A plethora of Social Media outlets are exploited by users to post comments, reviews, posts, tweets, and the list goes on and on. Those mentions have a direct impact on the reputation of the business or brand - We’ve all heard it before you may say - that’s the reason why I’m not going to underline the listening phase part of the Social Media Intelligence cycle as it was underlined in my previous article: Social Media Seminar. But before trying to engage with your community of users, consumers, detractors or evangelists it is important to know the community before you join and attempt to sell or market because you may end up infuriating everyone and losing credibility. I’m an advocate of the value of researching the users that interact about your business (Social DNA of your community) and this requires to pay attention to where the community congregate and engage with them as an individual and treat them with respect and use intelligence.
Community surveillance
The best way to know your audience is to use a Social Media Listening solution because there are an endless number of Social Media channels that come in all shapes and flavours (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Boards, Groups, Youtube, Flikr, Digg, StumbleUpon just to name a few). Undeniably business professionals are willing to monitor the Buzz about their brand health and a Social Media listening tool fits the bill. Those mentions from a multitude of Social Media outlets will be accessible from one single interface. The aggregator of mentions about your brand, products or services will allow to stalk all the conversation happening between users and if you put the right person in front of the solution (yep Social Media done right= right tool box + right mindset) you may translate what consumers say about your business into insights that will help you serve them better. And if you don’t bother to monitor, then this conversation is shaping your brand's image regardless of whether or not you choose to listen and engage with these conversations. Without a doubt the community has a hold over the medium and hence the conversation.
Geosocial
From a geographical standpoint, the Middle East is well-known for its diversity of dialects where people not only use Arabic, English, and French to interact online but also Franco-Arabic which is the use of Latin characters combined with numbers to write Arabic. The Arab League is composed of 22 countries with a minimum of 30 different dialects. The map below emphasizes the range of dialects spoken within the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).
While I do cringe at the thought of having to monitor all the content related to the brands I monitor on an ongoing basis, I am, on the other end of the spectrum, fascinated by the intricacies of the MENA region. Consequently, in order to avoid bad publicity and an unexpected loss of revenue due to a disgruntled consumer’s negative campaign hostile to your brand, you must, because it’s no longer a luxury, gather all the negative word-of-mouth that could easily proliferate to impair your e-reputation even more.
Actionable Intelligence from the Social web
Once you made up your mind on the right platform to utilize so that you have access to all the content around your business online, you still have to cycle through several pages of results and monitor key metrics around buzz, conduct comparisons between topics and competitors. An important step has been overcome, namely data collection and know is the time to understand the data. Technology at this stage is still critical and the use of text analytics and language processing allow to make sense of the stream of information shared online and detect early warnings in case you need to firefight. The focal element here is to cream off the major topics from the relevant content collected and accessible from a single window and detect the root cause of issues; those golden bits of information are buried and when brought to the surface could provide critical insights. You get out of Social Media what you put into it so as to leverage customer conversations as a business asset. The identification of key communities and influencers is the following stage to harness the power of the consumer’s voice within the social world of media. This stage is vital for future engagement since it permits customer behaviour profiling.
Social Mapping
Visualization of the voice of those passionate and vocal consumers is also what facilitate to connect the dots. A dashboard featuring several key metrics assists the identification of the people leading the conversation, provides a trend regarding the tonality of the discussion, and shares a clear benchmark of the share of voice of your business compared to other players within your industry.
To conclude, Social Media changed the dynamics between companies and consumers and only a continuous and automated listening combined with human analysis can help businesses demystify their buzz online. My best advice will be to set measurable, specific and attainable goals so that all your monitoring is done in the framework of a strategy.
No comments:
Post a Comment