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Brand monitoring 2.0; Feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the never ending stream of information? Prefer sticking your head in the sand and wait for it all to go away?
The good news is that with the new media outlets, new tools emerge to leverage value from this endless flow of information. Learning how to use such tools can save time, avoid online reputation issues and help identify new business opportunities.
Lets start with the time management issue. Sure, there’s times you just want to browse around, check out some mainstream news or funny videos, but when it comes to specific monitoring activities, focus is the name of the game. Unless you have a clear idea of what you’re looking for, and a strategy for what to do with the data once located, you’ll quickly get distracted.
By identifying keywords that are important for your business, you will be in a position to find conversations about your brand, competitors and industry trends. Next step is to filter out the useful information and decide what to do with it. Oftentimes, brand monitoring data will be forwarded to a colleague in customer support, who will take action, addressing unhappy bloggers or forum participants. Positive mention will be of interest for the person in charge of SEO link building and the PR and marketing department. Other data, such as competitive intelligence and market trends, will be of interest for the R&D department.
Over the last months Imooty has developed a tool facilitating this type of work. Through a social media listening dashboard, users locate information on keywords across different social media sources and save posts to their media library. Users create projects, delegate responsibilities and define milestones, creating a sense of accountability when dealing with online media intelligence.
Want to take the Imooty tool for a test drive? Sign up for a free brand monitoring trial today!
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In a context of online reputation management, we refer to crowdsourcing as social bookmarking or collaborative tagging. So what does that have to do with brands and brand monitoring? Well, these days, pretty much everything. The latest example comes to us from Sears, a large department store chain in the US:
A couple had just bought a freezer from a Sears store in Dripping Springs, Texas. It would be delivered directly to their home free of charge. When the Sears truck arrived, the family dog, Toot, ran out to investigate the new visitor. As the truck was about to a stop, a loud yelp was heard. Toot had been run over and died shortly thereafter.
Understandably, the dog’s mom was upset and went to see the store owner. She wanted to bring closure to the tragic event. The owner apologized, but went on to say that it was not Sears fault. It was the couple had let the dog out in the yard. This did not help the woman to find closure and when she got home, her husband was unhappy about how Sears had treated her.
He called the store, the owner repeated that it was the couples fault, the dog should have moved. He would have been wiser in offering an apology without placing the blame on a distraught customer.
The couple bought a domain name, SearsKilledMyDog.com and created a website telling about their experience. Once live, they forwarded it to their friends and family, and posted it on Facebook. As with any viral story, the response was immediate. Within 24 hours, their website was generating heavy traffic, and the tragic tale was trending as number 1 on Reddit while becoming a Twitter phenomenon via The Consumerist.
At this point Sears customer service entered to execute online reputation management and active damage control. High level executives called the couple personally to apologize and offer restitution for pain and suffering. The couple felt they had been heard and the SearsKilledMyDog.com website was taken down. Next, Sears added their voice to the conversation raging at The Consumerist. They requested to add a response in the article itself;
“We are very sorry about the loss of the dog of a devoted Sears customer. As soon as we heard about this (which was at 5 PM CT on Dec-11-2009), our team acted swiftly to contact the customer who purchased the freezer from our Hometown Store in Dripping Springs, Texas. In fact, Will Powell, our business unit President, spoke to the customer just before 7 PM CT on Dec-11-2009 and extended our apologies and the customer graciously accepted. As a symbol of our deep regret for the accident, we offered to reimburse him for the cost of his dog as well as to refund the original sale.”
After the update, Sears identified the people with most influence who had Tweeted the article and sent them a link with the update. This enabled 3rd parties to post an update to the article via their own accounts, adding online reputation management credibility since such re-tweets would not come from Sears directly.
The conventional definition of crowdsourcing is that it is the completion of tasks that normally would be performed by in-house employees or contractors, and out-sourcing them to a random set of people (that’s the crowd). The Sears story shows how the term applies to online reputation management too. With engagement, sincerity and personal interaction, Sears was able to turn the negative crowdsourcing around to a positive.
Feel like getting started with online reputation management? Sign up for a free Imooty.eu trial today!
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Last week, Kristoffer was featured in an interview at Krawattenträger, a blog on social media marketing. Apart from talking about Imooty’s development over the past years, he was asked how Imooty uses social media for marketing purposes. The answer is that we haven’t done much of that (so far). The best ROI for our target audience has proved to be good old direct mail and followups per phone.
Many companies seem to be embarrassed admitting to this. Sure, there are many cases where there’s reason to cringe at opportunity lost by not following a social media marketing strategy, however, it also not for everyone.
First step is obviously finding out where your customers are likely to hang out. If you’re a B2B service, it probably won’t make sense to pursue MySpace users. Secondly, the effort required to convert “fans”, “contacts” or “friends” into paying customers can be considerable so there needs to be someone in charge of community management. Then, the million dollar question, what’s the social media marketing budget? It’ll definitely not be enough registering a profile here and there and wait for magic to occur…
Trying to do too much will inevitably end up with a lot of things being done poorly. Don’t try being everywhere all the time, focus on delivering content that your audience will find meaningful.
To conclude, there’s no sense in rushing into social media marketing just for the sake of it. Research whether it makes sense for your product or service, find out where your prospects are, how they interact and assess what your cost is going to be.
Already do social media marketing and want to assess your ROI? Register with Imooty.eu for a free trial today!
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Looking back at 2009, it was decidedly the year to get started with live search media monitoring. If you don’t know what “live search” is, think Twitter.
Never understood what Twitter was all about? Well, then think about this: If I was to go on a little R&R skiing vacation in Bad-Gastein (Austrian Alps), I could do one of two things: Check Google for pages mentioning Bad-Gastein, or search Twitter for the same term.
For the better part of 2009, Google would return a bunch of Bad-Gastein sites optimized for selling travel packages, hotels, spas etc. That’s where live search media monitoring comes into play. Although commercial service providers are relevant for my planning, I’d first of all want to know what the snow conditions were like, preferably from some unbiased source. The hotels, skiing resorts and service providers are unlikely to give me that, which is what makes people so exited about Twitter. It returns real life impressions from people who are there right now!
Google is of course not passively sitting back and has already struck a deal with both Twitter and Facebook which includes search results from them alongside their index and adwords.
This has significant PR implications and companies increasingly need to pay attention and interact with social media users. If a customer service representative is stonewalling customers the word will soon be out on Twitter, which in turn will reveal an unfavorable impression in Google search results. On the flip side, speedy interaction and online reputation management may have the opposite effect.
In other words, now more than ever, it pays to set do live search media monitoring of company and product names. And not just proprietary names, other keywords associated to the products and services should be monitored too. For my Bad Gastein example, it would make sense to monitor, “Skiing vacation in Austria”, “Skiing in Hohe Tauern” and “Austria ski resort guide” too.
For a comprehensive live search media monitoring system, take this opportunity to try out the FREE Imooty.eu trial.
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Interest in Imooty’s online monitoring tool has picked up significantly over the past few weeks. As we launched the BASIC service in October, we were targeting the small and medium sized enterprise segment, however, we were soon approached by large companies looking for a user friendly environment to collect media intelligence.
Over the next few weeks we will test our online monitoring PRO features in a private Beta. The new version is scheduled to launch commercially in March of 2010. Imooty PRO will include a online monitoring team platform, semantic search and a information categorization tool. Please drop us a line if you’d like to participate in the Beta!
Looking back at 2009 we collected a wealth of practical experience from which we will benefit (hopefully) in 2010. In terms of theoretical knowledge, the most valuable read was without a doubt “Getting Real” by 37 Signals, mandatory reading for anyone developing an IT tool…
Want to start with online monitoring and don’t know how? Go to Imooty.eu and register for our free trial!
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An important element to getting information about your competitors is engaging in media intelligence and market research. Why? Because all companies have a communication strategy based on differentiating their company name and brands in the market!
Therefore, keeping an eye on your competitors investment in media exposure, will be a key component for understanding the market intent.
Media expenditures are the result of a carefully agreed and well thought through decision making process. It can be traced via the marketing and communication departments, all the way back to the company’s board of directors meeting. When analyzed properly, the information will reveal clues about your competitor’s overall market strategy.
Accordingly, media intelligence can be used to find answer to the following questions:
-Which line of business is being pushed the most? By measuring media exposure for the different products / services over time, one can establish the competitors strategy (or lack of one) for each line of business.
-What segments are they targeting, and how? By looking at where the competitors products / services appear, such as in online newspapers, blogs, social media, forums, portals and bookmarking sites, one can assess the investment size that was allocated for each market segment populating those channels.
-What is the emphasis of the communication strategy? Relationship to the brand, experience, building a stronger reputation or call-to-action? If the media campaign is aimed at enriching the relationship / experience with the brand, the intention will be to create a stronger bond with consumers and to grow brand equity. Reputation building on the other hand, will not only focus on the brand, but also include the organization’s relationship with society. Lastly, a dominance of call-to-action exposure will reveal the intention of rapidly gaining market share.
Systematic collection of media intelligence will enrich both short- and long-term knowledge of your competitor’s commercial intentions. Needless to say, it is will be important to compare this knowledge with your own brand monitoring.
Start harvesting your media intelligence with Imooty.eu today!
In a recent survey of over 2000 German media intelligence professionals, respondents answered questions centering on three topics; impact felt from the financial meltdown, gender issues and professional ethics.
Not surprisingly, it is the media intelligence professionals from the automotive and metalworking industry that are hardest hit by financial crisis. Particularly challenging is a rising communication need (45%) combined with a decrease in available resources (30%). The average yearly income has furthermore decreased with €6500 compared to 2007. Challenges are a further focus on added value communication aspects (36%), concentration on legitimation over image related aspects (35%), intensified internal communication (21%) and increased efficiency control (29%).
The media intelligence profession furthermore see an increase in female practitioners. In 2007 53% were men, whereas in 2009 we see a 50/50 split. For professionals under 30, 78% are female and between 30-39, 55%. As the professionals come of age, over 40, we see increasing male dominance. For those over 50 there is a 2:1 ratio between male/female practitioners. On average women earn ca. €22.500 less per year than men (€75.876 vs. €53.301). This discrepancy can in part be attributed to the fact that on average women practitioners are younger than men.
In recent years, corporate transparency has become a top-, front- and center issue for the media intelligence profession and 88% of the respondents agree that it is a condition for communicating trustworthiness of their organization. Only 4% of the professionals work in a department subordinate to another department. Consequently, about half of the professionals see their strategic influence on the media intelligence policy of the company as high or very high (and thereby presumably also on corporate transparency). Still, many of the respondents also criticize senior management’s understanding of the strategic importance of a consistent media intelligence policy.
Check out Imooty’s next generation media monitoring and media intelligence tool at Imooty.eu
Media intelligence : Analyzing how your company name or brand rates in online reviews, vs. those of your competitors’, most definitely belongs on your media intelligence to-do list.
Or does it?
The New York Times article, “On the Internet, Everyone’s a Critic But They’re Not Very Critical” reports that the average online review rating is 4.3 stars out of 5. That’s of course far away from being even remotely close to the “bell curve”. How come the average distribution of statistical data is so far off? Does media intelligence practices play a role here?
The article seems to indicate that yes, they do. Printer paper, boots and dog food in particular have bloated online reputations and the same can be said for hotels being reviewed on TripAdvisor.com.
However, media intelligence practices, such as a manager’s puffing up the average rating of this own product or service, is not the only factor. Someone is also minding the store. Several independent Amazon reviewers for example, suspect that the online megastore is involved in selective review vetting.
Translation: Negative reviews are simply deleted in order to sell more products. Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group, has found that ca. 65% of word-of-mouth reviews are positive, whereas only 8% are negative!
At the end of the day the question then becomes how “good” is a good review. Do you have the strength to give a 4.3 review its real (average) value in your media intelligence matrix?
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Proactive social media monitoring deals with minor social media flames before they turn into forest fires. When spotting a negative comment on your brand in a discussion forum the question quickly becomes, “how big is this”?
You don’t want to engage a diper rash personality who is using social media to symptomatically complain. However, DO pay attention if the comment resonates with other forum participants.
Next, find out who placed the comment. Is it a real person with a social media following? Is his/her audience likely to have resonance with your target group? In short, in doing social media monitoring, try to establish what level of influence the person posting the comment has.
It’s time to pay particular attention when social media monitoring shows that members of your core audience are posting negative comments. If some of your evangelist users are unhappy now, more are likely feel the same way in the near future.
When you find that comments and forum posts spread to a blog post, you need to take a closer look. The fact that a message makes a channel shift, from a forum discussion to blog post, is a red flag.
The blog may at that point be a good place to actively respond to criticism and do some active online reputation management. Start by getting in touch with the author and establish rapport. Explain your side of the story and ask to contribute with a comment.
With some luck, the blogger may issue an update on the previous post and report your solution to the problem. Proactive social media monitoring could prevent the issue from making another channel shift, for example to other blogs, online news sites, video and/or picture sharing sites.
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The Communication Summit is the yearly highlight for PR and Communication professionals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. During a panel discussion on online PR and communication, Mr. Volker Gaßner from Greenpeace, made an interesting contribution to the topic of online reputation monitoring.
Greenpeace does online reputation monitoring of companies they see as “greenwashing” their corporate image (i.e. claiming without merit that they are green and sustainable). He used an example of RWE, a large energy provider, who recently hired a high profile PR and marketing agency to create a video to improve their corporate image. The video depicts an animated version of the energy giant planting windmills, wave power generators and fixing broken power lines.
In fact, only 2% of RWE’s energy comes from green and sustainable energy and Greenpeace sees the RWE video as a typical “greenwashing” campaign. Accordingly, Greenpeace re-cut and altered the video to be shown on a TV monitor, sitting in a wasteland of nuclear energy plants (RWE owns 5 of them in Germany).
After only a few weeks the Greenpeace response has almost as many YouTube views as the original, it backfired.
Mr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management at Daimler AG, also addressed the topic at his opening Keynote to the Communication Summit. The challenges for PR and communication professionals in communicating green technology efforts are indeed real. It is not only a complex and difficult technology to understand (especially in the car industry), it is also easy to fall for the temptation of playing with statistics and nice imagery.
Mr. Zetsche concluded that only communication of real substance is likely to gain trust and goodwill. It is also safe to assume that Greenpeace, as well as competitors, will continue with online reputation monitoring, to keep track of greenwashing and misleading advertising.
