There's always a reason why a person's ears are located above his lips. Excellent communication only happens when someone listens first before they rant or comment. But for brands and businesses, listening to billions of customers is a big responsibility and commitment. Businesses now put a premium in enhancing their social monitoring efforts and sentiment analytics.
Big brands are now realizing the value that social media monitoring it gives to their CRM. It's a no-brainer. Brands have learned from the Dell Hell incident a couple of years ago where Entertainment Weekly's founding editor, Jeff Jarvis, blogged about the lemon he got from a Dell laptop. Jarvis blogged about the lemony experience with Dell customer service which made his snowball of a complaint turn into a avalanche of rants from Dell customers experiencing the same unfavorable experience from Dell's customer service.
Too bad Twitter wasn't around yet for Michael Dell and company to address the gamut of complaints. The linchpin that Jeff Jarvis pulled was one of the biggest PR disaster for the computer company. However, something actually good resulted from the Dell Hell ordeal. Michael Dell launched the IdeaStorm blog aside from his personal blog in order to communicate and collaborate directly with customers. Arguably, Dell spearheaded the whole ideao of social media command centers for multi-national brands. Aside from Dell, Gatorade's command center is one of the most impressive social monitoring and sentiment analytics hub in the planet today.
Facebook has launched its "People Talking About" metric a few weeks ago and has been testing the waters for sentiment analysis to be part of Insights. Third party social monitoring apps on Twitter are available. So how can B2C companies enhance sentiment analysis to their advantage? While establishing a rich and solid following on your social media accounts is a must, social monitoring should be a staple in the overall online PR strategy as well. Addressing issues about your brand and customer complaints is part of your commitment to customers. Tracking mentions and conversations is a great way to improve your user engagement as well.