As any business seeks to better understand customer needs and behaviors, it’s no secret that Social Media has opened more doors to CRM opportunities than ever before. Last week while reading a recent marketing blog, I was amazed to observe that the writer failed to suggest the current trend of social networking as a frontline method for creating a relationship with customers.
Social Media is providing a colossal platform allowing us to hear what our customers are saying. It is quickly becoming one of the best ways to engage a customer and gain valuable insight into their experience with our products as well as those of our competition. Are you listening?
This explosive technology could permit any business to identify competitive threats or opportunities through information that might not otherwise be detected without listening to thousands of customers. Historically, formal focus groups were utilized as the most common means of collecting this data in-person from the end user. Perhaps one could imply at this juncture that social media is quickly becoming the new focus group.
Consider for a moment that while traditional focus groups draw in customers to discuss their experiences, so are Social Networks providing the same information. Is there really a significant difference? The value of a focus group depends largely on quality of questions posed to the participants with all the biases that are incorporated into a question. The main disparity is that social media presents a very public review of a product or company’s benefits and even shortcomings. However, we must not ignore the exponential numbers of consumers who are vocalizing this valuable data. It is often more candid than any focus group could provide.
Getting connected with them is just part of the solution. Connecting & engaging within these social mediums is relatively easy. Nevertheless, just like any other ‘marketing” effort, its success is not realized without measurement. Therefore, the opportunity exists in figuring out what to do with the unstructured data.
Fortunately there is technology available to “interpret” this valuable data. Utilizing a multi-dimensional analysis, we convert various forms of feedback into an actionable plan then we take it one step further. We are examining customer ratings across the market of nearly 15,000 products (shameless self promotion). Many of the companies who have attempted their own translations had to invest very significant amounts of money into text mining implementation projects that allow only to handle feedback about their own products. With more than 1.4 million reviews, our database can deliver satisfaction scores from real world consumers about your products as well as that of your competition.
Self help author and motivational speaker, Robert Kiyosaki, was quoted last year as saying ‘I am a bit old to focus on social media now but I spend an average of two hundred thousand dollars monthly through hired employees or consultants on social media, online reputation etc’. While the use of social media as a marketing tool is still in its early stages, let’s not ignore this novel opportunity to act on customer feedback.
A Spanish saying declares “A bad wound may be healed, bad repute kills.” Yet another proverb found in the Holy Bible reveals “Good reputation is more valuable than wealth.”
Reputation is the perception of your product (or company) based on your customer’s personal views or prejudices. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, defines reputation as: “What people say about you when you have left the room.” A few dissatisfied customers along the way may create negative reviews, but we all know you can’t please everyone, all the time. It’s the majority that counts most, however it is critical to monitor and analyze what caused the negative Customer Experience, so we can learn and improve.
Corporate marketing plans often include strategies to enhance their reputation, but are they considering customer feedback as a device for measuring reputation? Should these views yield influence on the way you produce and deliver your products?
Lately, social media has emerged as a handy tool for gaining insight into consumer’s expectations. Customers are talking in their own language about the products they are using, voicing opinions and sharing their experiences and disappointments. They are discussing product/brand features in relation to cost and reputation. Perhaps ‘Social Research,’ if you will, is being prepared right before our eyes as social networks display consumer findings of our products.
While many shoppers are using social media to make informed decisions about their purchases, you can take advantage of the same information to modify your marketing plan, find a fix or correct customer support delivery, if necessary. Building and maintaining a good reputation are keys to business success. If positive PR is missing from your product’s character, you need to know about it quickly so you can find a solution to repair the injury.
Turning a deaf ear to the small voices of your Customers can easily turn them into a roar like the one Toyota is experiencing today and Dell experienced 5 years ago with XPS overheating. Being proactive early in the game can prevent tarnish on your reputation and enormous cost of its repair. In reputation management, an ounce of prevention is definitely worth a ton of cure.
We have developed a methodology to consistently measure product reputation. Raw, Customer generated data is used to measure the difference between consumer expectations and their actual experience with a specific product. These metrics, and detailed “Deep Dive” reports, provide effective road maps for product management and delivery.
Reputation beats everything else. But as Rome was not built in a day, reputation cannot be built in a day either. However, one blunder and you could hit the wall, knocking it all down. Learn to listen to what your customers are saying; your reputation is at stake.
Recently I’ve been reading various articles on brand building strategies and it has been a good review of the basic principals of marketing. The usual discussions are typically about the importance of planning the best marketing strategy.
One of the hottest topics on the internet today is SMM (Social Media Marketing). Questions are being raised about the role of social media on the infamous 4P’s of marketing. I think we still have to address Product, Price, Place & Promotion; however, there’s a new sheriff in town and Reputation is his middle name. Consumers have participated in surveys for decades, but social media is now defining many product’s brand image.
Many companies are looking for ways to harness the power of social media in hopes of building a positive image for their products. It seems that lack of strategy has been a hindrance for most. We all know that customer reviews and feedback to our company’s website is a good source for ideas to improve our products. It’s no surprise successful companies like Pure Digital and Bose use them to monitor and measure their products’ reputation and improve processes based on these findings.
The majority of today’s major companies are now focusing on the importance of social media marketing trends. It seems that many product manufacturers are also experimenting with ways to exploit it for their own benefit. Are any of them finding ways to measure social media’s strategic impact on brand value? I actually wonder if any of them really understand what to do with any of it.
Does collecting bits of data from what all is being “said” without a plan to convert them into action make it worth the effort? The use of a well developed process to consistently measure your product’s reputation across the consumer market may perhaps prove to be invaluable.
Taking on the challenge with great success, we use raw data from customer reviews and feedback on various social mediums to measure the gap between customer expectations and their actual experiences with specific products. Reflecting on functionality, reliability and product support, these metrics provide crucial information that could allow you to increase profitability as well as develop lucrative niche markets.
Successful marketing involves everything that leads to increased sales. Realizing that social media is defining the reputation (i.e brand/product perception by it’s customer) for nearly every product on today’s market, you should definitely take advantage of this innovative marketing tool.
Meaning: from the many, one. The following illustrates how many voices can come together via social networking and the internet to help us spend our money more wisely.
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist says in this interview:
“Posting information about products and experiences as everyday as hotel stays (”Generally all my reports are shower-related,” he said) helps other people make more educated purchases, he said during a panel session Tuesday, and can ultimately lead to better customer service when large numbers of people weigh in on social-media forums. Participating in these sites is an act of compassion, in some sense patriotism.”
Think back to your last “pig in a poke” purchase or “Hotel from Hell” experience. What would you give to have had someone spare you that? We all tell our friends our good and bad experiences in the marketplace. Now with social networking our “friends” can be like friends squared, we have the ability to reach the full six degrees of separation (just about anyone who has an internet connection) and share information. I agree with him that the numbers have to be large for it to really work and your idea of a great laptop and mine may vary due to what we want or require from it. Each reviewer contributes a piece of the puzzle to give shoppers a better picture of the product or service.
While it is often our own current economic woes that are making us choose more carefully where we spend our dollars, it is also the “green” thing to do. There is a lot of waste in the process of returns, and many products, particularly electronics, are not disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. In the end, the manufacturers and retailers include that cost of returns into the purchase price of their products. If we were able to choose more wisely, resulting in fewer returns, perhaps prices would reflect that. While my skepticism prevents me from holding my breath for that, (it could happen) I totally agree with Craig that it is a public service we can provide for one another and benefit from ourselves.
The positive effects of Word of Mouth references in customer acquisition (btw I hate that term) are very well documented. Often I see the term “peer to peer” marketing being used in the same context interchangeably, however not being a marketing professional I am not sure if there is a difference or if they are really synonymous. Wikipedia defines WoM Marketing as
Word-of-mouth marketing, which encompasses a variety of subcategories, including buzz, blog, viral, grassroots, cause influencers and social media marketing, as well as ambassador programs, work with consumer-generated media and more, can be highly valued by product marketers. Because of the personal nature of the communications between individuals, it is believed that product information communicated in this way has an added layer of credibility. Research points to individuals being more inclined to believe WOMM than more formal forms of promotion methods; the receiver of word-of-mouth referrals tends to believe that the communicator is speaking honestly and is unlikely to have an ulterior motive (i.e. they are not receiving an incentive for their referrals).[2]
Customer Reviews, describing personal experiences, opinions and recommendations of individual customers, are one of the best examples of WOMM. Amazon pioneered the approach and now there are many retailers like NewEgg, Best Buy and others, with technologies from BazaarVoice and PowerReviews that collect, manage and publish Customer Reviews. I have both contributed and used them as guidance for my purchases for many years, and even though I understand that the reviews sometimes tell more about the reviewer than the product reviewed, I still find them the best tool for reduction of purchasing decision uncertainty. I know some tech pros and gadget mavens, who’s advice is sought and respected by many, to use customer reviews as an important part of their product evaluation process.
Consumers have no squabbles over paying for independent advice and recommendation, often called unbiased which is incorrect as such a thing does not exist IMHO. The Consumer Report was a very successful example and provided great service to generations of shoppers who subscribed to their magazine and its online version, however their model has difficulties to cover an ever expanding breadth of the products offered, and it does not really deal with customer experiences. The point however is that their approach is not misleading – you, the customer, pay them to learn their opinion and recommendation and thus the only incentive is to provide you with good and honest information.
I want to make very clear that I am not attacking profit motives or the marketing profession. I love profits when they are honestly earned by providing quality customer experiences, and I love marketing that helps me find providers of such experiences. The problems arise when some people or companies decide to focus on deception instead. Many years ago, one of my good friends shared with me her great admiration for Amway products. I was very grateful for her zeal to “help” me find a good product, until I realized the concealed motivation. Needless to say, we are no longer good friends, just acquaintances and I would never buy anything associated with the Amway brand. That is not to say that Word Of Mouth Marketing cannot be incentivised, just that marketers have to understand that it could become a double-edged sword and can easily create unintended adverse consequences. It also creates a challenge for us, at Amplified Analytics, to develop an effective approach to weigh authenticity of reviews we analyze for producing Product Reputation metrics.
The input and collaboration of many creates value in most cases, but probably not in all. One of the best examples of the concept of “crowdsourcing” is Wikipedia, but there are some troubling signals that have come out of this social experiment:
More than 49,000 editors left Wikipedia’s English-language edition during the first three months of 2009, compared with only 4,900 for the same quarter a year earlier, according to the Journal, quoting Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzes Wikipedia’s online data. Though the service still boasts about 3 million active contributors, volunteers are leaving more rapidly than new ones are joining, the Journal said.
I fancy myself as being relatively well informed, and have joined, as a volunteer a few months ago, but upon reflection saw nothing particularly valuable to contribute to the existing entries. How many in a “crowd” makes “crowdsourcing” meaningful?
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed the site in an interview with Silicon.com earlier this month. With 13 million articles now written and edited by volunteers, Wales sees conflict among multiple contributors as the exception.
“We really tend to use less inflammatory words–try to stick to basic facts and so on. And that’s come about over time. You have people come together [on Wikipedia] with different viewpoints but in general they tend to be trying to work in good faith to collaborate and compromise with other people.”
Wales also pointed out that most articles are written by a small number of people.
“One of the things that’s important to know about Wikipedia is that the entries that are edited by hundreds of people are really anomalies,” he told Silicon.com.
So at what point does the wisdom of the crowd turn into madness of the mob? I am not envious of Wales as he seems to manage as explosive a process as nuclear fusion, when it comes to the emotions and egos involved, but I am very grateful that he does, as many studies have shown that Wikipedia’s authority is every bit as high, if not higher, than one of traditional encyclopedias. The accuracy is the context in which authority of an encyclopedia is judged.
The debate over the accuracy–and quality–of survey research conducted online is flaring at the moment, at least partly in response to a paper by Yeager, Krosnick, Chang, Javitz. Levendusky, Simpson and Wang: “Comparing the accuracy of RDD telephone surveys and Internet surveys conducted with probability and non-probability samples.”
In my opinion the methods employed to conduct the research are secondary to the findings, the researcher attempts to discover. This opinion usually draws very heated arguments from purists who are concerned that “biases” cannot be avoided if the research is “tainted” by pre-conceived expectations. I totally agree – biases cannot be avoided, or even tried to. Without biases the results of research is meaningless and it is a lot more useful to introduce the power of the context and some structure into the process.
Meaningful, representative and actionable results of market research are more important than its marginal accuracy.
There has been a lot written lately about the rising power of customer recommendation within the Marketing paradigm. Here is just one of many examples and a reference to an interesting study:
Advertisers are courting social-networking users because their opinions matter. More than 65 percent of 112,000 people surveyed said they were more likely to purchase products or services that they learned about in social-networking services, according to Powered Inc., an Austin-based company that helps Sony Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. with their social-media strategies.
Edelman Trust Report finds that trust in a recommendation, based on a personal experience of “a person like me”, has grown from 22% to 58% in just 6 years. AdAge reports that
So what is the meaning of “peer” or “a person like me” in an environment where most recommendations are anonymous, and the privacy of the recommenders is carefully protected? We all are too well aware of unscrupulous, and not too smart, marketers who tried to game the system with widely publicized failures. However that very publicity seems to give us even more confidence in our “peers”, as it makes us believe that the sheer number of reviews and recommendations of the authors, and the transparency of the Internet, will protect us from being manipulated.
Sometimes positive recommendations of people I know, will cause me not to buy the recommended product, as I am aware in our taste or skills difference. So how can we rely on the experiences of people we don’t know at all? I suppose there is a lesser of the two “evils” compared to the traditional advertising or “unbiased” review by paid experts.
As we have been working on mining Consumer Insight from unstructured and untagged data, I have been thinking of ways to algorithmically weight and/or score the “Authenticity” and “Authority” of authors in context of their product reviews and recommendations.
I believe that when someone (I hope that is me) manages to figure how to do it, it would bring even more value and meaning to the market. It would enable us to make more personalized choices.
Another thought, related to peer2peer marketing, came to me while I was exploring Cloud Expo grounds of the Dreamforce 2009. Not a single Dreamforce exhibitor with “Marketing” in their name, was demonstrating any functionality or service focused on learning and/or managing Customer Experience. I suppose to most people “Marketing” is still “Shouting”.
I was watching TV and an Apple commercial came on mocking PCs and the Windows 7 Operating system, claiming that their machines are No1 in terms of Customer satisfaction. I decided to verify this claim using our Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter, still under construction.
I filtered out 3 laptops that enjoy the highest reputation in terms of Customer satisfaction out of 123 laptops in our data base, based on Customer Reviews, and the data suggests that Apple does in fact tell the truth. Congratulations Apple!
Bob Warfield of HelpStream is really up to something. There is a lot of talk about ROI on Social Media efforts, but very little to show that makes any sense.
Process barfs on Social because most Business Process isn’t integrated with Social. E2.0’s biggest problem is it lacks Business Process for the most part. Too often it does get thrown out as the silver bullet. Process insists on considering all aspects. If you’ve left something out (like your E2.0 software), the Process is not well formed. If there are ways of doing things outside the Process, that’s a bad thing, at least from the Process viewpoint.
What we’re lacking is simply a harmonious marriage of these two. Social should be integrated into specific business processes, perhaps many if not most specific business processes.
When it isn’t, what we have is ad hoc. We lose the advantages of process in terms of measurability, repeatability, and consistency. We lose the support of those who cannot see value in anything but process. In the worst case, it sounds to them like we’re just arguing to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya”.
This is a matter of where we are in the evolution of Social Business Software. The 1.0 E2.0 products are tools, in some cases they want to be dignified as platforms, but they lack that process component, so they really shouldn’t be dignified as platforms because they are too incomplete.
We see this evolution over and over in Enterprise Software. First we get the tools. This is the Silver Bullet stage. Everyone expects magic. But the tools lack specific process. They do not solve specific problems. They are not solutions, in short. As such, the results one sees from them vary wildly. Nobody seems to be able to put their finger on why things work sometimes and not others. The answer is that without Process, they haven’t factored people properly into the equation. Ironic when this happens to software whose whole purpose is to be Social!
The formalization of “process” implies that there is a beginning, an end and most importantly – a purpose of repetitively doing something to achieve a specific result. The language of Social is extremely ambiguous, the current practitioners are still trying to figure out what exactly to expect, how realistic the expectations are and whether or not a good experience can be consistently replicated.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
Just because some people are innately more social and enjoy “socializing” on-line, doesn’t mean that there is an ROI in it by default. Therefore it is critically important to ask and answer some of these simple questions:
What areas of my business could possibly benefit from a Social Media investment in time and/or money? Do you want to use SM for Marketing? To supplement Advertising campaigns? Do you expect to reduce your overall advertising budget as a result of these efforts? To learn about Customer Experiences with your product or service? Do you expect to decrease customer churning?
What existing processes and/or practices would be affected? Improved? Broken? Improved?
Would my Customers/Employees/Suppliers be affected by this investment?
I would suggest to drill into each one of them to evaluate any potential opportunities, size up potential investment and set very specific, and realistic expectations. The search for ROI too often starts well after the proverbial “horse is out of the barn”.
I just re-read an excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group. Jeremiah used to work for Forrester Research and just recently joined Altimeter.
We all, more or less, know what monitoring is. Here is an example of a definition that come reasonably close to the marketing context once you replace the word “enemy” with something more appropriate, like “customer” or “consumer”, depending on the group one monitors.
The act of listening, carrying out surveillance on, and/or recording of enemy emissions for intelligence purposes.
So presumably obtaining “the insight” and/or “intelligence” is the purpose of the exercise. The most interesting question for me is – what are we going to do with this precious intelligence when we get it?
The second quote from this post, used here out of sequence, is
… marketers were used to ‘Bowling’, where marketers could easily throw a message down the aisle and hit the pins with great confidence. Now, he eloquently describes, it was more like ‘Pinball’ where a marketer could load the message up, shoot it out, but have no idea where it will end up.
It seems to me that despite all the talk by the “enlightened” marketers, by “listening” they still try to figure how to control the flow of messaging, rather than to “hear” and engage into conversation. “Listening” without a deep desire to “hear” cannot yield any insight or “Aha!” moments, and these are the ones that lead to meaningful and measurable actions. No wonder there is so much yearning for a magic ROI formula for Social Media investments. It is very difficult to figure a return on knowledge you didn’t bother to learn yet.
