Social channels are grabbing a larger share of our interest and investment as customer engagement channels. And there's little argument about the value of social channels to help us gauge customer sentiment to inform our strategies and activities intended to enhance meaningful interaction with our brands.
According to Banafsheh Ghassemi - and I suspect you will agree after listing to our conversation - relying too heavily on sentiment and other analyses from social media can create blind spots for marketers in our multi-channel world. We need to be listening on all of the channels in which we engage our customers.
Ghassemi is VP Marketing for American Red Cross, responsible for the not-for-profit's electronic customer relationship management and developing strategies to enhance overall customer experiences. An iconic brand, American Red Cross faces challenges that are not unlike any other company - large or small, charitable or for-profit, highly visible or brand new.
In this conversation, she shares with us her perspectives on the integration of business strategies and emerging technologies, such as sentiment analysis. Among the topics we explore are:
- The importance of building both brand and product awareness
- Factoring the inherent bias of customer engagement channels, whether Twitter or a call center
- Overall demographic and interest trends within a given channel may not be relevant to every brand
- Social channels may not be as information rich as offline channels to gain comprehensive insight into your customers
- Sentiment and text analysis tools can be very valuable, but have limitations
This convo is sponsored by:
Vitrue, an original Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant, is the leading social marketing platform facilitating relationships between brands and their fans across multiple social networks via its software-as-a-service solutions. Social marketers and agencies world-wide use Vitrue's Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform and its Publisher, Tabs, Shop and Analytics products.
Brandwatch is one of the world's leading social media monitoring and analysis tools, with offices in the UK, US, Germany and Brazil. Global brands and agencies use our tool to cut through the noise on the social web and find the conversation that matters, empowering decisions that improve their business.
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Neil Glassman is principal marketing strategist at WhizBangPowWow, where he delivers integrated social, digital and linear media solutions. Join his conversations on Twitter and Google +.