Corporate Social Media

Today, we went through the process of trying to figure out how an organization could use a listening tool for Social Media for a use otherthan engagement.  It got me thinking that this was part of an overall framework that needs to be broken down properly to be used across multiple clients and industries.  If for the time being, we assume that there are three major categories to Social Media success (listen, analyze and engage), then we need to start looking at these three items in more depth and defining each with greater rigor.  For lack of a better term, we need to be a little McKinsey on this with a Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive approach.  I’d like to put this into a bona fide framework when I’m done, but this is just the start.

So let’s begin with the broad topic areas that you would want to look at from just a listening perspective without engagement as an end goal.  Tomorrow, I want to look at the areas of listening that have a direct consequence on engagement…

Brand Management – Understanding what your customers are saying about your brand is often the first step in listening, and the main reason PR departments and firms buy Social Media Monitoring tools.  Sometimes this will be a part of PR crisis control, but ultimately, you want to understand the underlying themes that your customers and your competitor’s customers think about your brand.

Competitive Research – Understanding the overall market, trends and ideas that are circulating around similar competitors is essential to getting better at anticipation and addressing the moves that your competitors are making… and especially those moves that are showing signs of positive traction with their customers.  You can avoid developing in areas that are not showing signs of progress and push more in directions that you see prospective customers asking for.

Product Research – While similar to a competitor analysis, you should also use listening tools to understand what specific things people like and dislike about your products as well as your competitors.  This can help drive product innovation and design, especially if you learn to channel the appropriate information to the respective teams that can affect change.

Demand Analysis – While hype on the Internet does not always imply or guarantee success in real life, we now have the ability to see where conversations are coming from (through geo-location) and the level of enthusiasm for the products that are being discussed in those regions.  It can give a company the ability to anticipate pockets of low and high interest before a major launch to ensure that they meet the appropriate demand.

Issue Identification- A major cost implication for most product companies revolves around issue resolution.  Listening to online chatter in real-time can allow a company to refine FAQs, telephone hotlines and call center times by providing issue resolution in real-time as well.  By knowing what your customers are having problems with, you can make the solution more readily available whether in an online forum or on the voice prompts of a 1-800 number.

Tags: market research, strategy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Corporate Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.