Social Media Tools Week – My Presentation

Thanks to the team from Social Media Academy I’ve been given the opportunity to present at their global multi-day event next week – Social Media Tools Week. Given we’ve just launched Smart Social Media – this is a great opportunity to outline some of our thinking on social media.

The topic of my presentation is

Social Media Monitoring – Why the Executive team needs to be using these tools

Why this topic?

Several reasons. Firstly, social media monitoring tools like Scout Labs have quickly evolved from brand buzz monitoring tools into significant business intelligence portals.

Secondly, TEC speaker Gary Bertwistle is a big proponent of business leaders being active thinkers. Gary’s speaking topics like ‘What made you think of that‘ and ‘Leading Innovation‘ has influenced how I think information should be used in organisations and the importance of a business leader having access to knowledge that isn’t shaped by functional prejudice.

The current business climate means their are many threats and opportunities and business leaders need to be alert and need to be looking across more than the traditional information channels. I’ll also drill into why Government agencies need to be using these tools as well – and why they are more powerful and useful than existing services (like news clipping services).

My presentation is Thursday the 19th at 10.30am AEDT (9.30am for those of us in Queensland).

I’ll be posting more details on my presentation between now and Thursday.

http://www.socialmedia-academy.com/html/socialmediatoolsweek-nov09.cfm

Customer Feedback – Friend or Foe?

I caught in interesting story on Australian radio this morning. Noted Twitterer @612brisbane Spencer Howson was talking about his foray into the world of Internet auction sites. What was interesting this morning was his experience in providing feedback to a seller. In a nutshell Spencer provided negative feedback about one aspect of his experience. On the surface, this seemed reasonable and reflected his feelings about his experience.

What Spencer found unusual was the seller contacted him and asked him to change the feedback because he or she felt the feedback was harsh or unwarranted.

The fact is Spencer cared enough to provide feedback.

As we note too many of our customers when we get talking about social media monitoring, and the potential for negative feedback to be made public

With thanks to Scout Labs

I really like this image and tag line from Scout Labs – it’s one of the best I’ve seen – and it’s a point I make to all of our customers.

Putting aside whether Spencer was fair or harsh, I think the seller has missed a great opportunity to engage in dialogue with a customer and address his concerns – and also build trust and goodwill.

Rather than challenging Spencer and trying to embarrass him into a back down, my recommendation would have been to acknowledge the feedback, thank the buyer for caring, and then communicate what steps you’re taking to learn from this and improve the operation of your business. And don’t forget to ask the customer what they think you should do to improve your service – chances are their perspective is reflective of other customers.

What percentage of your customers give you direct feedback? What percentage of your customers talk about you in the social-sphere? How would you know?

This is where tools like Scout Labs come to the fore. Social media monitoring allows you to dial into what your customers, non-customers, and the community are saying about your product, your company, and your services.

Social media monitoring is NOT a marketing exercise – it’s about aligning your whole organisation to your community – from the executive down into R&D, sales, service, marketing, finance, and logistics. And it’s about finding opportunities to engage in dialogue.

As an aside, does your company engage in email marketing where the “From” address is ‘do-not-reply@’? Do you see the issue here?

I caught in interesting story on Australian radio this morning (http://www.abc.net.au/brisbane/). Noted twitterer @612brisbane Spencer Howson was talking about his foray into the world of Internet auction sites. What was interesting this morning was his experience in providing feedback to a seller. In a nutshell Spencer provided negative feedback about one aspect of his experience. On the surface, this seemed reasonable and reflected his feelings about his experience.

What Spencer found unusual was the seller contacted him and asked him to change the feedback because he or she felt the feedback was harsh or unwarranted.

The fact is Spencer cared enough to provide feedback.

As we note too many of our customers when we get talking about social media monitoring, and the potential for negative feedback to be made public

With thanks to the Scout Labs team

I really like this image and tag line from Scout Labs – it’s one of the best I’ve seen – and it’s a point I make to all of our customers.

Putting aside whether Spencer was fair or harsh, I think the seller has missed a great opportunity to engage in dialog with a customer and address his concerns – and also build trust and goodwill.

Rather than challenging Spencer and trying to embarrass him into a back down, my recommendation would have been to acknowledge the feedback, thank the buyer for caring, and then communicate what steps you’re taking to learn from this and improve the operation of your business. And don’t forget to ask the customer what they think you should do to improve your service – chances are their perspective is reflective of other customers.

What percentage of your customers give you direct feedback? What percentage of your customers talk about you in the social-sphere? How would you know?

This is where tools like Scout Labs come to the fore. Social media monitoring allows you to dial into what your customers, non-customers, and the community are saying about your product, your company, and your services.

Social media monitoring is not a marketing exercise – it’s about aligning your whole organisation to your community – from the executive down into R&D, sales, service, marketing, finance, and logistics. And it’s about finding opportunities to engage in dialog.

As an aside, does your company engage in email marketing where the “From” address is ‘do-not-reply@’? Do you see the issue here?

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.

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