Tag Archives: social media monitoring

When Something Goes Wrong Online (Because of You!)

I’ve often preached that one of the strongest (and most overlooked) benefits of digital marketing is that it enables you to be incredibly agile. You can test something quickly and alter it as you go. Pilots can be minutes or days, you can split test to your heart’s content, and so on.

Most importantly, you can correct mistakes! Say you screw up in social media, you can immediately be accountable and post a correction or apologize. If your ad has a typo, you can pull it down and correct it. This doesn’t mean you should be sloppy, lazy with your quality control, or cavalier in your instructions to your marketing teams. It just means you should use agility to your benefit.

Be quick to try something that might not be quite perfect so that you get the first mover advantage. Don’t spend weeks perfecting it – that just means lost market opportunity. Get it online and then worry about reiterations in the future.

And, if you screw up, here’s some fantastic advice to help you sleep at night from Amber Naslund at BrassTackThinking.com.

The Power of a Bad Review

Erik Saas just wrote a piece regarding a couple of surveys showing that consumers are highly likely to share a bad experience with their networks. This has long been reported as the case but perhaps somewhat ignored by many companies?

A study by Kaset International found:

  • 96% of unhappy customers never complain
  • 91% will not buy again or use your service
  • An unhappy customer will tell nine others about their bad experience
  • 13% of unhappy customers will tell 20 or more people

While this survey is over five years old, the data is still profound. In fact, the 13% figure is probably much higher today, than when this report was released, primarily due to social media.

What can you do? For starters, you need to be listening, which involves monitoring your brand not just in social communities, but on the entire ‘net.

Once you start listening you’ll be able to address issues more proactively and target areas of your business that need improvement. It really is THAT EASY. The improvement may actually be the hard part!

Here’s that article:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=146772&nid=124747#

Twitter Tips – Cutting Through the Clutter

Great article containing tips on how to configure Twitter (using third-party tools) to reduce the number of tweets you are consuming:

http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2011/01/14/5-ways-to-make-twitter-less-noisy/

However, before leveraging another tool, definitely take a look at unfollowing content providers that are offering little value. And, most importantly, use lists to group your content into multiple streams. This is a great way to manage multiple topics.

Finally, bring in the horsepower of another product as a last result. A tool like Radian6 can let you monitor literally thousands of tweets and users at once and alert you to “only the good stuff”. But be warned, tools like Radian6 and the many others out there require a fair amount of time to manage so that you can configure them accurately enough to deliver what you are looking for and to avoid the stuff you’d normally pass up. If a monitoring tool or service is consuming too much time, then you’re not getting the right value out of it.