Currently, many large companies have some difficulty with thinking about how to monitor social media to understand what their customers are discussing as it relates to their company and industry. Often the reluctance to make use of such business intelligence is because there is an understanding that it takes time to analyze the volume of content within social media. Yet if a company does not start the process of building a monitoring system for social media, there are potential crisis communications dangers for a company, here's two recent examples:
Target received a response about one of their ads, and their response was to state that Target does not consider bloggers to be part of the media. The statement generated more consternation amongst bloggers than the Target ad, but both succeeded in creating a lot of publicity for the issues with the ad and Target's lack of knowledge in how to deal with Target.
Motrin posted an ad that was offensive to many Mothers. The ad did not get pulled until the following week, demonstrates the importance of being on 24/7.
Even with an understanding that social media should be monitored, companies are unsure about where to start. I'd suggest internal communicators are in the perfect place to shepherd in the changes that are needed in order to deal with communications crisis both inside and outside a company.
Companies are concerned about the time it takes to monitor social media. Using web 3.0 technologies companies are starting to use semantic technologies to monitor and find opportunities online. Semantic technology companies like Visible Technologies, Radian6, Cymfony, Umbria etc. spider the web to develop a database of content. The content is scanned for keywords related to a brand, product or issue, and then words surrounding the keywords are analyzed for context, perhaps the sentiment of writing about a particular brand or product.
Dell Inc has used several of these technologies as part of its effort to listen and communicate directly with customers online. Semantic technologies help to identify negative discussions about a product, customer service and public affairs issues. Tools vendors even give companies the ability to route online opportunities either automatically or through manual triage, more importantly those incidents and a company's response can be tracked using existing CRM systems or custom databases.
Building a resource to monitor and respond to customers online is less about hiring new staff, though that certainly may have to happen, and is more about thinking about reorganizing existing communications structures to handle the new way of communicating. Some of the principal reasons for monitoring and responding to customers within social media are customer service, innovation management, customer evangelist promotion, and crisis communications.
Not every company will have a need to build an infrastructure to handle all of these goals, but for large companies with a large number of consumers or b2b customers it is likely most of these goals will be part of the social media monitoring and response structure. I'd suggest the following steps need to be in place for a social media infrastructure to be successful.
1) Executive support.
2) Combine resources from several departments.
3) Communicate the progress of the combined resources to the whole company.
Internal communicators should be at the forefront of any social media initiative, working to build a task force that includes the employees who need to be involved for building the infrastructure.
Remember the goal is to get the whole enterprise involved not just certain constituents who adopt social media because they see it as a power opportunity to continue their control of the enterprise. Internal communicators will need to marshal their communications tools to explain the new culture of social media and how to communicate within that new culture. Internal communicators will also have to do the mundane work of helping to build the social media monitoring and response infrastructure. Here, public affairs and customer service people will have to come together to work on responses to customers that are both customer service answers and opportunities for public relations. Designing a workflow process that allows for a speedy response but diminishes diplomatic hiccups is the real issue with managing social media. To speed the process of monitoring and response companies will have to adopt semantic technologies that integrate CRM tools.
Some of those same semantic technologies can be deployed on internal databases to help with highlighting innovation internally, or the development of social networking within a company. The successful development of social networking internally in a company has more to do with people internally in the company feeling it is okay to criticize and contribute to the network. Internal communicators again can help with the adoption of internal social networks by pinpointing examples using their existing communications tools. However, semantic technologies that integrate with CRM tools can be harnessed for employee social networking monitoring and response.
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