Social Media Monitoring and Australian Politics

The Queensland State election is over and the hacks, pundits, and SP experts are picking over the results.

I noticed an interesting piece on Crikey from Bernard Keane about the LNP (login required). Bernard made a connection between the LNP trying to execute an Obama-like campaign without the Obama-like results. His key point seemed to be that the LNP leader lacked the intelligence or deep charisma of Barack Obama. I’m not sure that this is the real issue here.

Whilst Obama is a charismatic leader, what Obama did most effectively was to use his party and those who subscribed to my.barackobama.com as the tool to get people engaged and involved. This is the critical difference and a difference that I think the LNP (or any party in Australia for that matter) has yet to grasp. Let me explain.

Firstly, let’s have a look at the respective homepages – This is Obama’s main site

My Barack Obama

Note the language? Note the reference to you the public and the request to believe in yourself. See a picture of Obama?

Lets have a look at LNP

How LNP engages

Note the difference. The first thing that stood out for me was the inference “We don’t need your help, we just need your money”.

The real critical difference is deeper than the websites though. Obama motivated people to engage – he mobilised the groundswell and then let the local troops continue to foster that engagement. Obama was all about getting people interested and engaged – both Queensland Labor and Queensland LNP failed on this front.

After reading Keane’s article, we sat down last night and mapped out a strategy that a political party could use to really connect to their community. I think over the space of an hour we put together an Obama-like strategy. At a high level, to be more like Obama LNP needs to:

• Set up each candidate with their own blog – this can be their own local website – and get them actively blogging and using twitter to drive engagement at the community level.
• The leader should be using Twitter and Facebook to drive engagement NOT just with the leader but with every candidate they’ve put forward – i.e. “I’m the leader but have you seen the post my local candidate put up regarding the slow response of the Government to the oil spill, go here to read more”
• Visits to rural areas can be seeded with active efforts to get the local community involved – Twitter or blog and ask them what questions they want answered?
• The local candidates should be using the local press and their own resources to reinforce the option to engage directly.
• The leader should be posting comments across his candidate base – 5-6 times a day – jump on a candidates blog and add a comment – recognise a contribution that a member of the public has made or remind the local candidate that the leader is expecting him to have local questions lined up for his pending visit.
• Hand outs shouldn’t be about the party line; it should be about come and engage. I received 3 letters from my local LNP candidate, none of which suggested I could engage other than by phone or email. He doesn’t have a website, a Twitter account, or a blog

A key element to this high level strategy is the ability (read: desire) of the party to listen to the community. This involves moving beyond what the press has to say and dialling into the groundswell. I had the opportunity to turn on Radian6 over the last week of the campaign and I tracked what was happening with both leaders and both the major parties (Anna Bligh from Qld Labor was the incumbent premier).

Once I filtered out the usual press noise I was able to get a very clear picture of what was happening. Aside from the fact there wasn’t much noise (reflecting the fact neither party really got engaged) I was amazed at how much more noise the Labor party was generating. They sustained this, whereas LNP fell away badly as Election Day approached.

Radian6 demonstrated clearly how important it is to listen so as to generate meaningful community engagement. As I just said, neither party did this well.How can you engage if you don’t listen?

The question now is whether any of the parties, local, state or federal are prepared to really listen.

CRM Vendors Continue to Confuse the Social Media Space

I continue to spend time working on our strategy and product offering around social media for the B2B world. Having evolved our business from the CRM space, we keep a close eye on what some of the big dicks are doing and I continue to be profoundly disappointed at what I’m seeing. And whilst it dismays me that I have to mention SFDC twice in the one month, it is necessary as yet again, the propaganda from SFDC has hit the airwaves without anyone being critical of what it all means.

Firstly, this initiative is not ground breaking. I commented on this recently in another blog post and stand by those comments and this additional post.

The article in question goes to great lengths to promote the failings of the social media monitoring tools (even mentioning the thought leaders like Radian6 and Techrigy) creating in my opinion a Benioff-esque tone of “they’re not a CRM so clearly they can’t be any good” as well as promoting a “jump in with jack boots” approach to interacting with the community

Example #1

After all, monitoring a conversation is one thing, but responding to it is another entirely — the domain of CRM, something Salesforce knows better than almost anyone else.

Monitoring or listening is one of the most fundamental activities of any company wanting to harness the power of the groundswell (with due credit to Li and Bernoff).

SFDC’s strategy seems to not so much put them on a collision course with the community monitoring start ups but puts you the customer on a collision course with your own community. I can’t help but feel SFDC are rushing into this space with grand plans about how you can use their platform to “respond” to social media activity yet they haven’t given a second of time to understanding the strategy that MUST reside behind the use of web 2.0 tools.

These “monitoring tools” deliver far more value than they are given credit for. Tools like Radian6 and Techrigy have a rich set of features that if used properly will allow a company to quickly and easily tap into the true feeling of the community. And it’s not just the “I’m interesting” bit that you should be tracking. Why not use these tools to keep an ear to what the community is saying about your strategic customers. Can you imagine going to one of your major customers with a solution to a problem that you unearthed via Radian6 when they probably don’t even know the problem exists? How can you use this information to deliver innovation to a major customer? I’m sorry but SFDC isn’t going to do that for you…

Example #2

But monitoring thousands of conversations across Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and blog comments is only part of the challenge. You still have to respond to them.

Absolute rubbish. If anyone goes into this thinking they need to respond to every piece of social noise about their company or products then they will fail quickly (and spectacularly).

This is what you’ll be doing if you follow what the author and SFDC are suggesting:

Due credit to Marta Zagan

Let me repeat something else Marta Zagan suggests – “The goal is not to control the conversation”.

In simple terms, the goal of using social network analytics is to watch, listen, and share some information with your community.

Don’t ever think you can skip the listen bit. And without tools like Radian6 or Techrigy you won’t be listening properly. Brian Solis (Social Media Manifesto) commented – “It’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners”. Think about that for a minute. Isn’t this suggesting we step back and listen, then contribute? Not jump in boots and all with a human-being charged with responding and controlling?

Don’t go jumping in thinking you can communicate. You will need humans involved, but more importantly you need to have everyone understanding what the strategy is and what effort and commitment is required. Because this social media stuff isn’t easy. Get your VP of Sales in and let them see the data, let the Exec’s see what people are saying, in fact, make it a priority to have non-sales and marketing people looking at some of this information so that you can gain insights into the information.

CRM will have a role to play in how you engage with your communities, but it can’t be the driving force behind this. You must have everyone understanding how you as a company will harness these tools to deliver a dialogue and engagement. And you must also confront the problem of whether you even want this data in the CRM in the first place.

And just so you know, there are some CRM vendors doing some far more interesting work in this space than SFDC. RightNow is really ahead of the curve when it comes to customer experience management and SugarCRM are miles ahead in terms of how they are harnessing the power of open source with these great new web 2.0 tools.

Gorilla in their midst – hardly…

Your comments are welcome as always

Social Media Monitoring Tools

I happened across a really interesting article about social media experts and how to differentiate the good from the bad.

In reading the comments I can across Martin Edic of Techrigy. Aside from the fact I thought he was quite within his rights to provide a link to his product (maybe more subtle next time Martin…) it made me click through to his website and have a look at the product SM2.

Social media monitoring is something we’ve had a few customers ask us about and we’ve looked into products like Radian6. We’re actively looking at adding a product like this to our product eco-system to help build out our social media expertise.

I‘m going to give the SM2 product a test drive so I’ve registered an account under our Smartpen business. This will give me a chance to see how it goes tracking some Livescribe keywords. Google Alerts seems able to find 6-10 articles a day on Livescribe so it’ll be interesting to see how SM2 goes.

They also had an interesting blog post on Twitter and the cult of MLM