Using ORM To Drive Consumer Engagement

One of the benefits of tracking your brand online is that it provides you with the opportunity to engage with your customers on a level that was previously too expensive and/or time consuming to achieve. Given that online reputation management is about knowing what consumers are saying about your brand, understanding the context and reacting accordingly, the information you receive from Online Reputation Management tools become the central guide in how to communicate and engage with your consumers.

We already know that BrandsEye scans the entire Web, ultimately capturing every single relevant mention of your brand. These relevant mentions are, amongst quite a few other things, given a credibility score - which rates on a scale of one to ten how credible the source of the mention was - and a sentiment score - which marks the mention as either having a negative or positive sentiment about your brand. You can read more about this process here.

Once BrandsEye knows the credibility and sentiment of all these mentions there are a number of ways you can use them to drive one-to-one customer centric engagement. BrandsEye gives you a number of functions that make this engagement easy and time efficient. Below I take a brief look at some of these functions.


E-mail
One of the best engagement driving features available with the BrandsEye packages are the e-mail notifications.

As you can see, you have the option of receiving immediate, daily or weekly notifications on mentions that BrandsEye has picked up. For instance, as above, I have BrandsEye set to send me a daily summary of mentions. This means at the end of every day I receive an e-mail detailing the credibility and sentiment of all the mentions that have been picked up that day. This email also alerts me to any component of the brand which has performed particularly well (or badly). I can then go through these mentions and respond to them individually if it seems prudent to do so.

For companies wishing to be particularly proactive there are other options which easily allow for instant notifications to be sent based on various criteria. If BrandsEye picks up a mention that has a high credibility and negative sentiment towards your brand an email could instantly be sent to the relevant brand representative for that particular area of your business. The said brand representative can then determine the best way to engage with the source of the mention.

You can see an example of this above. The notification will let you know immediately if BrandsEye picks up a mention that comes from a source with a credibility higher than 5 (respected) and has a sentiment that is negative. Having a notification like this set up will give you the ability to respond quickly and personally to any mention of your brand that is negative and comes from a person who holds great influence and credibility. The same can be done for any combination of user selected criteria. All this means that the relevant person can speak to commenters, whether negative or positive, immediately.

Mobile
The mobile notifications work in exactly the same way as the e-mail notifications. They are probably best used for alerting you to mentions that are either extremely negative or positive towards your brand. If, for instance, your CEO received a mobile notification of a mention that came from a highly credible source and was potentially quite harmful to the brand, they could then respond in person or at the very least mobilize the PR team to engage within a matter of minutes.

RSS
Another BrandsEye function that is useful in driving consumer engagement is RSS feeds.

These work in a very similar way to the e-mail and mobile notifications and can be aggregated as you require. Be that as part of a Google Desktop application (as some clients have done) or as part of some overarching CRM system.

The Next Step - Responding

While BrandsEye provides the tools to inform you about what is being said and how your brand is affected as a result, the most important aspect here is how you engage with these conversations.

When engaging there are five fundamentals to always keep in mind:

1. Be honest – with so much information available to your consumers they will no doubt “find you out” if what you are saying isn’t completely true. If this happens any positivity will quickly be turned into massive negativity and your overall credibility will be destroyed!
2. Be sincere – it’s critical that you mean what you are saying and aren’t just putting it on to buy approval. While this will work for a while it will eventually backfire and you’ll end up with egg on your face.
3. Care – if you don’t truly care then you’re wasting your time. Nothing will ever be resolved if you don’t care enough to make things happen.
4. Stick to your promises – remember that when you offer to assist a consumer their natural reaction will be to tell everybody (both on- and offline). If you don’t deliver on the promise they look bad and will do whatever is necessary to make sure the blame sits with you. Don’t get caught.
5. You are an individual – behave as one. Often individuals who respond to consumers in the online space do so in the very stiff “formal press release” fashion – often starting with “Dear Mr X, we apologies for…”. What they often miss is that any interaction is a conversation between two individuals. All communication should therefore reflect this.

If you keep these five points central to your approach and respond quickly to make sure nothing gets out of control you can be quite sure to make the most of the conversations taking place online.