The Case
The client’s problem stemmed from a reputation issue that they had noticed but did not resolve hoping it would die down with time. An ex-employee had been spreading false rumors about the organization on various portals related to the industry and this was slowly eroding the goodwill the company enjoyed. Potential employees walked away and, they later guessed, a few potential clients too. Our client had no idea until someone pointed it out to them. The posts were read in horror, duly noted and the company decided to wait it out. This was November 2009. A few token efforts were made to douse the flames but discontinued when they realized they were egging on the bloggers. An email began circulating saying blatant lies about the company.

In March 2010, an old customer pointed this out to them and they knew something had to be done. Legal notes were sent but the forum owner was neither legally liable nor could he violate the integrity of his website by deleting posts. The only option left to them was to take the bull by the horns and they were little equipped to do so.

This is when iridium Interactive was called in. Here is a snapshot of the things we did to build a stronger reputation

Listening:
iridium set up its monitoring tools starting with simple free ones like Google Alerts and free online monitoring tools along with our own social media monitoring system. We listed out in detail all the forums and websites where the company was being spoken about favorably as well as negatively and set about identifying influencers who really affected the online reputation of the company.

Responding:
As soon as we got a picture of the kind of things that were being spoken about, iridium swung into action and listed out appropriate responses for the same. We engaged clients and employees to promote a positive view of the company. where there were negative reviews, we stepped in and resolved people’s queries.  Our SEO machinery swung into action working to position relevant information on the first few pages of major search engines instead of the false rumors. We went a step further and created positive conversations on more credible communities.

Engaging:
iridium set up social media accounts to represent the company online. We dug into twitter and started slowly to interact with the influencers in their field. A facebook page served as a touchpoint for the employees of the company, slowly evolving as an extended platform to promote activities, updates and discussions.  The blog which we set up and maintained was a mix of industry news and company updates positioning the company as a thought leader and industry peer.

Within six months we noticed a remarkable change. The damaging reviews and emails subsided. The company’s sentiment index swung from red to green. A greater chunk of information about the company was positive and positioned in the initial pages of web results. At an industry conference they were recognized for what really mattered, their performance, and pulled in greater business. iridium’s efforts on the online reputation management program had worked. This is now an an integral part of the company’s work ethic. Never again will they ignore the multitude of voices that speak about them.

iridium Interactive is a pioneering company with over 10 years of experience in the field of internet marketing.  we have been in the ‘social media’ field from before the term existed.

Follow us on twitter and facebook to stay current with what is happening in the industry and how simple interventions can benefit you.

Here are some methods I feel can help you manage and guard your reputation:

1. Filter what is being said about your company on various social networks. A good social media monitoring can help you turn scattered information on the web into powerful trends & insights about you at a click of your dashboard.

2. Educate employees on the intent for your company’s social media initiative. It is not their personal social network but a corporate forum to interact with customers.

3. Be cordial and approachable while on the social network.

4. Handle negative customer comments with dignity and poise.

5. Do not bad talk any other brand. They will figure it out anyways. Rephrasing a famous quote “keep your fans close but keep your competitors closer”. Competitive analysis about you and your competition is something social media monitoring can give you where you can compare apples to apples and apples to oranges. For example, it can simply find out about a particular feature of your car v/s your competitors and get all the intelligence of what people think and how they perceive your brand.

So, if you are a smart company, understand the big message. Not having the social media presence and intelligence is now considered at par with not having a company website…now you understand…now let us act

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Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/comedynose/3512538453/

Strengths

• Analyzes what is being said about your company. This produces value for the company.

• Decoding the noise and chatter of user generated content which is of great relevance to a company and its brand.
• Encourages direct consumer interactions.
• Allows companies a real time view on consumer perceptions about their brands.
• Helps develop a marketing plan from consumer interactions and conversations.

Weaknesses

• Limitations of technology, ultimately requires a human touch to it.
• Huge volumes of data to process from numerous sources and innumerous languages.  Difficult to make a one stop technological solution.
• Its such a huge media space which is rather intimidating to a beginner.
• Ongoing disagreement between the data compilation over being comprehensive and insightful, which is rather difficult to achieve both successfully as yet.

Opportunities

• Potential to become a hygiene factor for every company with more technology improvements making monitoring more effective.
• Monetization of social media. Many companies have profited from social media and many more to yet to venture. This medium offers immense opportunities.
• SME’s who felt left behind due to their lack of resources to spend on advertisements can now capitalise social media without any penny spent to advertise their brand.

Threats

• There are no defined industry standards, will make it difficult to benchmark success and outcomes.
• Many new entrants/ board room level executives do not really understand the how to take advantage of user generated content.

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Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanlouis_zimmermann/3055864480/

“If you cant measure it, you can’t manage it.” as rightly quoted by management guru, Peter Drucker.

This is exactly what social media monitoring attempts to do. There are millions of conversations happening and by now if you have been reading my blogs, the message is loud and clear. If you cannot measure them with a predefined set of benchmarks then you cannot [do brand management] manage what is being said about your company and brand. Today enterprises, including those that approach iridium, face a bold challenge of managing their business in extremely dynamic webs + weeding out the conversations and dialogues in the humanized web networks. The crux of any good social media strategy is the Return on Investment or may I say ‘Return on Influence’. Sentiment Analysis and quantitatively measuring social media conversations gives an understanding of the business impact. Lets find out how.

I will point out the tangible benefits to any business or ROI from social media monitoring:

1. Gather consumer and competitor perceptions of a brand, then work towards changing their perceptions for the better.
2. Create avenues to let your consumers know that they are being heard.
3. Provides you with proactive crisis management and planning.
4. Provides warning or red alerts for defensive or reactive public relations.
5. Identify your real influencers.
6. Understand the environment of your business operations and the ecosystem it operates in.
7. Improves customer services which inturn leads to higher sales.
8. Reduces costs as this is the most cost effective way to touch base with a large volume of customers.
9. Reach the right customers faster and better.
10. Drives better decision making with the information aggregator tools.
11. Aids product development with live consumer inputs.
12. Enhanced SEO diminishes the need of paid searches.

These are some essential benefits anybody can avail from social media monitoring which iridium also provides. Await my next blog as I will talk conduct the SWOT analysis of Social Media Monitoring.

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Image Source: farfromtimid.com

“We have seen a clear evolution in demands from our customers. They are better informed and far more sophisticated in their expectations and requirements.”- Mark Redgrave of Hapax.

True!! With the advent of social media they now have their own platform to express their views and opinions. The main intention behind social media monitoring is to track these conversations as I have mentioned earlier. Determining if these conversations are positive or negative is called Sentiment Analysis.

Listening to the sentiments behind a customer’s voice is very important for any company that wishes to act upon these opinions. According to me, sentiment analysis is very important to any social media monitoring initiative. It is vital to analyze whether good or bad conversations are driving your brand in the social media space. In fact, tracking sentiments is one of the real reasons why businesses enter social media. At iridium, we use several tools to do this.

Automated sentimental analysis tools are generally used to give numbers to these customer sentiments. It is good if you dig deeper than the statistics to get a clearer picture. Also you will need to compare sentiments across several brands over a time period.

If the consumers have positive sentiments with a brand, its all good, but when there is negative sentiment it makes the analysis interesting when you have to uncover the reasons behind this particular sentiment. Sentiment analysis coupled with social monitoring tools make this study even more interesting. It is more like stepping into your consumer’s mind and understanding what drives their thinking about your company.

I would not like to confuse you further, so I conclude by stating that sentiment analysis is nothing but social media monitoring with a qualitative twist.

As I would put it, these free tools are good as long as you can wade your way around it and get the output you are looking for from these tools. But if you are lost with these tools, which I know many do in the beginning, then you might have to look into other alternatives.

There are some more shortcomings of these free tools:

Firstly, these tools can be used to assess a campaign or strategic prerequisite, but not for a large amount of data in an all-inclusive Web 2.0 coverage.

Secondly, free tools are just the tip of the iceberg; they do not have the ability to go into the details. They can only introduce you to the listening tools.

Thirdly, machines are great data retrievers but it’s the human touch that makes it into valuable information. This is one big shortcoming of automated, free monitoring tools.

The need of an analyst arises at this point when you have the What, Where, and When answered, but the most critical, Why? and How? are still left to be answered.

Why do consumers think this way about my product? How can I change their perception? An analyst like Iridium can help you draw insights from the data and develop a strategy.

So for all the companies waiting to explore social media, your customers are waiting to hear from you! Begin now to at-least play with the new set of social media monitoring tools. Next, begin taking expertise from social media experts who can take your brand, your voice to the next level. Its not too late…take the first mover advantage!!!

Watch out for more from me as I will take you through a deeper understanding of the Social Listening space…its time to evolve!

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Here are some free Social media monitoring tools that you can use to assess all social media metrics.

1. How Sociable: it is a free tool that defines simplicity. Just punch in the brand you want to measure metrics for and you will get the visibility score for it across 32 social networks. http://www.howsociable.com/

2. Addict-o-matic: This tool provides you with a comprehensive view of discussions on a topic across the most popular social networks. In just one view you can see all the discussions on all popular social networks and blogs. http://addictomatic.com/

3. Technorati- This tool is used to find top blogs and posts on any searched item. http://technorati.com/

4. Google Blogsearch- This is also a blog oriented tool that generates top discussions happening in blogs on a topic you want to search for. http://blogsearch.google.com/

5. Googletrends- Shows the worldwide traffic/searches of this particular keyword. http://google.com/trends

6. Twitterstats-  This is one tool that serves all my twitter purposes. It shows all the relevant twitter stats for the Iridium account and allows comparisons with other accounts too. One stop for all twitter analytics is what this tool is all about. Check it out on http://www.twitterstats.com/

7. Quantcast- This tool is apt for tracking traffic to a particular website and gives Graphical display and demographics wise data segregation. http://www.quantcast.com/

There are numerous free tools available but its your requirements that defines your choice. After my stint in social media monitoring, these are the top 7 tools I frequently use.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Social media includes blogs, forums, wikis, tags and any user generated content. This is where consumers and users saw the opportunity to share their opinions and thoughts with so much ease.

Word of mouth marketing saw unprecedented growth which it never did before. Listening to these conversations on companies has brought about the importance of social media monitoring and the various tools invented to track and measure the zillion conversations happening online.

Social monitoring tools monitor:

• All websites
• Every possible social network
• Social news
• Blogs
• Forums
• Microblogs
• Images
• User generated content
• Tags
• Videos
• Almost every possible thing on Web 2.0

Social Media Monitoring tools will provide you with all the statistics. But it is sheer analysis that will give some sense to the random numbers and graphs these tools generate.

In my next blog I will talk more about these tools and provide you with more examples especially from my experience at iridium Interactive.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Also known as social reputation management, or online reputation management, social media monitoring serves more than gathering metrics on your social media initiatives.

There will be a lot of metrics that can be gathered but making some sense out of these numbers is what is required.  In fact, I would say social media monitoring should not be done after you enter social media; this can be done even before you enter the social media marketing. By this not only will you have awareness about your brand, you will have the right intent to begin your social media initiatives.

Here are some basic reasons to monitor social media in case you are new to this terrific listening tool and its scalable capabilities:

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

A B2B company in the IT Remote Management services would willingly and callisthenically bend backward to reach out to the CIOs of those Fortune 50 customer base who has been elusive all along.

The Real Estate company wanting to market that luxury condominium in the city of Honolulu or Tashkent or Kiev or Madagascar or even Bhopal would aspire to market to those deep pocketed Investment Bankers looking for that quick deal ( no pun intended )

The Tourism Board of any Country would want to market its country, locales and cultural beauty to the prospects across the globe – with the sole desire and intention of garnering those big tourism dollars.

What is common to all the above scenarios?

Each of the concerned brand owners or company managers listed above would certainly try the tested waters over and over.
The Maxim being followed – If it aint broke, why fix it?
Hence, rest assured there would be the Front Page adverts, the Billboards on the Highway, the TV spots in the midst of the prime time clutter and of late, some enterprising daredevils would also venture into the brave new world of the web.
Depending on the thousands or millions of currency budgeted for marketing spends, the qauntum .and magnitude of the largesse varies.

There is another wave that has been rising over the virtual waters – on the blogsphere. Brands are being discussed, promoted and pilloried among this cult following.
Blog Postings are normally followed avidly among a close set of Blog followers.

Examples are galore in the web gallery that highlight the power of the Blogspace.

For instance, Guy Kawasaki was in Mumbai recently. The Emerging India Story has been written and talked about on all kinds of platforms and bourses over the last few years.

Be that as it may, images and perceptions are built and changed by influencers among their close circuit of followers. Guy Kawasaki only had to make a simple posting of his Mumbai Visit - to start a torrent of discussions on the City, its culture, its religion, its facilities, its roads, its marketing, its Dhobi Ghat.

Brands, organizations and even countries need to take a cue from this – to plan to manage and monitor their online reputations appropriately.

For those new to the blogosphere, here’s a good place to start …