From the monthly archives:

May 2009

Social media - Protecting your brand against negative buzz

May 24, 2009

in Reputation Management, Social Media, b2b marketing

“A third of the population has reviewed something online and any one of those reviews can be read by millions of people,” according to Andy Sernovitz of Fast Company. This is the power of social media: user-generated comments and conversation that can build or destroy a brand. Ignoring a conversation in social media and not responding effectively could impact your company’s bottom line.

Scenario: Your client tweets about a bad customer service experience, immediately alerting his or her social graph (all their connections within social media) to the issue; or if they blog, they document the bad experience and publish the post. Through the multiplier effect this information is spread on the web often unedited and/or commented by new authors. These headlines appear on sites such as Digg or Technorati and are indexed by Google. The news is fanned by Twitter and citizen journalists, resulting in a full-blown reputation crisis within a few hours – are you prepared?

The above example is extreme, but if the cost is simply to monitor the conversation with a few search engines, social networks, forums, blogs and respond to negative buzz when/where appropriate then it would make sense to do so. The cost benefits of monitoring social media far outweigh the damage to your brand if you choose not to.

Start by listening to social media
You need to track down the entire buzz around your brand within social media to get an idea of what the negativity landscape looks like. Free tools such as whostalkin.com or socialmention.com can help you to identify the conversations around your brand. Simply list relevant keywords to search – for example brand, product, model number or CEO name. The tools will then return results and categorise them by channels i.e. blogs, forums, networks, news and video. If your company is global with a huge web presence, it is best to use a social media agency to produce an audit – manually searching the voicescape is very labour intensive. Do not forget that Google alerts are a great way of monitoring the conversation based on brand mentions.

Join the conversation
If you discover negative or factually incorrect buzz, it is important to react quickly so the information is not spread further via blogs or micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

Simply by responding to the post/comment or contacting the detractor directly shows that your brand is open to dialogue and portrays that your business is listening and values the customer. Do not be defensive as it will encourage further negativity – instead explain your position and invite feedback.

Transparent communications
Social media within any marketing context is all about being open and honest. If something goes wrong – such as your server crashes, or the development and delivery of a product is delayed – then tell your customers. Let your customers know how you are rectifying a situation. Failure to communicate will open your brand up to the mercy of social media.

Social media strategy
If you have a company blog, you can respond with a formal blog post making sure that its title features keywords that match the negative posts or content. This will help to add positive search engine results, pushing down negative posts indexed by search engines.

Also, counteract anonymous and negative comments by highlighting testimonials from some of your best customers. In support of the blog post you can use your Twitter account to raise awareness of your response. Depending on the scale of the negative reaction you can respond via video or audio in the form of webcasts and podcasts. If you have an online community, you can host the conversation on your own website, confining the negativity to one area and allowing you to respond immediately.

Make it a habit
Remember marketing 101: a recipient of good customer service will tell five others on average. Yet a recipient of bad service will tell ten people and many more – maybe even hundreds if they are a blogger or active on social networks. It may not prevent a crisis from occurring, but the earlier you learn of dissatisfaction the faster you can react.

Key to managing and maintaining your reputation within social media is to be part of the conversation and for your brand to have a voice that is respected. This comes only through investing time in engaging with customers through social media, building relationships and in turn developing trust.

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Communities are not a right - they are a privilege

May 4, 2009

in Community Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, b2b marketing

The foundation of social media is conversations.  As a B2B marketer you should look toward social media, in particular communities as an opportunity to create dialogue between your organisation and customers.  

Marketing is, after all, about understanding and satisfying customer wants and needs.  What better way to do this than to provide your customers with a community where like-minded individuals can come together and interact with both the company and each other.  

Great organisations such as Dell, Oracle, IBM, already use communities as a channel to communicate with their customers on equal terms.  At the same time providing a collaborative work space where their clients can provide feedback and assist in the development of future products and services. 

Where to start?
Well I’m certainly not going to follow the tired formula of ‘build it and they will come.’  B2B marketing is all about initiating the program, pulling the strings and orchestrating the story so here is the best way of building a community for your company:

First, as with any plan you need to define your business objectives; do you want to co-create future products/services with your customers, build stronger relationships or identify current trends and understand how your products or services are used?  Next you can look at resources and what investment you can realistically dedicate to the community as time and effort play a large part in the success of a community.

The cost to develop a community can be minimal and can be launched immediately for free using tools such as Facebook brand pages or groups.  So, if budgets are tight or, you do not have time to wait for budgets to be signed off for a bespoke interface as part of your corporate website, you can start building your community immediately.

Create a stir
Having identified your objectives and platform you then need to target your key influencers; these will usually be the customers who provide regular feedback to your company via e-mail, surveys or have an active presence through blogs and will be willing to participate in a community.  Furthermore these key influencers will help you to build the community through dialogue with other members. 

Contact the key influencers via e-mail informing them about your new community and invite them to join first.  Seed content such as company information into the community to kick-start the conversation and educate the key influencers on how the dialogue should take shape.  When the community starts to buzz, use your CRM e-mail database to inform all your customers about the community and invite them to participate in the discussion.

Promote, promote, promote
Once the conversation is taking shape you still need to maintain the momentum.  To do this you can run promotions or competitions amongst the community.  Set up a tiered system whereby members are ranked or rewarded based upon their contribution to the community.  Make the recognitions public to encourage other members to follow suit.

If you gather real insight into emerging trends within your industry via the community why not write a report and issue a press release to raise awareness of the community’s value.  Through effective digital pr you can boost community activity whilst at the same time recruiting new members.

Integrate other business units
Your community should shape what your business will eventually become – open, honest and highly effective.  More importantly the community should be integrated with not just marketing but other strategic business units, for example: customer service/support, product development and finance, this is because all units can benefit from the knowledge, insight and collaboration of the community as they are all brand touch points.

Fundamentally history shows us that those businesses that go on to succeed and reap the benefits are authentic.  If you provide a platform where customers can share values with your company, meaningful conversations with different business units and interact with other community members then they are more likely to stay loyal to a brand.  We’re all well aware that it costs twice as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer.  A community based approach can help lower costs at the outset but when budgets are tight they may increase rewards when (if) success blossoms.

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