Social Media Monitoring: Brands That Listen Make Better Friends

Social Media Monitoring (Because brands that listen make better friends)

“ Word of Mouth” has always been the most effective form of marketing. People have always trusted their friends opinions…

Hey Maximus, Poncius in front of me reckons I need a new anti-perspirant, you always smell nice, what do you use? Centurio, it never lets me down!

Word of mouth never stopped being important, but when mass media became popular last century, brands could rely on advertising to broadcast their message at the world and word of mouth didn’t seem as important to some marketers anymore…

TV got people’s attention. And trust.

You could tell people whatever you wanted, because you knew they were paying attention… Image © Aaron Escobar @ Flickr

No matter how blatant or irrelevant your message was, people used to listen…

But the landscape has changed…

Ads are everywhere. In fact, people see and hear between 1,000 and 3,000 advertising messages every day…
87,600,000 throughout their lives…

People still watch TV, but they flick through the ads. They read the news online instead of on paper.
Recommendations and opinions for every product and service are now available on the Internet.

We have reached a point where:
14% of people trust ads
78% of people trust consumer recommendations
(Source: Neilsen Global Trust In Advertising Survey, 2007)

McKinsey and Co. estimate that 2/3 of the economy is now influenced by personal recommendations…

People obviously still talk to each other face to face, but the INTERNET has allowed conversations to spread at light speed around the globe and be heard by millions within minutes.
And the Internet is now the largest
mass-communication medium, by far…

13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

There are more than 133 million blogs in the world (Source: Technorati)

Facebook has more than 200,000,000 users worldwide (Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

Every single second of every single day , Twitter’s 5 million users mention brands they LOVE and HATE .
AND Twitter is growing at a rate of 1382% per year (Source: Twitter Search, Forrester Research)

There are millions of special interested forums in Australia. Vogue Magazine’s Australian forum is one of the biggest with 93,000 active members. The most common forum topics are product recommendations. (Source: Vogue Forums)

People are talking about
your brand right now .

Some people like you…

Some people don’t…

But if you monitor what people are saying…

And start engaging your customers.

You have an opportunity to make friends like never before

Most brands now have a Twitter page and a Facebook account of course…

Most companies now have a Twitter account and a Facebook page, but smart marketers are starting to realise that brands that listen make better friends…

But you don’t just want any old friends, you want best friends. And you only get to be best friends by being the best listener…

“ I would much rather be in front of ten people who are the right people than ten thousand people who aren’t.” – Seth Godin

Take a look at a few examples of what other companies have been doing and you’ll start to get an idea why…

Responsive Marketing: Greystone Bar: Brisbane, Australia
The bar is next to a major entertainment venue and staff monitor Twitter and respond to people attending events with helpful special offers and advice:
“ Anyone going to see Dylan Moran at QPAC tonight should definitely pop in for a pre or post show drink.... 4:57 PM May 18 th ”
“ QLD teachers striking around South Bank today could be some disruptions to traffic in case you're round the area. 11:25 AM May 19 th ”

Market Research: Wine Library
Son of Russian Immigrants starts reading blogs and forums to find out what wines people want to know about.
Answers common questions, tells people to check out his site.
Turns small New York bottle shop into the world’s biggest online wine store with a $48 million a year turnover .

Reaction Marketing: Parmalat
We were monitoring for Parmalat, makers of Ice Break (Australia’s #1 selling iced coffee) and noticed that radio personality Dave Hughes had complained on Twitter that he loved the product but was worried about the fat content. We told alerted them to the issue.

Researching Policy: ABC Childcare Centres setup ChildcareChat.com.au as a listening post and discussion forum for parents.
They monitored other social media channels, noticed an issue to do with public holiday payments, used their own forum to ask parents what they thought and used that feedback to change a policy within a week of first hearing about the problem.
This made parents VERY happy.

Customer Service: Dell Hell
Influential blogger complains. Company reacts, engages him, engages the social media sphere, starts monitoring 1500 blogs a day, talks to people about their issues, gives out personal email addresses for customer service, the influential blogger becomes a fan again, tells everyone. Complaints fall by 16% in the first 6 months.

Crisis Avoidance: AOL
Word starts circulating in blogs and forums that AOL’s customer service people make it impossible to cancel your account.
A YouTube video is published by an account holder trying to cancel his service. He shows the conversation taking place and shows how rude the customer service rep is.
The video is seen by 350,000+ people.
The story is picked up by The NBC Today show.
800,000 other people cancel their accounts in protest
The rep is fired
AOL withdraws its product from the market.
The US attorney General investigates and AOL has to pay $1.25 million to the state of New York in fines.
If they’d been listening to what was being said about them in blogs and forums, it never would have happened.

Whether you’re a local café, or a multi-billion dollar corporation, social media monitoring can make you money…

So what’s the best way to listen?

Two Ways to Listen
Option One: Do it yourself
Lots of free tools like Google alerts
But it’s time-consuming
You’ll need to pay someone to monitor the data
If you want to respond you need to speak the ‘language’
If you miss something, too bad
Great for small businesses without many conversations
A Professional Monitoring Tool like Dialogix
Costs around $400-$1500 a month
No need to chase the data, it comes to you
You can see who is doing the talking
You can get advice on how to respond
You know you won’t miss anything because someone else is doing the watching
You can benchmark against your competitors and chart data

Dialogix is a social media monitoring tool that shows you exactly what is being said about your brand, industry and competitors in Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, news websites, forums, MySpace, Facebook and much more. Track sentiment, create a database of key influencers and then keep on top of the buzz.

Who has been using it?
Agencies working in PR, Advertising, Digital and Brand Consulting
Corporations
Political Parties
How Much?
Starts at $400 a month for agencies. Most corporations pay around $1500 a month

More Information?
www.dialogix.com.au

This presentation brought to you by Dialogix is a social media monitoring tool that shows you exactly what is being said about your brand, industry and competitors in Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, news websites, forums, MySpace, Facebook and much more. Track sentiment, create a database of key influencers and then keep on top of the buzz. www.dialogix.com.au

IMAGE CREDITS [All photos were sourced from Flickr with thanks to Compfight. All images are used under the terms of a Creative Commons licence . Photographer Credits: kalandrakas; hans s; Aaron Escobar; MsBlueSky; Falling Heavens; Jay Dugger; Jacob Bøtter; Vincent Boiteau; World Economic Forum; teamstickergiant; Libertinus; kimba; Jeb Ro; K.Coles; erin MC hammer; Torley]

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Social Media Monitoring: Brands That Listen Make Better Friends

by Matt Granfield

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