According to Altimeter companies with more than 1000 employees have 178 Social Media Accounts, not including employees accounts. With those numbers it’s hard to get grip on your social activities, measure according to your KPI’s and last but not least: offer a coordinated customer experience. The subtitle of the reports says it all: “Get Account Control now, using software and services, or risk a career of continual social media sanitation.” The review of the Social Media Management Systems is based on the following 5 cases:

Based on those five cases Altimeter scored each vendor:

So if you take a look at the cases that matches your situation, the table above gives you a shortlist of vendors that fits your needs. One remark! It’s not about the tools, but what you do with those tools. So don’t even think about buying any of those tools if you don’t have a Social Media Strategy yet.

Combined with my Social Media Tools & Listening Center article this report of Altimeter is the perfect documentation for selecting the right Social Media system/tool.

Losing a customer’s trust is mostly due to ignorance. Some companies (22%) don’t have a clue whether or not their customers use social media to share their feedback with other people. And almost 50% of the respondents don’t believe that their customers complain online. Still, it is very important for B2C companies in particular, to give the consumer the attention and interaction they need. Sometimes that already can be enough to remove negative comments from a social platform.

Maybe a bit more context is needed here. In the article at MIT the authors write:

“While customers routinely seek out the opinions of others prior to making a purchase, it’s much less common for customers to share their own opinions online. As a result, the opinions that potential buyers and social media strategists see come from only a small segment of the customer population — one that may not mirror the sentiment of all customers. While market researchers have long used small samples to survey customers’ opinions, such samples are selected with considerable care to ensure that they are representative. Since the decision to post a rating or review online is up to the customer, the representativeness of the opinions posted online is outside of a researcher’s control.”

The dynamics of the online voice

Conclusions

Some of the findings and conclusions:

• More involved customers will often skew their ratings downward to stand out from the crowd, and most customers will be influenced by comments that have already been made.
• Forums with a “pre-existing consensus of opinion” garnered more positive customers.
• Customers are likely to comment on products they have an extreme opinion about, one way or the other.
• Comments tend to become more negative over time as the more involved, more critical customers begin to dominate the forum while their less involved counterparts stick to the sidelines.

Dynamics

The researchers found some important dynamics based on the postings on the retailer’s website:

Adjustment effects. These occur when contributors express opinions that differ from their underlying product evaluations. We found evidence that more involved customers skew their ratings downward to stand out and that less involved customers tend to shift their ratings upward to further contribute to a consensus of positive opinions.
Selection effects. Forums that have a pre-existing consensus of opinion encourage participation from more positive and less involved customers. In contrast, when there is disagreement, participants tend to be the more involved customers who post more negative opinions.
Polarization effects. Customers tend to provide online ratings for products for which they harbor extreme opinions — whether positive or negative.

Overreacting

The research concludes, and this is a very important remark for marketers and communication people who are trying to understand the voice of the consumer online: “This is not to say that managers should entirely disregard what they hear online. Rather, they should be aware of these potential dynamics so they do not overreact to negative online opinions. In many cases, these opinions may only represent a small but vocal segment of the customer population.” In the MIT-article, the authors also discuss the involvement of companies trying to “fix” negative conversations and forumthreads with the adding of artificial positive comments about products. That is, of course, the most stupid thing to do for a company (think of the negative buzz it evokes and about taking your customers seriously) but, and I didn’t know that, the research found that these activities have a very limited effect on long-term sales. Moe, Schweidel and Trusov write: “[...]products that receive an uncharacteristically positive (or negative) rating may see a short-term boost in subsequent ratings and sales. But unless these artificial ratings are continuously posted, posted opinions and product sales very quickly return to their baseline value. This is especially the case when diverse opinions encourage lively discussion.” So…. what are the lesssons here?

Lessons for Managers Who are Listening to Social Media

1. Don’t forget about the silent majority. Many forums are dominated by a small, hardcore group of individuals who may not be representative of the broader customer base that has chosen to remain silent.
2. Social dynamics in the forum can influence who posts and who remains silent. In the face of conflicting opinions, less involved and more positive customers increasingly remain silent, letting the more critical customers steer the ratings environment.
3. Don’t overreact to negative feedback. Negative reviews don’t necessarily mean that your brand or product is uniformly disliked. More favorable customers may have chosen to remain silent rather than contradict the harsh criticism expressed by previous posters. Trying to appease your dissatisfied customers may be quite costly — and not necessarily worth it.
4. Ignore the white noise. It is important to differentiate between the white noise and the meaningful insights. Many trends and dynamics observed in online opinions are simply a result of “healthy” dynamics. A careful statistical analysis of ratings dynamics can help identify when a marketer should address an issue raised by a negative comment or modify a product in response to criticism.

Lessons for Social Media Strategists

1. Be prepared to act. Monitoring the conversations taking place online can be very beneficial for a social media strategist who knows how to interpret what he or she hears and is prepared to act on it. While product managers have been known to modify their product strategy in light of what they hear online, social media strategists can also respond to the online chatter by managing the social media environment in such a way that healthy social dynamics are fostered.
2. Encourage the less involved to post. Less involved customers tend to be more favorable, while more involved customers tend to be more critical. If you’re trying to foster a positive tone, incentives for posting reviews should be provided to the more casual customers.
3. Don’t be afraid of disagreements. While disagreement among opinions tends to attract more negative posters, it also fosters more discussion. This insulates product sales from a few uncharacteristically negative opinions.
4. Resist the temptation to try to manipulate opinions with artificially positive reviews. An online opinion forum tends to take on a life of its own. While the temptation is high to strategically manipulate expressed opinions, the benefits in terms of product sales are limited — not to mention the steep downsides associated with the legal ramifications and the potential for negative publicity.

Full credits

Wendy W. Moe is associate professor of marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. David A. Schweidel is assistant professor of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. Michael Trusov is assistant professor of marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.

Via Pedro De Bruyckere.

At Rabobank, there were about 400 people present. The goal is to inspire as many people as possible. It was an entire day with speakers with experience in using social media in the financial sector, internet pioneers and people of Rabobank who wanted to share their first experiences in this domain with their colleagues.

The atmosphere was extremely positive. They shared their learnings on their internal Yammer network but also on external channels like Twitter. I have never seen so many tweets from an internal conference before. One of the tweets even held a drawing of my speech.

Many companies want to create a culture of change. A great way to do it is through these inspirational days for a broad audience. During those days, your teams go home with loads of inspiration. And more importantly, they start the conversation, no doubt about it.

Take a look at the presentation I gave at Rabobank:

WDM Belgium’s Social Media Barometer reveals relevant data and many insights concerning the use of social media in Belgium. The starting point for this study was Forrester’s Social Technographics Model, based on the answers of 8.500 people (via Permesso.be).

Social media is a broad term that covers a lot of different things such as networks, forums, multimedia, online tools and applications, blogs, tweets, podcasts, customer reviews, etc. This diversity gives an indiciation of the opportunities it offers for marketing.

Some of social media’s main strengths are: interactivity, quick responses, quick distribution, and spontaneity. All this enables customer experiences, recommendations and information; the right message at the right time and place to be spread rapidly and efficiently.

Nevertheless, social media users do remain critical and pay attention to their privacy. They value personal contacts and communication. Advertisers should keep this in mind.

All active social media players know that social media cannot be used in the same way as other media. So, even though marketing gets another dimension through social media, it doesn’t happen overnight and without a struggle!

As a consequence, marketers are permanently in a “learn and test process” which makes our jobs more captivating.

You can find the White Paper – Social Media Barometer (in Dutch) here:

Patrick Verstraete | WDM Central | http://www.wdmcentral.be/

The book is structured around seven aspects of Da Vinci’s way of thinking and promises the reader true personal renaissance. (This last bit really triggered me to actually read the book).

So what would Leonardo’s approach be towards Conversation Management if he would live today? Here are my thoughts, following the 7 Da Vincian Principles:

Curiosità = an insatiably curious approach to life and a quest for continuous learning. With a Da Vinci-like open mind, you will broaden your universe and improve the way you travel through it – both the physical as well as the digital world. I believe you need to keep your knowledge up-to-date and learn new things, since change is accelerating more and more everyday.

Dimostrazione = a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes. You can never learn to play the piano just by reading about it in a book. The same applies to social media. You need to go out there and experience it for yourself. Learn from mistakes, ideally the ones made by others.

Sensazione = the continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience. Quite some people look without actually seeing, having a very narrowed focus. Allow yourself to be inspired in the broadest sense – really everything can be a conversation starter! In the style of Da Vinci, try to use images, sounds and video to enliven your communication.

Sfumato (which literally means going up in smoke) = a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty. As change accelerates, illusions of certainty become more difficult to maintain. The ability to thrive with ambiguity is an even more essential skill to modern times. So start small by accepting you simply can’t read all the tweets in your timeline.

Arte/Scienza = the development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. It’s balancing analysis and intuition, seriousness and play, planning and improvisation. A trustworthy gut feel is still important, since not everything can be measured – but more and more can be! But remember, it is what you make of the numbers and graphs that counts.   

Corporalita = the cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness and poise. Many people associate high intelligence with physical ineptitude. The state of your body influences your mind. In general we forget that we ourselves are the geese which lay the golden eggs. So take care of your own goose, and take a walk after reading this post

Connessione = a recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Leonardo already saw how everything is connected to everything else. Today we are more connected then ever. The possibilities are endless, so explore them with a Da Vinci style open-mind.

May you enjoy your personal renaissance!