I chatted with Scott Wilder, group manager of the small business division for Intuit this week about how he is using semantic technologies for social media analysis. He is using the any data gathered for the refinement of website navigation and user experience on Intuit web properties.
Intuit has different products and customer communities, including new customers and existing customers. Each group has different needs and uses different languages to describe the accounting and tax services they use through Intuit. Scott uses semantic technologies to identify vocabulary that each group uses. This new language is then used to improve the relevancy and usefulness of content on Intuit websites. In addition Scott uses semantic data to identify what different groups exist within his customer communities.
Scott also manages the response system for social media for his part of Intuit. We chatted a little about using semantic technologies for identifying customer service issues and customer innovation. Scott explained that he focuses on the top 20 or so issues of the issues that account for 80% of product questions people raise. If intuit responds to a customer idea through social media the response is recorded within an Intuit CRM system, but otherwise the CRM data is not collected if no value is seen to exist. So CRM data capture is only conducted where value is generated.
I asked Scott if Intuit hired new people or used existing resources to manage any Intuit's social media engagement system. Scott told me that the company initially hired new people to manage and moderate their forums, those same people now engage customers in social media. Scott is the triage person for customer services incidents. He also explained that Intuit was one of the first companies to hire Word of Mouth Marketing Managers.
Semantic technologies are being used for social media analysis or listening, but interestingly the data is being mainly used for business intelligence to help with understanding customer groups and the language that should be used to connect with them.
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More resources about Scott Wilder
My previous blog interview with Scott was from a 2005 Backbone Media blogsurvey post.
Scott also conducted an interview with Jen McClure at the Society for New Communications Research; you can find a link to the podcast on my old post about business blogging practices.
Another great podcast appears from a PodTech interview with Scott from 2007, the interview with Scott gives a great overview of how Scott has built up social media for product management and customer support in the last four years.
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