Coach (member IACC) to run an anti-counterfeiting campaign. The campaign used a fictional character. The major issues people point out about this case are academic freedom and the deceptive campaign strategy. More relevant posts on this case:

Update [Feb. 27 9:00 am]: I came across the class blog for this course. It was mainly a tool for students and professors to stay in touch. But I found a number of problematic posts showing that no one thought twice about using deception, such as these about deceiving friends on facebook or the media. And this one summarizes the origins of the campaign’s concept.