The solution was obvious. I needed to connect my phone directly to my car’s sound system. Before even getting my morning coffee, I had logged onto the Peugeot website and submitted my question regarding how one would go about connecting one’s phone to the radio of one’s car. For good measure, I also logged on to Twitter and asked @PeugeotZA the same question. 30 minutes and a few more Tweets between myself and the Peugeot Twitter account manager and I had my answer. It didn’t look good for me, my radio model won’t connect to my phone, but Peugeot still got a #brandplus. Less than 30 minutes to get my answer on Twitter - what more could you ask for? Oh, and if you were wondering no reply to that email.

This got me thinking about how the lines of communication between customers and brands have evolved. Who in today’s society goes into a branch unless they absolutely have to, or braves a call centre as their first line of communication? Clearly email isn’t the way forward either.

I was recently asked how I believed companies and customers would live in harmony in the world of Social Media. The argument put forward to me was who wants to hear from their bank, car company or shower gel when they are really trying to stalk their ex on Facebook. And how are companies going to control the urge to sell you something while you are building your farm or cyber graffiting your name on your best friend’s wall. I argue that if the company is providing value, then social media is the most obvious place for companies and customers to meet.

It all comes down to adding value and thoughtfully engaging with consumers. I for one was happy that Peugeot was on Twitter. I got the answer I required virtually immediately, something we have come to expect these days.

Its positive experiences like this that have me turning to my closest social network when I want an answer from a company. Engage with consumers through mediums in which they feel comfortable,  provide value and the goodwill and positive online reputation will follow.

Comment on "Social Media To The Rescue"

1. Have a clear objectives for your campaign.
   
   Having a clearly defined end goal and objectives ensures that your eye is kept on ball. Obama’s mission was to become President and his objective was to raise millions in donations and win the hearts and minds of the American population. 
   
   Monitoring of the online conversation can assist in informing key objectives as well as measuring the success in achieving them. 
    
2. Drive action
   
   Action is key to strategy implementation engaging with consumers is key to motivate them to take action on your behalf. Obama turned to the thought leaders with in his target community and engaged with them. These influencers were then motivated to act on his behalf, helping to implement his objective.
   
   Through ORM thought leaders are more easily identified, these key player can then be engaged through their social network of choice. Once equipped with the information required these early adopters can act as your brand ambassadors. However remember engaging is key, understanding their conversation and communicating as an equal will return greater results then simply pushing information.
    
3. Allow people to engage at all levels
   
   While thought leaders may be the most influential it is important to offer followers the opportunity to engage at all levels. Remember it is important to cater for various levels of engagement. Offer even the most casual of supporters an opportunity to engage. Through monitoring of the online conversation opportunities can be identified to drive up engagement through offering added value.
    
4. Fish where the fish are
   
   Online conversation tracking helps to identify where your brand is being spoken about. Understanding how and where your current target market communicates about your brand or about your industry is key. This will ensure that your brands communication isn’t filtered out, because the communication is sent through the wrong channel.
    
5. Be Relevant
   
   Ensure that the tone of voice and what your brand has to say is relevant to your target audience. Ensuring this will guarantee that your message resonates with your target audience. Relevant communication does not mean communicating what you want your consumers to know but rather offering them what they want to hear and in that way providing added value and increased goodwill for your brand.
   
   ORM can provide valuable qualitative insight into the tone of conversation required. A quantitative approach can also offer feedback into your brands success in communicating with consumers. Continuous tracking is required to ensure that your brands communication remains relevant.
    
6. Ensure your content can be found.
   
   With users becoming increasingly thirsty for information and impatient when looking for it, brands can ensure real added value if they facilitate the information search. Monitoring conversation and providing relevant information is a sure fire way to increase brand loyalty. SEO and online advertising can only go so far in making your information readily available, actively pursuing interested parties, an option available through ORM, will guarantee consumers are aware of your brand while conducting pre purchase research.
    
7. Measure everything.
   
    “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results” this Winston Churchill quote captures the importance of measuring to ensure efforts to date are in line with objectives and strategy is being effectively implemented. Measuring of one’s online reputation and the sentiment of consumers all aid in evaluating success and making timely course corrections to ensure the end goal is achieved.

Comment on "Implementing Strategy with Online Reputation Management Tools"

So how do you navigate the loud, competitive minefield that is today’s marketing landscape?

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is fast becoming vital when it comes to understanding what people really think about your brand, responding quickly to opportunities and putting out the fires of brand crises. In the longer term, an effective ORM tool can add massive value to your strategy, filtering and analysing online conversation around your brand and providing strategic business direction.

We’ve all seen the example of ORM tools being used to drive marketing strategy is that of Barack Obama in the most recent US presidential elections. Obama’s team analysed online usage and population statistics to define his target audience as a younger one, which makes frequent use of social media to stay connected. Responses to other political campaigns (measured online) cried for a leader who was involved and who engaged with the public in a personal, positive and informative way. The result was a message of hope, driven by community involvement and placing the emphasis on the voter (“YOU”). After profiling the needs and wants of the online voter, Obama’s campaign focused on creating grassroots strategies and making integration with social networks such as Facebook easier. Obama wished to become part of the community and respond on the same level, placing the power in the hands of the people.  While competitor McCain ignored online conversation around his shallow online strategy, Obama looked at engagement opportunities such as an activity index that monitored voter activity and gave them a mark out of ten for their participation levels. ORM also allowed for the identification of social influencers and ideal brand affiliations. A combination of good ideas combined with effective ORM led to history’s most successful political campaign.

A recent study by Digital Brand Expressions showed that 52% of social media marketers within large companies are operating without a game plan – which explains the proliferation of inactive company blogs and un-followed Twitter pages. ORM tools are the biggest step in formulating the plan and making sure your efforts, both online and offline, are channeled successfully.

Strategic insights provided by effectively managing your reputation online include:

• Spotting the opportunities in your offering or in the market category by picking up on frequent consumer demands
• Monitoring and measuring competitor activity to provide benchmarking insights
• Demonstrating the benefits of internal adjustments, such as service channel restructuring, based on consumer and media feedback online
• Measuring the response to both online and offline marketing efforts, to determine if these should be adjusted or repeated
• Measuring ROI for online marketing efforts, which will assist in guiding future efforts
  

Not only can ORM tools assist in setting specific, measurable objectives, they also afford a business the opportunity to monitor the response as the strategy is implemented and adjust accordingly.

Comment on "Driving Strategy with Online Reputation Management Tools"

The FIFA World Cup sees 32 Countries battle it out for the top award in international football. With the tournament bring broadcast to 213 countries, it is little wonder that sponsors are paying top dollar to be associated with this prestigious tournament. From the BrandsEye perspective, we thought it might be interesting to see whether the brands associated with the World Cup are really getting their money’s worth.

It turns out that sponsoring this event doesn’t guarantee online conversation:

• Sponsorship of the World Cup has been fruitful for McDonalds over the past two days, generating 142 mentions of the brand. This resulted in 853 250 people being reached and earning McDonalds R193 046 in free advertising.
• In the case of Mahindra Satyam’s sponsorship however, money spent seems to have vanished down the proverbial drain - their relationship with the tournament hasn’t been mentioned once online in the last two days.

Despite fewer mentions for some, all 6 World Cup partners can consider the sponsorship an astute move. All have seen high volumes of conversation around their brand online, even if they are not mentioned in association with the tournament. Visa is benefitting the most: their sponsorship achieved R300 988 worth of advertising from 122 mentions reaching 1 333 660 people.

The Football World Cup is often regarded as the most global of all sporting events and our research into the event supports this:

Conversation around the sponsors was divided geographically with the UK taking the lion’s share.

• UK - 10%
• SA - 6%
• Netherlands - 1%
• Japan - 1%
• Germany - 3%
• France - 1%
• Canada - 2%
• Brazil - 1%
• Australia - 1%

The dominant languages in the conversation were

• 88% English
• Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese all receiving 2%.
• Closely followed by Polish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Dutch all receiving 1%.

Overall in the last 48 hours 6 836 040 people were exposed to a conversation about the relationship between one of the World Cup sponsors and the tournament. This was achieved through 1 952 conversations in 48 hours.

Brands are promoting their relationship with the World Cup, as can be expected, but this only accounts for 15% of the conversation in total. The bulk is from consumers, with 76% of all mentions. Press accounts for the final 9% of the conversation.

Twitter only occupies 9% of the conversation (which is comparatively very low). It's also interesting to see that 8% of the conversation is coming through individuals introducing brands through comments in blog posts - i.e. the blog post was on another topic, but in the blog comments the brand was brought up.

On analysing what affect sponsorship of this World Cup has had on its partnering brands, it seems to have been made clear that, unless you are FIFA itself, a return is not guaranteed. 

Comment on "I Spy With My BrandsEye: World Cup Sponsorship"

This is easier said than done. If we view the conversation taking place online as a relationship driving activity, then we need to approach it in the same way we would a normal relationship with a new potential friend. Fundamentally, this requires that we are mostly a good person (i.e. the business is normally providing to its brand promise) but provided this is the case then there are some things to remember:

• You cannot be everything to everybody

As is the case when making “physical friends” there is a certain group of people who you will and won’t get along with. All too often brands deviate from their core business and brand promise when engaging. They try to appease all consumers and in doing so appear fickle. Although the initial engagement promotes a feeling of achievement for consumers, a continuous flip-flopping to apologise for problems reflects poorly on the brand and questions its integrity. Consumers who are engaged with feel a sense of achievement initially but soon realise that the continual flip-flopping of the brand to apologise for problems amounts to nothing as integrity is lost. Without trust a relationship isn’t possible and brands should be very conscious of the line which they tow and ensure consistency. Brands need to stick to their point of view and be firm with anybody who is incorrect in their engagements. A response which is level, fact driven (with references) and personal is normally the best approach. Initially it may be tough, but in time consumers will begin to trust the brand and engagements will begin to hold more weight.

• You cannot engage everybody

As Clay Shirky put it, online communication is a numbers game. Trying to engage with everybody is time-expensive and builds the expectation of further engagement. Large brands need to start being strategic about who they engage with and rely on those individuals to perpetuate the conversation.

A number of criteria can be used to select who to engage with. On a basic level, influence and reach is a good measure but from a more advanced perspective, it should be viewed as a learning mechanism. In the same way that you would prompt your friends to modify inappropriate behaviour so to can this be done online. The use of Operant Conditioning (or Classical Conditioning if you have a LOT of money) can be used to train your community on how to engage in the online space. Identifying and rewarding (levering social value being the most effective) those who are talking correctly about the brand will train the community on how to respond. One can also begin to consciously limit engagements on any given day. Consequently a value will be assigned to individual engagements (according to scarcity of resource).

Take for example an individual who says something which serves your brand/marketing/communication objectives. You as a brand then promote this inidvidual through your newsletter, site, social media etc. Others see this and want the same for their own social worth. Consequently, they learn from it and - provided the reward stimulus is always the same - the community can be made to modify its behaviour as directed by the positive reinforcement.

• Don’t stop online

Just because you are the Online Reputation Manager doesn’t mean that you can only play online. In order to build a real relationship, the distance imposed by intermediating technology needs to be eliminated as far as possible. This could be achieved by making phone calls, organising face to face meetings or by participation in specific focus groups to resolve problems. Ultimately, the closer you can build your relationship with the consumer, the less likely he will be to complain, respond badly or generally not engage in a responsible way. Dan Ariely (in his book Predictably Irrational) argues that as soon as there is a relationship in play, the environment moves from a market norms environment into a social norms environment – where trust, respect and transparency are all key variables (rather than money, time and product).

In summary, we as brands need to be looking to build real relationships with small subsets of our communities. Attempting to engage everybody in a way which works for them doesn’t solve anything. Rather identify those who have a natural fit with the brand and invest heavily in building long lasting relationships – the real sort, where there is a bi-directional trust. Once established, this trust can then be used to grow the community.

Additionally, be willing to stick a peg in the ground and defend your territory. You will never please everybody, so leverage disagreements between consumers and the brand to build transparency, trust and integrity. Key here is to not appear confrontational but rather engage in a personable and honest way and the results can be hugely positive.

This post certainly doesn’t provide a completed framework and if you have any ideas please feel free to contribute below. I’m willing to engage positive and negative comments – we are, after all, still learning. 

Comment on "Advanced ORM – Managing the Power Relations"