{"id":4137,"date":"2012-07-04T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4137"},"modified":"2012-07-04T10:21:05","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T09:21:05","slug":"why-brands-need-to-think-about-social-media-monitoring-and-analytics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/07\/why-brands-need-to-think-about-social-media-monitoring-and-analytics.htm","title":{"rendered":"Why brands need social media monitoring and analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I was asked to give a short (10 minute) talk about social media monitoring and analytics. I’m not exactly what you might call an expert in this field, but I have been around the loop with this as part of some work I did a couple of years ago, when the company I work for started to make better use of social media, although I’ve since moved on to other activities.<\/p>\n

In researching for my talk, I decided to reach out via my own social network(s) and have to say that I was pretty amazed by the response. Within a few minutes of tweeting, I had responses that gave me some fantastic angles to cover.<\/p>\n

[blackbirdpie url=”https:\/\/twitter.com\/markwilsonit\/status\/217902930999787521″]<\/p>\n

Even though I can’t share the presentation (I used some slides that were “loaned” to me by others), I can write about what I presented, so here goes – with special thanks to\u00a0David Gentle (@<\/a>DaveGentle<\/a>), Graeme Goulden and Jim Millen at Fujitsu<\/a>; Brent Ozar (@<\/a>BrentO<\/a>), Consultant and Author at Brent <\/a>Ozar<\/a> PLF, LLC<\/a>; Louise Parker (@<\/a>LouParker<\/a>), Sales Director at Sentiment Metrics<\/a>; and Eileen Brown (@<\/a>EileenB<\/a>), Author and Social Media Consultant at Amastra<\/a>\u00a0– as well as to the many other people who offered assistance but whose work I haven’t “borrowed” here!<\/p>\n

“Social working”<\/h3>\n

Many organisations are experimenting with (or even gaining real value from) social media and are rapidly trying to discover ways to exploit these new channels before their competitors do. The challenge here is that the steps required to gain value from social media go against conventional wisdom: In business, we want things to be routine and predictable. Social media, however, is organic in nature and is driven by people\u2019s passions and interests.<\/p>\n

Integrating the virtual and physical worlds<\/h3>\n

One way to consider social networks is that we need to look after customers in the virtual world, just as we would in a physical context.<\/p>\n

For example, in a restaurant, management touch tables and customer check-backs are an integral part of the service in the UK and elsewhere. They are used to see that customers are happy with their meal, ideally before any simmering concerns become full-on dissatisfaction. In the past, restaurant customers didn’t talk to each other. But with social media, they do, and bad experiences snowball fast.\u00a0 In real life, you can hear your customers complaining and shuffling toward the door. The same happens in social media too.<\/p>\n

Smart organisations can use this to their advantage and build brand advocacy<\/a>. For example, one upset Mum sent a tweet after she had taken her four-year-old child to McDonald’s to complete his Marvel Set figurines only to receive a Littlest Pet Shop character (another type of toy) instead.\u00a0 Instead of sending a tweet to apologise, McDonald’s took the initiative to send a real mail and titled it \u201cyou tweeted, we listened\u201d, including the missing Marvel figure with a handwritten note. Cool right?\u00a0 Especially for McDonalds as that mum had a popular blog and she wrote about it leading to 50,000 page views a month and, even better, the story was included in the updated version of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research)\u2019s book Groundswell<\/a>\"\".<\/p>\n

Some organisations are particularly smart and they integrate customer feedback into their loyalty programmes and CRM systems.\u00a0In an example, which Eileen Brown wrote about on her ZDnet blog<\/a>, a customer tweeted to say how much she loved cornbread when staying at Gaylord hotels (a US hotel chain).\u00a0 The company offered her some, but by then she\u2019d already left. A few weeks later and she stayed at another one of their hotels and, a short while after checkin, some cornbread was delivered to her room \u2013 without even requesting it.\u00a0 She then blogged about the great customer service<\/a>, closing the communication loop and making it clear that she was a satisfied customer.<\/p>\n

What’s the alternative to this? Well, sadly, things don\u2019t always work out so well. These pictures have been around for a few years now but became Internet memes<\/a>. Thankfully the names of the restaurant chains involved are not so easy to find\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

Losing sight of the individual<\/h3>\n

The next part of my talk was borrowed from Chris Brown and Louise Parker’s SoConBuzz talk<\/a> where Chris highlights a hotel on Trip Advisor which ranked really highly (9 out of 1068 hotels in London) but for which some very negative reviews really stand out –\u00a0this is the social media challenge \u2013 we need to be able to identify these individual responses, this individual dissatisfaction and react at the tactical level to address specific concerns.<\/p>\n