This post is a quick follow up to the post I wrote on the Attensity blog about the sentiment around Fast Company’s “Influence Project”. In that post, I was taking a look at sentiment across all mediums, as well as the same mediums without Twitter. I found that in all media, the sentiment was 18.4% negative, ahead of the positive at 15.2%. It was a split in favor of negative, but it wasn’t as wide as I expected. However, taking a look at just blogposts and discussion boards, online views and videos, sans Twitter, was more skewed towards negative , with 40.5% of the messages hating the project. The reason was that many messages on Twitter were positively referencing the same negative blogposts that went pretty viral themselves (example: “Hey, check out this great article by @mrsmith talking about the #influenceproject http://bit.ly/xyz” — bit.ly/xyz is of course the link to the negative blogpost).
I’ve been chatting with Dr. Michael Wu (smart dude!), over on the Lithium blog, and from that discussion I got the idea to actually measure sentiment as share of impact. What I was measuring before was share of coverage, which is a fancy way of saying “% of all the conversations” — each message, regardless if it’s a tweet by someone with an audience of 1, or a blogpost from a blogger with a 100,000 uniques a month, is counted the same. Share of impact, however, allows you to account for how impactful each message was. Our impact metric is estimated based on traffic, engagement, sharing, and comments.
Using share of impact, we can see that 38.3% of all the impact made by social media messages talking about the FC project are negatively-themed (across all channels. This is much higher than our initial metric of 18.4%. Note: I measured the same days (7.6 and 7.7) to ensure that I’m comparing apples to apples.
- In: social media
Experts, Contests and Influence
8 Jul2010
I’ve been observing the rise of an alarming trend in the world of social media: the growth of social media ego. It’s nothing new, as social media’s rise has offered a new way to increase people’s profiles. Some people have truly earned their newfound fame by providing original thought and seeding the community with thought-provoking conversations that make all of us better. However, that can’t be said for everyone. There are tons of opportunistic d-bags who jumped in and built their “followings” with dubious practices, declared themselves gurus, ninjas and experts. This is NOT to say that some people actually don’t deserve the title of an expert — however, they remain few and far between. Some of the people with large followings just happened to be at the right place at the right time, which is not replicable and explains why they fail to deliver to their clients, who still overpay for social media services because they don’t fully understand them.
Does size matter?
Let’s talk about the size of your network for a second. By the way, I hate the notion of counting Twitter followers; it makes me think of a bunch of sheep following a shepherd blindly — could be just me though. You aren’t my followers or disciples; you are my friends and colleagues. For some reason, we the human race, are obsessed with numbers. Some things should be measured – absolutely! How else would you know where you are, where you are going, and how you will know when you will get there? However, just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean you should. And if you should, you should never take it out of context. Number of followers / size of network is precisely such a measurement that should never be taken out of context. Twitter can be easily gamed to grow followers, and even if you earned those followers, they may not be a good match to relate to what you talk about, thus resulting in low engagement. I suggest you read Anil Dash’s “Life on the (suggested Twitter) list” to see for yourself if number of followers translates to engagement. Bottom line for me, is that I would rather have 100 followers that cared about what I said and interacted with me vs. 1000 followers who dismissed everything I said. Knowing each other in context leads to trust, which leads to influence (see great post by Michael Wu yesterday who talks about importance of factors like context to influence).
Influence
Ah, influence! The topic du jour… Two days ago, Fast Company completely botched its attempt at creating a “viral campaign”. The premise was an MLM-like scheme where you con your followers into clicking your link, which makes you more influential with each click, as their followers click you, and consequently their followers click you. There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to start; so let’s start with the low hanging fruit.
- No such thing as a campaign in social media. Yes, you can do fun projects, and you should! Create whitepapers, videos, blogposts, get out there and do something creative for your community – something that really gets people talking, something that adds value. But to really move the needle in a meaningful way, you have to consistently execute, engage, converse and build relationships. I hate to break it to you, but social media is about relationships, and relationships take time.
- You can make something go viral. This notion enrages me. Really. Truly. You don’t decide when your stuff goes viral. People who consume it do (“consume” here means: read, watch, listen, whatever). After they consume it, they comment on it, and they share it. And they do it all over again. When enough people do that, things go viral. You can’t force something to go viral, and the truth is that very few things actually do. Your goal should be creating good content.
- Clicks aren’t influence. They are a poor man’s version of reach, pandering to the “number of followers” fallacy (see above – 2nd para). Reach should be measured too, but again context is important. influence is so complex, and metrics aren’t always right for it. Klout is the best execution we have, to date, portraying complexity AND including context within their metrics, i.e. if I am influential in social media monitoring, I am not necessarily influential in gadgets. As good as Klout is, a lot of influence can not and should not be measured. It happens in your brain, in the backchannels, in F2F conversations.
- Did I mention this is a con and an MLM? You get “credit” when your “downline” clicks on you. Excuse my French, but WTF! At this point, we all know how virality works. Each of your friends tells 5 friends, each of which tells another 5 friends – and so it grows. I think it’s safe to say that we get it (at least, we, as in the audience of Fast Company), and don’t really need this illustration. If I’m gonna ask my network to click something, it’s going to be something of value.
Adverse effects
An interesting thing happened in my mind: as people started tweeting, IMing, Facebooking and otherwise polluting my social media stream with this project, campaigning for my vote, they actually lost a bit of influence and “street cred” with me. Not only did Fast Company lose a whole bunch of its own influence (which is a darn shame!), but it’s also helping people who don’t know better to undermine their own credibility. As I was commenting on Esteban Kolsky’s blog yesterday, one offense isn’t cause for dismissal, but I will have to make some withdrawals from your trust account. Let’s face it, we all make mistakes — it’s what makes us human. Even the relatively social media savvy author of this blog fell for it with my application for the Murphy Goode wine job position, where I asked my friends to vote for me (whose votes got completely ignored by Murphy Goode in the end — another botched “campaign”). But at least I made a video and produced a bunch of blogposts and a funny fake commercial. Even though the whole thing was an error on my part, I did it once, and I think I did add some value, even if it was a comic relief. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret it, because I met amazing people, like my friend Rick Bakas.
I am not against voting. I will vote for you if I think it’s cool and adds value, and will ask you to vote for me (very infrequently) if I think I have a chance to make a difference. But I won’t indulge your vanity so that you can feel good about placing first in a contest that’s as deep as a puddle, so that you can become professionally and personally validated. Because if you were professionally respected, you wouldn’t seek validation from a popularity contest.
Before you participate in another contest, please take a minute to think. Contests are rarely called that: they masquerade as social media jobs (Murphy Goode, MTV Twitter Jockey) and the ill-fated “Influence Project” (see how badly it’s been received by bloggers). These popularity contests have nothing to do with adding value or creating buzzworthy content, or getting people to move the needle on anything worthwhile. What these contests do have in common is that they are essentially PR stunts, using the naivete of “social media sheep” to click on stuff, forward stuff along, to create more “buzz”, in exchange for a chance at the glittery social media stardom. Don’t make a mistake – this buzz is for the brand conducting the contest, not for you. So before you click a button and ask your friends to vote, ask yourself if you are providing at least some value in return. And yes, sometimes you will make mistakes, and things will turn out not as valuable as you thought. But if your intent is solid, people will mostly understand. And remember this: influence will never be reaped in one day, you have to spend a lifetime building it – online or off.
Photo credit billaday
- In: social media
- Tags: influence, social media, social media contests
The Social Customer
28 Jun2010
There has been a healthy discussion around the concept of the Social Customer that I’ve been observing and participating in, and this post was inspired by this particular discussion. Much like the debate around SocialCRM, a lot of the discussion comes down to definitions and terms. So I encourage everyone writing this post to step outside of the boxed definitions and focus on the issues. I am not here to debate the validity of the term “social customer” and neither do I endorse the practice of slapping “social” to the front of existent business constructs. What I do want to discuss is whether or not the social customer actually exists or whether it’s just another buzzword. Whatever, we call her, she does exist, and yes, she is different in some ways to her more traditional counterpart, yet somewhat the same, because she is still human. Obviously I think she exists, otherwise I wouldn’t have written a whole whitepaper about her with Chess Media and Comity Advisors.
What hasn’t changed:
Humans are social creatures, and sharing information with others is a part of our nature. We also have a much higher degree of trust placed in people we know. Nielsen says that “ninety percent of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know” and “seventy percent of people polled trusted consumer opinions posted online”. This has always been the case, with or without social media. Word of Mouth has always been esteemed as the #1 marketing approach in all of my undergrad and MBA marketing courses. Except for back in the day, W-O-M happened in person, via phone, via email and across other channels that we couldn’t measure. If I really wanted to know what the best product in the category was, I’d ping a couple friends on email and ask.
Enter review sites. Now consumers could post reviews of various products for the benefit of other consumers. This was, and still is, a great way to figure out what people outside of your social circle are saying. For example, I was shopping around for a digital photo frame for my parents. Googling got me to consumer review sites, where I learned about certain brands and certain dimensions that I should stay away from if I wanted to keep the original aspect ratio on my photos. Would’ve never thought to ask, and none of my friends knew much about digital photo frames.
But people share not only information about products. They share news and what they think is important and germane to their social circles. In his book “Here Comes Everbody“, Clay Shirky highlights about how in the past, there was a tremendous barrier to sharing, If I wanted to share an article, I’d have to clip it, photocopy it, put it into envelopes, write addresses, lick stamps and take the letters to a post office. The desire to share was always there, but the tools were lacking. Until…
Things became different
With easy publishing tools, creating content is easy. With social sharing tools, it’s even easier to share this content with as many people as are in your network, and with platforms as good for discovery as Twitter is, you can even expose your message to anyone tracking that topic. So now, this same customer, who’s had opinions of her own about any and every product she’s ever used, can publish and share her thoughts with a mouseclick. And if you are looking for information on that product, you can find what other people have already said. This information can be exchanged inside or outside of your personal network, and definitely is more trusted inside your network (90% vs. 70% as stated above). The same human being, characterized by learning from her peers and sharing information with others, now goes about her business very differently. She can get more reliable information faster, so she shares and consumes. She is the same, yet different. Same desires and business (or personal) problems, same pain points, but different behaviors that help her solve these problems.
To learn more about the social customer and the impact that she has on businesses, please check out our free whitepaper. For a brief overview of the content, you can check out this slideshare deck.
- In: social media
- Tags: social business, social crm, social customer, social media
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
28 Jun2010
Although there’s much debate about the origins of the title phrase – could it be SpiderMan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or even Jesus? Regardless of who uttered those words for the first time (I think Jesus though 
, I think it’s more top-of-mind today than ever before. In the ancient land of “old media”, only journalists and book authors could produce content to be read by many. We also couldn’t fathom reading and trusting any piece of content that didn’t come from a reputable source. In this brand new age of “new media”, tables have turned, and now everyone has a microphone. Content creation and social sharing tools allow everyone to become a journalist and an author, and for each message to get amplified with an unprecedented power and speed (provided, of course, that it’s found worth amplifying by the greater community). Because of that, especially if you are someone who is on the forefront of a (fairly) nascent movement, you bear responsibility in helping coin terms and how the mass market understands a particular notion / movement / term.
For example, let’s take Social CRM: however you feel about the term (I explain my take on it and my feelings about the term itself here), it’s starting to gain mainstream acceptance and mindshare. However, Social CRM hasn’t completely jumped the shark to mainstream acceptance, and a lot of questions on this topic still remain among the population of social media practitioners. Because this is a term that’s quickly gaining in popularity, a lot of people see an opportunity to jump in and make a name for themselves using this trend. So they jump in by blogging and tweeting about it every day. Don’t get me wrong — I am all for strengthening your personal brand and associating it with a a topic of expertise. However, labeling each tweet with a #SCRM hashtag, whether related or not, (otherwise known as “riding the hashtag”) is not a good practice. It is downright misleading to those who are new to the topic, who seek to educate themselves by following a hashtag.
An even graver misdeed is repurposing other people’s content without giving any credit to the original writer. Sharing, building on top of what’s already created, collaborating and discussing are undoubtedly tenets of social media. However, passing material as your own, without attribution, is basically plagiarism. Also, pointing people to your own writings without any mention of other writers’ material, is extremely misleading. Imagine a newcomer to the topic following a hashtag, stumbling onto a Top 10 Articles list, and discovering that they are all from one author. The newbie may think that this person is a true authority and has coined the term. The writer wins as he gains mainstream association with the topic, while the reader loses as he gets misled into thinking that the writer is the authority on the subject. Even if the writer is the true authority on the topic, I really doubt that he / she would not want to give credit to others he / she respects in the filed. Being gracious and generous is also part of being a true visionary.
I urge all of you reading this post, to examine how you promote your content. Do you always make it about you? Do you give proper credit to the ones that came before you? Do you use the hashtag only when appropriate? Do you create Top 10 lists filled with your own articles? Do you drown out others with the sheer volume and frequency of your tweets? Please give others some room to breathe and allow the newbies to learn from a balanced perspective. In the end, you are also hurting your reputation by tooting (or should I say “tweeting”) your horn too loudly.
- In: social media
(I must admit, it took me a long time to write this, and this post sat in drafts for a couple of weeks. I feel challenged at times, because I produce so much content over on the Attensity blog, and contributing guest articles for other publications – I find it difficult to write more for my own blog on top of that. It’s not just a question of time, but also an issue of, I don’t want to say emotional (maybe mental is a better word), at least some kind of non-physical exhaustion. I am certainly not making excuses, but just wondering if other social media people / content producers, feel this way as well). Regardless, here it goes…
This post was inspired by a discussion over on the CRM Outsiders blog that was in turn inspired by a discussion over on the SocialCRM Pioneers group led by Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang. The original question was posed by my pal Mike Fraietta of Jive Software. The issue in question was: What impact does the number of Twitter followers have on your ability to get help via Twitter? What impact *should* your number of followers have? Mitch Lieberman states, and I agree, that we are starting to develop some bad habits. We are essentially rewarding people for whining online, by coming to their rescue… As long as they have a significant number of followers. With fiascos like Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines, brands are scared, which is definitely understandable, that a vocal “influencer” will forever tarnish them beyond the point of repair.
Does the rest of the customer record matter? A vocal influencer may provide negative word-of-mouth, which may cost you potential customers. However, this particular person may not be a customer, or may not be a profitable customer (yes, sometimes, it IS ok to fire your customers). What’s more valuable: to keep this vocal person happy who may or may not be a profitable customer (or not a customer at all), or to keep happy someone who you know is an important and profitable customer? Ideally, you would do both; however, more often than not, it’s rhetoric. When you have to pick and choose: what do you do? John Bernier of Best Buy’s Twelpforce, aims to help every customer with no regard to who the customer is. He has built a well-oiled machine and he was able to do so due to his company’s orientation towards service and commitment of necessary resources to the cause. “It doesn’t matter who they are and where [what channel] they are coming from.. We provide value and service that’s valuable, going out of our way to service the customer,” John told me during our interview.
As part of SocialCRM, you should be able to have visibility into a customer record, marrying social data with internal data on that customer. Whether you decide to help everyone, or to help selectively, you (and other relevant personnel within your organization) need to have access to complete and current information to make the decision of whom you help. Moreover, being able to reference context (such as previous conversations and purchase data) when she sends you a tweet, is undoubtedly crucial to providing a seamless service experience.
Is it even possible to respond to all queries? And even if you could, should you? I think your ability to scale your reactive service depends on the type of business you are in, and the way you have structured your organization. Companies with consumer-facing products receive more Twitter messages than B2B companies (I have no empirical data supporting this, but it’s based on observation). There are simply more consumer customers than business customers. The type of good or service you provide is a consideration too. Products with higher repurchase rates create more opportunities for questions and service queries. Products with more intense purchase decision cycles also invite more assistance. Last and certainly not least, the more problems your product has, the more service your customers need. I call all of the above reactive service.
Proactive service, on the other hand, is structuring the collaboration channels within your company in such a way that they allow and strengthen collaboration channels between customer and company. For proactive service, your effort should not vary with how many inbound queries you get. You should be working your butt off to involve your customer in product creation, in a way that makes her feel valued, and not “used” for her feedback. You also need to figure out how critical roles within the organization allow for this collaboration, and how to get them to collaborate with each other. You should still engage in reactive service, but not at the expense of proactive service. Even though reactive service tasks feel more urgent and can thus crowd out proactive tasks, it is important to invest in forward-looking strategies. It’s the whole issue of short term fire-drill vs. a long term strategy.
In order to help you deal with the current fire-drills though, you should establish processes that allow you to do more and efficiently. There’s been some debate about automation and its place in social media. We are going through the process of figuring out how much of the Attensity product should be automated. My view is that the response itself should rarely, if ever, be automated. However, the system should figure out what the question is asking, find the right response (in internal FAQ or external user forum) and suggest this response to the company rep. This way, the rep can craft a personalized message, while cutting the research time (I actually blogged about this a couple of days ago).
How can you scale customer service? As I reference above, the key is to establish the right internal process and a smart system that makes you efficient. This system should result in activating the right resources within the organization, and for a large organization should involve at least some degree of automation and routing (by message type, content, tone, etc). But even more importantly than tools and processes, you need to become a culture that welcomes customer support – both kinds: not only reactive, but also proactive. Socialize your existing support teams to receive inbound queries and to collaborate with the product team. Instead of providing only phone support, encourage your service reps to jump on Twitter as well. Twelpforce does it well, and so does Zappos, so it is possible (I recently wrote about my experiences with various companies here). Socialize your product team to and establish channels for customers to co-create with you, making her a stakeholder of the product’s future. And we all know that great service and a great user experience is the best marketing and PR. And if you need me to sell you more on the value of being proactive vs. reactive, service-oriented vs. “salesy” – check this out: customer retention is cheaper and more effective than acquisition.
And finally… social (networking) responsibility:
To echo Mitch’s sentiment, we have created a system that sometimes (not always) rewards obnoxious socially visible behavior by providing the fastest customer service to the perpetrators. Our ecosystem makes it OK for the customer to hurl insults at companies, but not the other way. In the court of social media opinion, we side with the consumer before we would side with a company. Whereas that’s a welcome development, as it’s shifting the balance of power in the consumer’s favor, we have to be careful to not over-shift that way. We have to remember that at the end of the social media helpline, there are people too. We have to demand mutual respect, and we all as consumers and brands have to step up to the plate to set boundaries. I love this post from Jacob Morgan that urges companies to create SSCLAs that would establish proper expectations. I think it’s a great idea, and do hope it catches on. The SSCLA achieves several things at once. Firstly, it provides a better customer service experience, as she now knows what to expect (do all queries get answered? how often? etc). Secondly, it holds the company responsible to its promise. Finally, it holds the customer to a standard of social conduct.
And remember… With power comes responsibility, so if you are an influencer, you really need to set an example for people within your network by treating others with respect, whether they are individuals or companies.
To conclude:
- Yes, we all deserve excellent customer service.
- Companies need to provide it by scaling their reactive service in the current term, while building for the future: through proactive service and collaboration.
- Companies need to spell out what is reasonable and possible to expect.
- In return, we must adjust our expectations.
- We need a new social contract that requires social dignity and responsibility from both sides.
What are your thoughts on this complex question?
- In: Customer service
Tweet Me, Help Me, Don’t Just Sit There
30 Apr2010
I got the idea for this post while going through some travel mishaps caused by the Icelandic Volcanic Ash Cloud. Here’s a bit of background: I flew Air France to Moscow via Paris, and Delta was fulfilling my flight back to New York’s JFK’s airport (whose customer was I really? It’s still not clear). Although Air France was very helpful getting me out of Paris and into Moscow amidst the Paris CDG Airport chaos, and even managed to get me to Moscow before CDG closed for several days, they weren’t very helpful getting me back from Moscow to JFK. “Your ticket isn’t our problem, you are Delta’s problem” was exactly what they told me (translated from Russian). And Delta, in turn, told me the same thing. Ouch, way to make someone feel special! I understand that the situation was a bit untraditional to say the least, but if you are a uniform-wearing representative, you should still choose your words carefully, whether it’s online or off.
However, this post is not about bad customer service, it’s about failed social media customer service. When neither calls or website visits or personal visits yielded any further insight as far as the next flight I could take or rebooking on a partner airline, when everything else failed, I located Delta’s twitter account and tweeted them for help. This is what our exchange looked like:
And their response:
To which I say:
I was just looking for a little out-of-the-box thinking…. But instead we were going in circles:
Although I commend Delta on at least answering their @ replies regularly, I can not commend them on proactively listening and engaging, or at least attempting to provide a solution for a customer in need. Usually when I engage with a company customer service rep on Twitter, they provide help outside of what I may find on the website. I’d like to take a second to note that I am NOT by any means knocking Delta: the airline did put me on an flight standby, some time after the above exchange, and that flight got me home to the U.S. The assistance I eventually got at the airport was fantastic. In this post, I am simply using my Twitter exchange with them as a case study for constructive criticism for social support. Most companies are very bad at it, and Delta is by far, nowhere near the worst. However, some companies are light years ahead of their peers. For example, when I had issues with Comcast, @ComcastBonnie not only found me online through active listening, but booked a service appointment for me, without me ever having to call or email, or without me even knowing how the appointment was scheduled. Everything was 100% seamless and with maximum convenience; I was not bogged down with any scheduling minutae, but rather presented with a final solution (and note: Comcast is a BIG company with many customers complaining online).
And herein lies the lesson for companies who wish to use Twitter and other social channels for customer service. It’s not enough to just be on Twitter to direct people to the homepage and 800 number, while sharing one-way company news. It is certainly not enough to point the customer to a fairly obvious online destination. At a very basic level, you should be actively helping customers who seek you out. At an actually useful level, you should be actively listening, triaging and helping, while utilizing the expertise of the whole enterprise and beyond. People who contact you on Twitter either have a much stronger preference for Twitter over other communication methods, or have exhausted other methods. You should take the time to call customer service on their behalf, or somehow help them using your own channels. At the very least, just tell them you heard them and are working on it, even if you can’t guarantee an outcome.
I can hear your objections already in my head… But airlines (or insert industry name) are too big! They have too many customers! It is simply not possible to answer everyone! Although it’s possible that some queries will be unanswered, you should be striving for a 100% response rate. With a semi-automated routing and response system like Attensity360 (disclosure: I work there), for example, you shouldn’t have any problem scaling your response efforts while simultaneously reducing your response time. In addition, how about empowering all customer service personnel to aid customers not just by phone but also by Twitter? Zappos does this, and so does Best Buy with @twelpforce (more on Twelpforce in a forthcoming post). Companies should consider Twitter as a legitimate help channel, in addition to emails, instant web chats and 800 numbers.
And yes, even with airlines it is possible; just check out Virgin America, Jet Blue and Southwest Airlines. They engage effectively and efficiently, and even if an answer points to another web-based resource, you won’t find a generic, one-fits-all answer cut and pasted to different customers. Let me give you an example from my own experience… During the same trip, due to massive delays and uncertainty, I was facing missing my flight from JFK to SFO on Virgin America, if my flight from Russia was going to be delayed. So I DM’d Virgin to explain the situation and let them know that I may be late. The tricky thing was that I wasn’t going to know if I was running late to JFK until I boarded my flight out of Moscow. Without a way to call internationally or get online conveniently, I asked if they could rebook me if I sent them a DM from the Moscow airport. Although the rep couldn’t guarantee that I would be rebooked on the next flight, he did say he will do everything possible if I sent him my frequent flyer number and DM’d from the airport. And when I landed, they sent me this message, which made me feel so warm and fuzzy all over – both, as a customer and as a social media practitioner:
Yep, an airline was actually helpful and gave me an individualized solution for an out-of-the-box problem. I know, shocking! They could’ve easily pointed me to online help or 800 number, which would’ve been OK for a more standard and less complex situation. So how did Virgin succeed where most airlines fail miserably? Because customer service is Virgin’s DNA. Even before Twitter, they have always been helpful and went above and beyond in an industry that squeezes the customer more and more. Twitter is a tool; it is not a silver bullet, but rather a manifestation of your customer service orientation, your DNA, your culture. If the orientation is not there, no tool can help you.
- In: Customer service
The Ugly Face of Social Media
30 Mar2010
What I love most about social media is the speed with which you can meet, collaborate, build relationships with people who have the same passions as you, wherever they are in the world. I love the sense of community that some of us still feel, even though some of the communication platforms which we enjoyed for so long are getting crowded, losing the intimate feel, and getting overrun with spammers. I love how quickly social media mobilizes passionate people and moves them towards action.
But there are some things I really dislike, and they all stem from the fact that it’s easy to hide behind an anonymity that the web provides. Armed with a fake name and an anonymous avatar, some of us feel entitled to go over the top and say things we would never say to anyone face-to-face. We wouldn’t say those same things to anyone while endorsing it with our real names. But a fake name makes trolling OK, or does it?
In my job I’ve had a couple of run-ins with some unsavory characters. One of them went so far as to discredit me in front of my peers by posting degrading comments after each post and comment I made publicly. All of this was done with a fake name of course, although it wasn’t hard to figure out who it was. Whatever issues this person had with me, (s)he wouldn’t have the guts to approach me and tell me the same thing in person. The situation escalated when this same person started posting on other sites, impersonating me, which is not only immoral but also illegal.
What prompted this post was today’s discovery (made with Biz360 monitoring platform, by the way), that a blogpost I had painstakingly written for the Biz360 blog (a two-part blogpost, in fact - part 1 and part 2) was unceremoniously cut and pasted into someone else’s blog. He did mention my name; however, no links to the original source were provided, and no disclaimer was made that this article was cross-posted from its original position. The way the post read, it can be misconstrued that I had partnered with this blog to write this article. A quick glanceover revealed quite a few cut and pasted posts. Which brings me to my next point: if you don’t have any original content to share, perhaps you shouldn’t blog? Referencing others’ work is completely OK, as long as you provide proper linkage, and some kind of original commentary around the subject. Just cutting and pasting into your own blogpost for SEO around certain keywords is not OK.
I am not really fretting about any of the above. I get it; this is what happens when you live life in public, share your thoughts constantly and are always on. These are the inescapable realities of the digital age and the types of jobs we hold. But is all of this really necessary? Because you may not get caught is not a good enough reason to pilfer content, in absence of good original ideas. Neither is it a good enough reason to bring a peer down in public. You wouldn’t want someone doing it to you, would you?
I didn’t write this post to rant. I wrote this to bring awareness to the ugly side of the social web, and to see if there’s a way that we can encourage social responsibility. Each person now has a voice, on an unprecedented scale; would you want to use that voice for something positive or to bring someone down, just so you can bring yourself up. I wrote it so that we can all take an extra 30 seconds and think before we do something. Think before you do something shady online: “How would I feel if someone did this to me?” Because guess what? The golden rule still applies: do onto others.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/395233378/
- In: social media
As many of you know, I have been looking for my next dream gig as a social media / community manager for a company whose product I love, and who is committed to using social media as a viable marketing and customer service channel. Well, I am pleased to announce that I found exactly that kind of gig, with exactly that kind of company. As of yesterday, I started working with Biz360, a social media monitoring, measurement and analysis company. Biz360 allows businesses large and small figure out who is talking about them in blogs, microblogs, forums and other social media channels, who the influencers are, and how these influencers and the community at large feel about their products, competitors’ products, as well as just about any other relevant topic or keyword.
Biz360 has been around for roughly 10 years in media measurement, and has expanded its social media presence in 2009 with the Community Insights tool. I had a chance to use the CI tool in my Gowalla vs. Foursquare blogpost, and fell in love with the richness and relevance of data and how easy it is to use. With a few clicks of a mouse, you can set up topics and keywords that you wish to track, and create custom analysis reports and charts, highlighting various metrics like sentiment, reach, share of voice, etc. The amount of data sources that gets indexed is simply staggering, and as a data geek this excites me tremendously. Right away, I knew that this is a product I am passionate about, and when I received the offer to join the team as the Director of Social Media, I gladly accepted.
In my new role, I will be acting as the online concierge for the Biz360, tweeting, facebooking, blogging, monitoring and joining conversations (using the Biz360 tools, of course!). I will also be creating tons of original content weekly, much like the post referenced above, so make sure you check out my Twitter page, Biz360’s Twitter page, and blog. Also, if you have a topic or a product (or set of products) that you want to see covered, send me your ideas. You can email me via this site, tweet me, Facebook me, or email me at mogneva (at) biz360 (dot) com.
As you know, I love data and measurement. In my last post, I started to explore the importance of measuring impact that your brand is having on social media outlets, such as blogs, microblogs, forums, etc. In another post, I discussed the dichotomy of needing to have a long-term marketing strategy, as well as short term tactical initiatives. There are great tools out there to help you monitor and measure what’s going on with your brand or product, so you know exactly who is talking about it, so you can join the conversation, as well as measure sentiment (how people feel about it) and coverage (how many people are talking about you, and how many people are reading and commenting on what’s been written).
I had a chance to test-drive Community Insights from Biz360 (disclaimer: I scored a free account so I could write this post; it is a premium-priced product geared at business customers). I wanted to compare side-by-side two competitive companies in the location-based services space: Foursquare and Gowalla.
One of the most important tasks is defining your keywords correctly. I was looking for mentions of Gowalla and Foursquare specifically within the mobile and location-based space, so I defined it as such. My reach numbers weren’t huge as a result, and Gowalla’s numbers may be even statistically insignificant, but I was able to discard users’ “check-in” tweets that do not hold much factual information. Right off the bat, you can see that Foursquare has a higher share of coverage (number of mentions) than Gowalla. This makes sense, because Foursquare is a more mature product. You can also track how much coverage each product got each day this year. You can see that Foursquare had the heaviest publish date on 12.3.09. As a brand / product / community manager, you should be asking yourself what the qualifying event was, and do a more detailed drilldown of just that day, to see what sources drove the conversation on that day, and what the sentiment was.
Even though Gowalla is gaining steam in the market (in terms of install base and media coverage), Foursquare is still receiving more positive sentiment than Gowalla, and both products mostly talked about in blogs vs. microblogs, which makes sense based on our filters of “mobile” and “location”.
Another interesting tidbit is to track sentiment over time. As you can see below, that spike in coverage for Foursquare on 12.3.09 was mostly positive, while Gowalla received some negative press on 12.11.09.
Finally, if you have enough data, you can run a discovery report, which will show you a topic cloud depicting the most discussed topics around your product.
Remember, by adding extra search filters (location and mobile), we narrowed down our search to mostly full-length content that would mention the product in the context of location-based services and mobile. What happens when we remove those filters? Well, first of all coverage numbers increase dramatically, as Foursqare has almost 33K mentions, and Gowalla has about 10k. A similar share of coverage is present (see below).
As you can see below, sentiment became more neutral across both products, and dominant source became microblogs. This makes me think that this is because the data is muddled a bit with users checking in on Foursquare and Gowalla and having it update their Twitter accounts.
When we remove microblogs as a platform, this is what we get (see below). Foursquare becomes mostly positive, and Gowalla becomes mostly neutral. I am thinking this is because it’s a newer platform, and people haven’t had a chance to get to know it yet. If I was the Gowalla community manager, I would dig deeper to get more insights on the neutral sources.
I took a bit of a deeper dive to understand what the most heavily mentioned keywords were for each of the products (see below). Most buzz around Foursquare had to do with its new blackberry application, love from Robert Scoble and something called Brociety. Looking at the same for Gowalla, you can see that most of the buzz is around its cool icons, and its recent funding raise.
As you can see from our very basic analysis, Foursquare currently has more mindshare, and more positive sentiment towards it than Gowalla. However, Gowalla mentions are growing at a faster velocity, so it will be important to go through this exercise every month to understand how mindshare and sentiment are changing, and who the key blogs and communities are discussing the products.
Also, like Biz360 are great for tracking actual articles and blogposts that speak about a chosen keyword or topic. You can sort them in order of reach and impact, so that you know which ones you should read, address and comment on first. For a community manager, this is a true goldmine. It also helps you take a team approach towards community management, by being able to assign these instances to people on your team.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Golden Gifts: Gowalla Steps Up Its Game For The Holidays (techcrunch.com)
- Location’s Social Paradox (techcrunch.com)
- Waze hits the road with Treasure Hunt and Foursquare support (thenextweb.com)
- Twitter finally enables geotagged tweets with new location API (venturebeat.com)
- There Is No Geolocation Social Paradox (stoweboyd.com)
- Gowalla Hops Onto Android Via The Mobile Web (techcrunch.com)
- Flook Takes a Playful Social Approach to Location Discovery (mashable.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=13806b3f-847c-458e-964c-4314236c3c8f)
Statistics Are Cool!
15 Dec2009
Social media is a scalable way to create a personal relationship with your customers and consumers, it allows you to be where all the conversations are happening, and if you do it well and with the right amount of diligence, you will win (provided that your customers are participating in the aforementioned channels). Because all of this is happening over the ‘net, and online efforts have always been considered more measurable than their offline counterparts, social media measurement and ROI have become a million dollar question. On the one hand, social media is all about engagement and long term relationship building efforts. On the other hand, brands hunger for numbers, results that are immediately measurable, campaign-based ROI. Monitoring, measurement and ROI have so much mindshare for all of us marketers, that web monitoring and measurement companies like Radian6, Biz360 and Scout Labs (as well as web analytics giants Google Analytics and Omniture) will continue to win in the coming years.
Whether you track short-term social media tactical efforts (I hate the word campaign as applied to social media, so I refuse to use it), or longer term community building efforts, you should be tracking, evaluating, course-correcting and iterating. Not convinced that you should be measuring? To illustrate how important measurement is, and what a vast ocean of data points exists out there, I found this great social media counter created by Gary Hayes. We all know statistics can be stated to prove whatever thesis you have, but the true magnitude of these numbers is truly astounding. It’s dynamically updated, and you can toggle between various time intervals. Enjoy!
- In: social media
- Tags: business, Marketing, measurment, ROI, social media
Recent Comments