This excellent article by Eric Tsai is full of practical and useful information. I am glad Eric have addressed the issue of customer insights and how it can be used in an organization.

If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch.  If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products. If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.

In my experience this knowledge, even if it is available within an organization, is rarely utilized for a process of resolving customer problems with a specific product or in a new product development process. Product Marketing organizations often seem to be more inclined to use “customer” feedback they solicit, via panels and focus groups other then analysis of unsolicited voice of the real customers, who actually purchased their products. I suspect it is the issue of control, and in my opinion, it contradicts the notion of “Social” relationship with customers. Another potential reason of the disconnect is a nature of “soft” raw data, extracted from chats and and forums, does not easily translates into the structured information required by enterprise processes and systems.

I understand brand as a collection of products, marketed under common name/trademark by a specified company.  While the brand is “owned” by a company, perhaps a symbolic image of a brand resides within the minds of consumers.  Formerly, when tenative threats were made to a brand, it could take months for it to be publicly identified.  Social media has altered the timeframe to mere minutes.

Recent blogs discussing the topic of real-time brand management were based on the March 13 Virgin America flight detained for more than 4 hours due to inclement weather.  I find the debate quite interesting.   The story suggests passengers and crew on this flight became quite restless and nerves were waning.  During this time, David Martin, the CEO of Kontain.com, utilized a social media app on his IPhone to “share” the unbelievable experience.

This effort initiated a phone call to Martin from a Virgin marketing officer with a $100 voucher proposal for his inconvenience.  His response was that all the passengers deserved more.  Subsequently, he was called by Virgin’s CEO, David Cush where Martin maintains he negotiated a full refund and a $100-per-person voucher for all passengers.

While you cannot amend the acts of Mother Nature, I am concerned that spontaneous reflexes such as this will begin to emerge when they are more likely very expensive patches for inadequate customer service processes or poor brand management.    A deeper analysis of root causes for poor customer experiences with a goal of the these causes systematic elimination constitutes a real “function” of brand management.

In response to the Virgin account John Sviokla suggested, “Every company must have “a brand radar system” to constantly monitor social media.”  He also states in a recent blog for the Harvard Business Review that businesses need to adjust to the new reality of being “on stage” at all times.   However, Real-time brand management is more than responding at the speed of a tweet.  Conceivably, we should strive for real-time identification, monitoring and analysis of customer feedback in an effort to develop a consistent set of rules that makes our brand stand out. 

This week as Facebook surpassed Google in terms of overall traffic, it provides evidence to my perception that social media is vastly becoming a Marketing Tsunami.  Now that Facebook has 450+ million users, if it were a country it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India.  Just 6 short months ago FB would have ranked 4^th behind the United States, but has quickly maneuvered ahead.

Let’s consider the historical warning signs of this phenomenon.  For years to reach 50 millions users:  it took Radio 38 Years, TV-13 Years, Internet – 4 Years, iPod – 3 Years and Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 month.  IPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

What force is driving this huge wave of information that is rapidly stretching out and putting television, radio and print media to shame?  While viewing Eric Qualman’s video on Social Media Revolution, it become more obvious to me that Social Media is not only lending to buyer behavior, it is more or less dictating buyer activities.

The statistics are astounding and these hundreds of million users say they prefer to view a peer recommendation over traditional advertising.  According to Facebook, only 14% of their users trust traditional advertisements.  Savvy shoppers are no longer going into the marketplace without delving into the social ranks for assistance. Unless a product also has social support riding on the surge of information, it could become dead in the water.

Moreover, consider the effects this movement is having on American institutions such as the US Postal Service and newspaper industry as a whole.  Items such as news and mail are finding us, where the need to “wait” on the 5 o’clock news is passé for generations across the board.  Joe Puzilli once said ‘we are seeing nothing less than a tsunami affecting business of every size’ in reference to Social Media.  The Mom & Pop businesses that won the battles against big business may now lose the war if they don’t pay attention and defend themselves within Social Networks.

A remarkable platform has emerged allowing you to engage in conversation with your customers.  No longer can you simply sell your products straight away without building a relationship with buyers.  If you are not using these social mediums to listen to consumers, build your brand and increase sales you are falling way behind.  Socialnomics may compel us to action as in the self-help quote “Don’t wait for your ship to come in, swim out to meet it.”

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.

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 about the comparative accuracy of Market Research methods (online vs telephone) made me think about the context in which this debate is formed.

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.

Very interesting results of the survey:

A Social Media Survey conducted on behalf of PRWeek and MS&L by PRWeek and CA Walker found that marketers don’t make changes to their products based on customer feedback, despite monitoring feedback being one of the most common business uses of social media in the first place.

The survey found that 70% of marketers say they’ve never made a change to a product or marketing efforts based on feedback from consumers on social media sites.

I have to second Larry Malloy’s comment.

I believe there’s two reasons for this.First, we are still in the early stages of social media as a marketing tool. I believe as the technology matures, potentials are stretched, metrics are determined, and processes are developed this will change.

Second, there could be a disconnect between marketing and product management (you said the survey polled senior level marketers). As a product manager, I often used social media throughout the product lifecycle, and the executives I reported to often did not know where the new product ideas came from. And, what I learned through social media, I often further tested through more traditional marketing technologies like surveys, customer visits, interviews, etc.

Most Product Management and Marketing executives I have talked to are interested in listening, but have no strategy, processes, methodologies or best practices to act on customer feedback. Most tools available today are not providing particularly actionable data either. I am not sure what would or should come first, but without these elements you cannot produce any ROI. I attempted to come up with a “calculator” to measure an impact of customer feedback on product profitability, but it is just a rudimentary attempt for discussion and anybody who wants a copy can find it here.

I read a very interesting post on the Wikinomics blog today called “A future vision of CRM”

I’ve heard the argument that traditional CRM “is dead,” but this is far from the truth. In fact, as Brian notes, Social CRM does not replace transactional CRM systems, rather it augments them. What CRM is in desperate need of is new data sources and tools that help integrate and analyze this data. The future vision of CRM also requires that companies get involved in new channels and cede a certain amount of control to the customer – it’s less about management and more about engagement.

and left a comment I hope you find interesting:

One of the challenges for Social Media channels and CRM integration, is the fact that they “speak” different languages – SM is mostly communicates in unstructured text, while CRM is using formalized data structures.

There is a potential for tremendous benefits and cost savings for Marketing, but scalability, transformation of data into knowledge, and new processes for translating this knowledge into measurable actions, still need to take place.
Your examples of corporations adopting SM channels, while sexy and newsworthy, may prove to be uneconomical in the long run as a Customer Service operation mechanism, unless the automation of these processes and work-flows, can be automated.

Let me know if you agree.