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March 5, 2010

Let's Talk Social Media Monitoring. (Listen In!)

This past weekend I did a post titled "Creating Relationship" in which is criticized Lands End for the volume of e-mail. On Monday, I received the following Comment to the post:

"We have read your blog and wanted to let you know that you are able to reduce the amount of emails you receive from us to just one per week. You may reduce you (sic) emails by clicking here: http://bit.ly/LEnewsletters. Click on unsubscribe and you will be prompted to choose once a week or unsubscribe. We do not want our newsletter to harm our relationship. Customer service is our top priority at Lands' End, which is why we appreciate all of our customer's feedback, and value your insights."

Obviously, I am impressed by the response, and I DO believe that Lands End does care. But now, I want to focus on the practice and tools of social media monitoring, since their response is reflective of a practice that market leaders are doing well....but the bulk of the market has no understanding of.

In the Cluetrain Manifesto, the words "Markets are conversations." has become a rallying cry for social media specialists. My blog post was not a direct e-mail to Lands End...it was a publicly-posted piece of information in the primordial ooze of the Internet. Some person in the Lands End infrastructure was tasked with keeping track of what people are saying about the company online. In social media parlance, that is "monitoring" or "listening" and constitutes one of the most important new disciplines in marketing today. It is how market leaders are able to address small issues while they are still small.

By posting back a helpful, friendly reply on my blog, Lands End responded to my concerns and offered a positive solution...in effect they conversed with me. In social media parlance, that is "engaging". While social media experts may scoff at this simplistic presentation, in my experience with very large corporate enterprises, these simple concepts are neither widely understood nor practiced regularly.

A few quick rules. Engaging is a combination of art and science....just like the delicate art of human conversation. In online conversations, just like in e-mail, it is easy to have people mistake your "tone" or your "intent". In addition, people who post content online are inherently "empowered" and, by their nature, do not like to be told they are wrong...even if they are. So, as a brand/corporation, trying to crush negative comments or squash objections can quickly create a 'cause celebre" out of minor incident.

The above comments are the tip of the iceberg regarding social media practices and I will spend more time over the coming weeks exploring some of the ideas in more depth. But for now, if you want to begin monitoring (we ALWAYS recommend that you start by listening and refrain from responding until you get used to the dynamic of online conversations), how do you do that?

The number of social media marketing tools popping up resembles mushrooms in a field of.... you get the idea. They range from free to moderately costly to slightly pain-inducing in price, with the completeness of search and quality/amount of analytics/reporting support varying accordingly. Here are a few tools that we use, along with a couple of market leaders grouped into some categories:

JUST GETTING STARTED


GETTING SERIOUS
  • Scout Labs: Affordable, easy-to-set up and with reasonable aggregation and trending tools. We use this for multiple customers.

  • Cloudtrackr: A promising newcomer focused on the global nature of SM.

  • Filtrbox: Good tools and interesting graphical representations. Now owned by Jive Software and part of Jive's broader social business software solutions.

PROFESSIONAL GRADE
  • Radian 6: Powerful, thorough monitoring and engagement tools with good visualization tools.

  • BuzzLogic: Large enterprise and media solution with broad capabilities.

At Cierant, we believe B2B companies or mid-market organizations should start simple to learn the ropes then evolve to more expensive tools as experience and needs dictate. If you are a larger enterprise in industries where online conversation is critical (e.g. CPG, pharmaceuticals, publishing, retail), starting at ScoutLabs or Radian6 at a minimum makes good sense.

Social media may seem new or fad-ish, but the changes it has brought to consumer/customer mindset are now a permanent part of the sales and marketing landscape in every industry. Getting used to the processes for monitoring and engaging are no longer optional for any marketing professional.

Posted by jcioban at March 5, 2010 8:14 AM

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Comments

Hi Jim -

Love your practical example of how Land's End was paying attention, and responsive. Effective doesn't always have to mean complicated. Sometimes, it's about genuine effort, and diligence.

Thanks also for the mention and recommendation.

Cheers,
Amber Naslund, Radian6
@ambercadabra

Posted by: Amber Naslund at March 8, 2010 2:12 PM

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