The Net-Savvy Executive

Things you might discover when you monitor social media:

• A happy customer who likes your product.

• An unhappy customer who doesn't. All the more difficult if your company name ends in "ell." Is this a PR problem or a customer service problem? (Both.)

• A blogger who wants to buy your product, but doesn't know if it exists (it does). This example is for a small product. What if it were a big product? Would your sales team like a lead like this?

• A competitor's reaction to your product announcement. If a competitor's CEO blogs, you subscribe and read every post. It's that simple.
  

Tags: reputation buzz

Reputation monitoring got a new player with the public launch of BuzzLogic at DEMOfall this week (see their 6-minute presentation). The announcement got me thinking about two ways of looking at online reputation monitoring: macro and micro.

BuzzLogic focuses on identifying trends in the online conversation, identifying the most influential writers (not just blogs), and how influence flows through the conversation as it travels around the Net. It's a macro approach that focuses on identifying and engaging the most influential voices. The influence map below offers one glimpse of the web-based analytical service.

Macro reputation monitoring is important. Tracking buzz around markets, products and companies requires heavy-duty tools as the volume of the conversation grows, especially for highly visible, consumer-oriented businesses that generate a lot of online mentions. The usual poster children for monitoring are Dell and Kryptonite, and the BuzzLogic demo used Microsoft for its example. Companies that sell lots of products to lots of people will need macro monitoring tools that scale to match their exposure. Several companies offer macro monitoring services, and BuzzLogic looks like a solid entrant.

On the other hand, everyone is an influencer online. Big news stories—and big company problems—don't always flow from the most influential bloggers. Part of the beauty of social media is that everyone has a voice. With a sufficiently compelling story, any voice can start the conversation. Call it the Long Tail, call it Chaos, or just call it a really big job to monitor. The problem is that any mention of a company (including products, promotions and people) could be the first appearance of something that's going to be a big problem. (Or, being optimistic, the beginning of a great opportunity, but those tend to be less urgent than the problems.) The macro approach catches the problem as it gains traction in the larger conversation; what's needed is a micro approach to provide early warning, too.

How do you do micro reputation monitoring? You can use the do-it-yourself approach with vanity feeds and a feed reader; the problem is, that doesn't scale. It works for companies who aren't mentioned a lot (which is a lot of companies, just not the household names). Some of the high-end monitoring services may be able to catch the single-post indicator of an approaching storm, but I suspect that this is an area where a human reader is still most effective.

I came across a case this week where a single online mention provided an early warning of what has become a huge problem for a consumer products company. As I'm writing the case study, I plan to talk to the companies who offer high-end buzz-monitoring to understand how their services compare and how they address micro monitoring.

Tags: reputation buzz BuzzLogic

From do-it-yourself to big budget, you have options in how to track the discussion of your company online. VeriSign's Mike Denning plugs the specialized reputation-monitoring companies for defending your brand online:

Get involved in protecting your brand’s online presence. You can’t leave brand reputation monitoring to an intern and a search engine. Even your Legal/IP team can’t do it alone. They can be the first line of defense, but there is no substitute for a specialized, automated system that combines human analysis, ongoing incident tracking, and abuse/misuse identification throughout the Internet. There are products and services at every price range, and the annual cost is generally less than a single marketing initiative for the average large company.

This is actually an older threat: someone outside your company—competitor, critic, or criminal—registers a domain that could be confused with your company and does something you wouldn't want associated with your brand. The old companysucks.com ploy is a variation; there's no need to make it so easy for your critics when it's cheap and easy to register the anti-brand domains. Top-level domains other than .com create other opportunities for those who would misuse your marks. VeriSign's white paper (registration required) suggests some other ideas on what you need to do to protect yourself in the domain name arena.

Oh, the enabling power of the Internet. How many ways can people use it to damage your company? The more you look, the more there is to find.

Tags: brand buzz dns VeriSign

In social media, as in other pursuits, try to avoid becoming a case study.

In this case, a prominent public relations firm joins its well-known, but not always well-liked, client in a "what not to do" moment. In a medium that loves its transparency, it's hard for the man behind the curtain to stay behind the curtain.

Now the discussion is focusing on the firm's ethics instead of the client's wonderful stories, and when people recite the well-known examples of companies who messed up in the blogosphere, Edelman and Wal-Mart will be on the list.

Probably not the outcome they were hoping for.

Tags: blog buzz pr Edelman Wal-Mart

Now that you're monitoring blogs, product reviews and domain name registrations, have you considered Wikipedia?

If you aren't familiar with it, Wikipedia is the free, community-edited, online reference that has taken a primary place in many people's reference library. It's a great resource with information on many, many topics. Its greatest strength is also the problem—anyone can edit it, and the information isn't always accurate. If you're using it as a source for a history paper, you're risking a bad grade. What if people are getting misleading information on your products?

I was talking to an executive at a large industrial company last week, when he told me about an ongoing problem they have on Wikipedia. It seems that a product his company invented is credited to a company that licensed it from them, and another product is listed under a competitor's trade name in Wikipedia. In theory, the generic term should be listed, with trade names listed as examples. But they've been unable to make corrections stick, so far. Since people use (and many trust) Wikipedia, the company needs to get the entries corrected, but the process isn't always as simple as it looks. As they deal with this, his team is becoming expert on Wikipedia.

For a happier example, Dan Pink recently learned that his book is in Wikipedia (I would link to the post, but Dan's item archive links never work for me):

A Whole New Wiki?

A Whole New Mind has its own Wikipedia entry. In fact, it's had one since June. Of course, I didn't know until this weekend when, er, my ten-year-old daughter showed me. Cool.

Monitoring Wikipedia for your business
If you're responsible for your company's image, Wikipedia is just one more place to know what's being said about you. Our corporate example demonstrates the importance of looking up your competitors, too, since you or your products may appear on pages about them. Here are some steps for getting started:

• Look up your company, products, inventions, brands, and people on Wikipedia. Do the same for other companies in your ecosystem: competitors, partners, suppliers and customers. Take note of any entries that present a problem. You may be involved with these pages for a while.

• Browse the Help section and read a good selection of entries before you start making changes. Wikipedia is like other Internet subcultures that want newcomers to learn their ways before making noise.

• Anyone can edit Wikipedia entries. If you find simple errors, fix them. Then monitor that page to see if the errors return. Be sure to see the Discussion and History tabs at the top of each entry.

• Set up an account on Wikipedia. Registered users can create new pages and set up watchlists to track changes to Wikipedia entries.

• Just to keep things interesting, remember that Wikipedia exists in multiple languages. You'll need to track them individually.
  

Update: I posted more thoughts and some updates in Crash course on Wikipedia.

Tags: reputation marketing Wikipedia

I got a friendly wakeup nudge yesterday when I realized that people have linked to my blog while misspelling my name. People have been misspelling—and mispronouncing—my name forever, so I can't imagine why I hadn't already thought of it. I keep a folder of vanity feeds—feeds based on searches for my name or sites—in my feed reader. Adding the most popular spelling error bumped it up to 55 feeds and pointed out additional references I hadn't already found.

Even celebrities have this problem (via SEW).

I don't care what you say about me. Just spell the name right.
Gene Sarazen

Tags: reputation monitoring

If you have a high-profile problem—let's say your products have been exploding into flame—how do you get your message to customers who want more information? Obviously, you need to handle the product issues—set up the recall or whatever, issue a press release, and get your customer service operation ready to handle the influx. If you have a blog, you write about it there. Kate Zimmermann suggests using search marketing for damage control:

1. Run a search marketing campaign on generic, branded AND local keywords.

2. Run contextual ads on industry-specific sites.

3. Send ad traffic to landing pages that are specific to the recall.

4. Point to local options.

5. Provide an immediate point of customer service.

This is a really good idea. Sony's already taken the hit for its exploding battery recall; now the company has to focus on making things right and repairing its image. Contextual ads will put the company's message with the information customers are looking for as they research the topic and, possibly, decide what to do about their own computers and batteries. Show the ad to the right person at the right time. Perfect.

Search marketers probably see this as the obvious reaction, but for everyone else, it's a helpful reminder of another new tool for marketers to get their message out in a crisis.

Tags: reputation SERM PR

If your company isn't tracking what's being said about it online, at least you're not alone. Most global executives haven't figured it out, either. A new survey by PR firm Weber Shandwick of 950 senior executives in 11 countries found that most don't see the value of engaging bloggers during a crisis. Monitoring online media and communities isn't on their radar, either:

Perhaps business decision-makers around the globe believe that companies should concentrate on fixing the problem and understanding what went wrong before turning their attention to correcting online conversations. This is not surprising since our research also reveals that only a minority of companies pay attention to online coverage of their company’s reputation. (emphasis added)

Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, Weber Shandwick’s Chief Reputation Strategist

1. Announce specific actions company will take to fix the problem (76% Always/Usually)
   
2. Establish early warning system (76%)
   
3. Establish specific policies and goals demonstrating corporate responsibility (73%)
   
4. Make sure legal team approves all statements (72%)
   
5. Issue regular public progress reports addressing the problem (771%)
   
6. Disclose quickly and publicly what happened(71%)

You can decide whether it makes sense to engage bloggers in a crisis. It might make more sense to stay out of the conversation sometimes; it would certainly be harder to engage them once the crisis starts. But we've seen the examples of PR crises that started online before moving to a broader audience. Whether you choose to engage bloggers or not, you need to pay attention to what happens to your brand online.

Once you're there, let's talk about why you should care about things that stay online, too.

Tags: reputation PR Weber Shandwick

Have you thought about how your company should deal with bloggers? We've seen how an issue that starts on a blog can become front-page news, so I hope you don't think that ignoring blogs is a good strategy. So, before you're in crisis mode, how do you plan to respond to blogs that talk about you?

First, you have choices, and let's be clear that starting your own blog is only one (optional) piece of your strategy. James Governor lists some general approaches in a blogger relations piece that also features the examples of some high-profile computer industry companies (via David Churbuck). For the moment, let's think about companies that want to engage and influence bloggers. Here are some strategies to consider:

Online reputation monitoring
Let's start with the basics: you need to know what's being said about you before you can decide how to respond. Monitoring social media (not just blogs) is a no-brainer. Too many executives don't realize it, but the examples of companies who've experienced crises that started online demonstrate the stakes. It doesn't have to be hard; every day I discover another company that wants to help you (today it was Kalivo).

When you find a blogger writing about your company (broadly defined) or your industry, how do you respond? I'll consider the broader question of blogger relations in another post. For now, let's consider some strategies for responding to specific blogs and posts.

Silence
Most enthusiastic bloggers won't recommend this approach, but some companies are better off not engaging bloggers in any way. You probably already know if that describes your business. Silence may also be the right reaction to persistent critics and unknown bloggers (hence the interest in influence among reputation-monitoring firms). You have to decide which bloggers and posts merit a response, but few companies should adopt silence as a general policy.

Commenting
You don't have to have a blog to participate. When you find a blogger writing about your company (or your business), leave a well-thought-out comment. You'll show that your company is paying attention and cares enough to participate, but you won't have the demands of your own blog. Fred Wilson posed the question of whether a company should correct inaccuracies. The ensuing discussion touches on some of the issues that you'll want to consider.

Commenting also works to increase the visibility of your company; you don't have to wait for a post about your company to comment. Just be careful not to be too self-serving; the "spam" label isn't a good addition to any wardrobe.

Blogging
Creating your own blog, whether personal or corporate, is the total commitment approach to joining the conversation. You can respond with a full post of your own. A well-placed comment linked to your longer response respects the original blogger's contribution and directs readers to your response, too. For longer-lasting issues you can post updates that respond to the changing situation. Business blogging is about much more than responding to critical bloggers, but it does give you additional options and credibility in dealing with bloggers.

The back channel
You don't always have to respond in public. Most bloggers are reachable by email. If one posts a complaint about your company, you could use direct contact to address the issue before any public response. This is especially important with critical posts that are based on customer-service problems. The back channel is also effective for proactive engagement with bloggers in your sphere, especially when combined with your blog.

Traditional media
I have a quizzical look as I write this, but if your controversy is playing out on blogs and in the media, you could respond with traditional methods and let bloggers get your side from mainstream media. It's probably better to address the issue in the medium where it appears, though, which means you should consider addressing social media separately.



The short answer to almost every interesting question is, "it depends," and the question of how to deal with critical bloggers is no exception. My hope here is to get you thinking about your options when it comes to reacting to bloggers. Next, we'll look at the broader topic of blogger relations and how you can move beyond a reactive stance to interact with bloggers more productively.

Update: I've outlined the responsibilities for a social media relations role in a new post.

Tags: blogging PR reputation

I subscribe to over 50 vanity feeds to detect when someone mentions me or links to one of my sites, but it's not enough. Today, Market Sentinel picked up the Hasbro case, and the search engines haven't found it yet. I expect that they will, but the opportunity for a same-day response came from my web statistics service.

The usual application of statistics in a blog is to provide an ego boost to the blogger. More people are reading this blog this month than last month, which convinces me that I'm not just writing to myself. But the service gives me more information than that. It collects information on where my readers are (Austria and the UK, this morning). It tells me which pages people read and the search queries that lead them to the site, which is useful for identifying topics. And, the point of this post, it tells me the page that linked to my site.

Search engines take time to find new content. Server logs and analytics packages collect incoming link information in real-time. If you want to know when someone links to your site (not just blogs), you need to look at your server data to catch the connections the search engines miss. Even if your site gets a lot of traffic, today's analytics tools make the analysis easy.

Oh, and if you're concerned about privacy, one thing that these tools do not collect is any personally identifying information. I don't see your name or email address, for example, unless you give them to me in a comment.

blogging analytics reputation

How does your company approach social media? We've looked at how to respond to bloggers and who does blogger relations, and I'm seeing the need for a coordinating role. Rather than blogger relations, let's call it social media relations, because there's more to social media than blogs, and your company needs to be prepared to engage customers wherever they are. In this post, I'll provide a high-level view—for discussion—of the role of social media relations.

Companies can interact with social media in a variety of ways. I've given some examples in the posts on product reviews, Wikipedia, search engine crisis management, and social networks. You could also look at the marketing experiments in MySpace and Second Life and the Social Media Release. There's a lot of activity, and it touches multiple functional groups and multiple vendors to the company.

I view social media relations (SMR) as an interdisciplinary specialty that spans marketing, technology, and Internet culture—three components of any successful strategy for engaging social media. It's probably an internal function, but where it belongs on the org chart and how big it should be is a question for individual companies to consider. Briefly, SMR is the "go-to" person (or group) for the topic of social media as it affects the company. Here's a summary of the responsibilities of the role:

1. Coordinate the development and implementation of social media engagement strategy and policies, including blogging policy, formal blogger relations programs and social media monitoring programs.
   1. Maintain domain knowledge in social media. Be a resource for others who need to understand new services and their potential impact on the business.

   2. Maintain awareness of company's activities in social media and contacts for the various activities.

   3. Be an advocate for the understanding of social media and how they affect the company's marketing and communications activities.

   4. Engage the company's IT organization to coordinate IT resources and policies with social media strategy.

2. Train functional groups (such as marketing, communications, and HR) on the technology and culture of social media as it relates to their roles.

3. Coordinate company's tactical response to social media issues.
   1. Consult with internal groups on appropriate responses to social media issues. Advise on the likely response of online communities to the company's plan.

   2. Coordinate company response to social media crises; track engagement by appropriate groups (internal and external).

4. Serve as the primary contact for external service providers and vendors who support the monitoring of, and engagement with social media.
   

[Thanks to Mark Harris for his help in reviewing and reorganizing the list. With enough of us on the case, we may just get this figured out.]

Update (27 July 2007): Is this your job, or close to it? I'm looking for social media specialists to interview for an upcoming paper on the role and how real companies have approached it. If you're the social media person in your company, I'd like to talk with you, even—especially—if your description is different from the above. Email me at nathan (at) net-savvy (dot) com.

Tags: blogger relations, social media relations, PR SMR

There's this big company—Wal-Mart—and they sometimes attract the wrong kind of attention. This week, bloggers are writing about t-shirts with a Nazi symbol found in a Wal-Mart store. Follow the link if you want to know the story; I'm going to focus on what we can learn from it. Because of Wal-Mart's high profile, this story makes it easy to see how online buzz works.

Blogger Rick Rottman explains the appeal of the story in a Consumerist interview:

RICK: I guess people just love good Walmart slash Nazi stories, you know.

CONSUMERIST: Perfect Venn diagram for the blogosphere. Sweet spot! Yes!

1. Any blogger can become highly visible with the right story.
   Rottman posted his original item on the social news site Digg, which sent him over 55,000 readers in one day. The many links to his posts boosted his rankings and influence ratings went from approximately nowhere to very influential, and they will stay there for a few months, regardless of his future posts and readership. He could also leverage his current visibility to become a long-term influential blogger on Wal-Mart. Any tool you use to measure the influence of bloggers needs to be able to detect a sudden increase in influence.

2. Bloggers will report on blogger relations efforts.
   Rottman posted the full text of an email from Edelman, along with some research into the sender's background and his observations on Wal-Mart's response. The days of PR pros working behind the curtain are over, at least online. You will be judged not only on your original actions but also your follow-up actions.

3. All kinds of people read blogs.
   One side effect was a rush by neo-Nazis to buy the t-shirts at Wal-Mart.

4. Topics of interest spread.
   If you want to follow the conversations springing from Rottman's post, you need to read many blogs (and comments). You also need to read over 170 comments on Digg, where much of the conversation has focused on free speech (in favor of Wal-Mart).

5. Blogs provide an early warning system.
   True, this all started with a blog post, and a lot of people know about it. But the consensus seems to be that mistakes will happen, and Wal-Mart is responding appropriately (although there were some complaints about taking a few days to get the shirts out of the stores). When mainstream media picked up the story, the headline was Wal-Mart pulls T-shirts with Nazi skull logo, and the company was able to apologize and explain their plan to correct the situation in the initial reports. If they didn't read the blogs, the initial reports could have been far more difficult for the company.

Tags: Wal-Mart blogger relations PR

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Only that's not fair to the hammer. A blacksmith can use a hammer to make a nail—or a hinge, or a piece of sculpture. A jeweler can use a hammer to make a gold leaf. A hammer drives the chisel of the stone carver. OK, there are different types of specialized hammers. The point is, some very similar tools can be used for very different purposes by different specialists. Online monitoring tools are like that, too.

Last Thursday, two online monitoring companies held simultaneous webcasts. Makes it tough on the schedule (what was wrong with all the other hours last week?), but it was interesting to see the different topics chosen by companies with similar services.

First up (because I had to pick) was Mining the Blogosphere, with Umbria's Howard Kaushansky and Brains on Fire's Geno Church. They painted a picture of blog monitoring as a near-real-time market research tool for marketers. Two examples stuck with me: a CPG company measuring online buzz to determine that a competitor's product launch was failing, and BoF gauging before-and-after visibility of Fiskars for a word-of-mouth program.

Cymfony's Jim Nail, meanwhile, was hosting The Changing Face of PR, where social media were discussed as one of three big trends affecting PR (the social media section starts at 40:30, if you want to skip ahead). There were some pretty clear expectations that blog monitoring is at least partly a PR function, and some very interesting data points from the 2006 PRWeek/Cymfony Corporate Survey (PDF):

• Over 40% of respondents listed "developing a media relations program for new technologies (e.g., blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc.)" as a top-of-mind media issue for 2007 (#5 on the list).

• But 62% don't have a strategy for responding to blogs today, and regular blog monitoring is not a habit for most companies:
  • 25% don't monitor blogs for mentions of their companies at all.

  • 34% monitor blogs less than weekly.

  • Only 16% monitor blogs at least daily.

• Blog monitoring serves multiple purposes, but the majority cited buzz tracking and reputation management as their goals. Over 40% also cited competitive insight, customer understanding, crisis prevention/detection, and awareness of developing brands as additional goals.

It's certainly interesting to see the same topics from the perspectives of different functional groups. I think it's about time to go get the IT perspective.

Tags: social media PR SMR Umbria Cymfony

Global is the new next door.

I've known for a long time that distance doesn't generally matter online, but there's something about getting an email from London after a recent blog post that really brings it home. I've seen international visitors to some of my other web pages for years, but the blog is more interactive, which makes the connection more vibrant. The email exchange got me thinking about the state of social media monitoring outside the US.

Blogging is decidedly not a US / English phenomenon. According to Technorati's latest State of the Blogosphere report, only 31% of blogs are written in English, while Japanese and Chinese blogs account for more than half of all blogs. The numbers come with some caveats, and they don't attempt to sort blogs by geography, but it's a reasonable interpretation that most of those blogs in other languages are written a long way from my home in North Carolina.

US-based online monitoring companies aren't limited to monitoring English-language content. I don't know how extensive their capabilities are, but multi-lingual monitoring was one of the selection criteria for the Forrester Wave on brand monitoring, so at least the need has been identified. Technorati and Edelman have teamed up to develop multi-lingual services, too, but we're still dealing with US-based companies. What's going on in the rest of the world?

Europe
From Brussels, Attentio offers social media monitoring with a focus on Europe. Scanblog offers similar services in France, where blogging has become quite popular, and in Norway, Integrasco offers social media monitoring and analysis. Reading Scanblog's "about" page was entertaining, given my rusty college French, but I was able to verify that they aren't selling radio scanners.

In the UK, I found Market Sentinel and Onalytica, coincidentally one day before Market Sentinel found me. From the looks of my site statistics and email inbox, some days I wonder if I'm based in London!

Asia
CIC data offers social media monitoring and word of mouth research for China. CIC data founder Sam Flemming also blogs at China Word of Mouth.

Richard Edelman posted observations on the Chinese and Korean blogospheres, worth reading if you have interests in those markets.


Listing companies is one thing, but I'm really curious about what's different about companies based in different countries. What's the difference between a US-based international company and a company based in a client's home market? I could guess, but instead, I'm setting up conversations with non-US monitoring companies to get a more informed perspective. Stay tuned.

While this post was sitting in my drafts folder, Jeremiah Owyang
started a list of companies that measure social media, along with a good list of requirements that should help you think about what you want from a monitoring service. Great minds, I guess. ;-)

Tags: buzz social media reputation

As part of the international theme this week, I'm having as many conversations with people at social media monitoring companies outside the US as I can. This morning, I talked with Simon McDermott, CEO of Attentio, a social media monitoring and analysis company focused on the European market.

The conversation came about because of Simon's follow-up note to their sample buzz report on selected brands and childhood obesity (Pepsi, Kraft, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Unilever, P&G, Danone, Kellogg’s and Nestle appear in the report). Entertaining headlines make it easy to focus on what I'm starting to think of as defensive social media monitoring (the activity that alerts you to issues that require a response—what I called micro a couple of months ago). This is a different kind of analysis, more focused on what people think of your brand. It gets at questions you might ask in a survey or interview, but it has an almost ethnographic feel of capturing the unprompted associations people make in the real world.

Measuring brand associations
The basic methodology is to compare the correlations between brand names and topic keywords in search results. For example, count the number of posts that contain McDonald's, child, and obesity (and variations on each term) and compare with the results for other brands or keywords. The result is presented in charts that compare brands, show the variance by subtopic within a brand's results, and chart the associations between brands and specific subtopics.

Another sample from the Attentio site charts buzz over time. You can see how you might combine the time element with keyword correlation to see how your brand associations are changing. While defensive monitoring is arguably a PR function, this kind of research could be used to measure the results of any kind of marketing campaign in any medium.

Focus, Proximity, Languages
What's different about a European company? First, Attentio focuses on the European market, so they're attuned to the different social media trends among European countries. Their Brussels location gives them proximity to clients. They have multilingual capabilities, which not only help with monitoring and analysis, but also enable them to deliver reports in multiple languages. Good reasons for a company that needs global coverage to work with local specialists for a clear view of each region.

You can hear more from Simon on the Attentio blog and in an interview with Philippe Borremans from June 2006.

Tags: Attentio social media buzz market research

What makes social media companies outside the US different? Language and familiarity with local cultures are the obvious answers, and my conversation with Sam Flemming tomorrow morning (fun with time zones!) really brought that home. Sam's Shanghai-based company, CIC Data, delivers Internet word of mouth and competitive intelligence research for China.

CIC Data focuses exclusively on China, typically working with the China headquarters of multinational clients. They have also worked with other social media research firms to provide Chinese market coverage. The services they offer are similar to the services you'd find in other countries: social media monitoring, trend analysis, and identifying influencers. The big differences are—surprise—language and culture.

It turns out that the work on analyzing Western-language social media doesn't help much with analyzing Chinese-language media. But beyond the technical challenges of the language is the importance of cultural awareness. It turns out that Chinese consumers are creative producers of slang, such as the 10–12 different ways to refer to "Bluetooth." Imagine instant-messaging-style abbreviations, with specific slang and abbreviations for different industries. Add mobile phone terms that vary by the user's phone and market-specific slang for some of the industries CIC Data watches (such as automobiles), and the text analysis becomes a worthy challenge.

And then there's the choice of technology. According to Technorati, Chinese language represents 10% of blogs. The real action, though, is on message boards (but call it BBS); that's where Chinese consumers share their opinions of companies, brands, products... the stuff that shows up on blogs in the US. If you've seen online message boards, you get the idea, but add to your mental picture longer, bloglike articles and mainstream adoption. CIC Data tracks 4 million messages each month from automobile-related boards alone.

China is awash in marketing messages—ads are everywhere (including escalator handrails). Consumers who trust other people more than marketers are heavy users of social media to share information and opinions about companies and products. If China is an important market for you, you'll see the value in a China specialist's knowledge of the language and culture.

Tags: cicdata social media buzz reputation market research China

One word I keep hearing from companies that monitor and analyze conversations in social media is busy. Everyone seems to have lots of client activity lately, and several company founders expressed an expectation of more companies entering the market.

If all the companies you know are from Forrester's report, you'll want a longer list. The NewPR Wiki now has a page with that list and more information on social media measurement.

Here's what you'll find:

• What to monitor?
  
• Upcoming Events
  
• Companies offering monitoring/measurement services
  
• Interviews
  
• Blog analytics research
  

Katie Paine predicts, "blog monitoring/analysis/measurement will show up on to-do lists everywhere" in 2007 (New Communications Review). Sounds like busy will continue to be a much-used word for companies offering those services.

Tags: buzz reputation PR

Forget I ever mentioned an international theme week. With three conversations just yesterday, it's not about to end. This post takes the virtual world tour back to London for an informative conversation with Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers.

Market Sentinel is a social media monitoring and analysis company serving primarily UK-based, Europe-focused companies (they also do some work in the US market). They maintain a clear focus on research and analysis, leaving the solutions to the clients and PR partners they work with.

As Mark described the history of Market Sentinel, I heard a progression that probably mirrors the lifecycle of client-side attitudes toward social media. Market Sentinel grew out of a service that generated RSS feeds to track updates of web sites that didn't offer feeds. When a major US technology vendor asked to use it, the company entered the monitoring business. Their services matured from monitoring to analysis, and now the company has a real focus on identifying influencers online to support clients' interactions with them.

When we discussed the parallels with how a client may approach social media, Mark suggested some stages of client motivation:

1. Awareness/fear
   
2. Listening/monitoring
   
3. Indentifying influencers
   
4. Focused engagement
   

Mark mentioned that in the last six months, he's noticed clients moving beyond reactive strategies. Now they're becoming interested in identifying problems before they become acute. While many companies are not yet monitoring social media, those that have started monitoring are quickly becoming more sophisticated in their approach to online engagement.

You can hear more from Mark Rogers on the Market Sentinel blog and in interviews with Nicole Simon (November 2005) and Guillaume du Gardier (September 2005).

Tags: Market Sentinel social media buzz reputation market research

Flemming Madsen isn't much interested in buzz. He says buzz—the volume of the conversation—doesn't correlate to sales, but influence does. His London-based company, Onalytica, analyzes online media and influence for clients in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia.

Correlating buzz and word of mouth to influence is a major piece of Onalytica's work, which includes monitoring and measuring online media and word of mouth. Distinguishing influence from popularity is the critical step in the process. Flemming talked about the history of influence measurement, going back to the work of Wassily Leontief and his input/output model. The established technique for analyzing media is citation analysis, which follows references upstream to identify influential sources.

Onalytica illustrates the distinction between popularity and influence in a paper on sources of information about avian flu (PDF). If you were to look up flu-related keywords on Google or Technorati, you would find popular sources, such as Google News and Engadget. Factor in citation analysis to measure influence and you'll find sources like the World Health Organization, OIE (World organization for animal health), the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, and the US Centers for Disease Control.

The popular sites rank highly in the results because of their many inbound links on every topic. The influential sites are cited more often on this topic. Influence analysis makes it possible to identify appropriate contacts along a chain of influence on the topic of interest. Stakeholders who are disproportionately influential vis à vis their popularity provide a particularly attractive opportunity, since they may be easier to approach than more popular stakeholders.

"Clients want as little data as possible, but they do want all the relevant information."

Onalytica began with government clients and still works on initiatives on topics like childhood obesity, youth crime, and child support, though a majority of their work is for corporate and agency clients. A typical engagement might focus on identifying influential stakeholders to prioritize PR efforts, or on identifying brand perceptions, challenges and opportunities. One of the major benefits of this kind of analysis is relief from information overload. Flemming also noted that social media analysis can serve as a substitute for surveys—in one example, Onalytica identified customer decision drivers for a financial services client.

What else have clients done with Onalytica research? One used influence analysis to determine the value of celebrity endorsements. Others have created key performance indicators (KPIs) for their PR agencies based on increasing influence. There's more here than defensively monitoring blogs for emerging issues, although they'll do that for you, too.

You can hear more from Flemming Madsen on the Onalytica blog and in interviews with Neville Hobson (July 2006) and Eric Mattson (September 2006).

Tags: Onalytica social media buzz influence reputation market research

I've taken a real interest in companies that monitor and analyze social media lately. I met some of them at the WOMMA Summit, and one of the fun topics was trying to figure out what to call their new industry.

It seems a little strange to call it an industry already, but the New York Times called it a "promising new industry" in yesterday's story on Nielsen BuzzMetrics. I guess that makes it official. Part of what makes this little industry interesting is the different backgrounds of the companies and what that difference means for their approach to analyzing social media. It also leads to confusing terminology.

Here are some of the terms I've come across. They all mean roughly the same thing:

• Blog monitoring
  
• Brand monitoring (Forrester)
  
• Consumer-generated media measurement (Nielsen BuzzMetrics)
  
• Conversation mining (Converseon)
  
• Internet word of mouth and competitive intelligence research (CIC Data)
  
• Market influence analytics (Cymfony)
  
• Online market intelligence (Attentio)
  
• Online reputation monitoring (search marketers)
  
• Public image monitoring (Nstein)
  
• Social media analysis (Matt Hurst)
  
• Social media analytics
  
• Social media measurement (Constantin Basturea)
  
• Social media research
  

I have my opinions, but I'd like to hear yours. Is it possible to find a common term? What's your favorite?

Tags: blog monitoring social media buzz

It seems I'm not the only one thinking about the labels we use around marketing and social media. I asked your opinion on what to call the group of activities around monitoring and analyzing social media a few weeks back (already? wow). Now, Rohit Bhargava and Cameron Olthuis are refining the distinction between social media optimization (SMO) and social media marketing (SMM). So here's my opinion on the labelling question.

I like social media analysis.

I like social media research, too, but analysis sounds to me more approachable than research, and some of these activities don't come off as research. Besides, isn't SMR taken? :-)

I like online market intelligence, but it's very broad, and I don't think many people would associate it with what we're talking about. Reputation monitoring, on the other hand, is only one application.

Monitoring may the basic activity, but it misses some of the more interesting work. Measurement is interesting, but some of the activities—such as monitoring—don't necessarily involve measurement. Analytics is just too geeky for a non-technical audience.

The idea is to come up with an inclusive term to describe some similar services offered under a variety of labels. It needs to encompass these activities (and possibly more):

1. Monitoring social media—blogs, discussion boards, online product reviews, newsgroup, et al—to find mentions of the client (company, products, brands, messages, people...)
   
2. Software-aided analysis of the data gathered to identify trends, sentiment, influencers, and associations.
   
3. Presentation of the data in an analytical framework with some sort of reporting interface (web, PDF, Powerpoint, Braille...)
   
4. Human analysis of the data and tactical/strategic recommendations.
   

Tags: social+media blog monitoring

Social media change the dynamics of crisis management. Here's our newest case study, already in progress.

Passengers on American Airlines flight 1348 from San Francisco to Dallas spent hours on the ramp in Austin instead. They—along with other jets—were diverted to Austin last Friday because of strong storms over Dallas. The problem is, Austin's airport and American weren't prepared to handle the ensuing mess in Austin. And it was a big mess.

Passengers spent hours in deteriorating conditions before finally getting off the plane that night. The airport was in its closed-for-the-night mode when they got in, so they remained hungry (after 12 hours or more on the plane). The airline had virtually no staff to take care of the passengers stranded in the wrong city, and the airline didn't seem to have any management involvement to fix things. The details provide a convincing argument against holiday air travel, but let's move along.

This is obviously a big problem for American. First, you have direct consequences. Northwest Airlines settled a class action for $7.1 million after it made passengers wait hours on grounded planes in Detroit in 1999. The lawyers will go to work on this one, too.

Second, American has a traditional PR problem, which I'll define as what happens when the media make the public aware of something the company has done wrong (or at least badly). The Wall Street Journal printed a lengthy story today—page one, above the fold. Lots of details to make readers want to avoid flying American. I imagine it will be in local papers everywhere by Tuesday.

Third—and here's the social media angle—this isn't 1999. Passengers were talking to the media while still on the plane. I wonder how many pictures they took with those cell phones? But that's speculative. Look at how they're already using social media:

Austin American-Statesman reporter Helen Anders has been writing about flight 1348 on her blog on the newspaper's site. Passengers are adding lengthy comments to her posts. They're adding details of what happened, some worse than in news reports. Passenger Kate Hanni posted her contact details and invited other passengers to contact her (presumably to coordinate lawsuits). She also criticized the local CBS station for not using her interview in their coverage. Oh, and she's in touch with her congressman. How much did American save by denying her a hotel voucher?

Today's lessons:

1. Blogs can give anyone a voice, even non-bloggers. Comments on an easy-to-find blog can become a platform for angry customers.

2. Angry customers can use social media to organize themselves against you.

3. Mobile phones give customers access to mainstream media now.

4. Camera phones are everywhere (and digital cameras are standard issue for vacations). If anything visually interesting happened on those planes, someone probably took pictures. Don't be surprised if they pop up on photo-sharing sites soon.
   

Update: The passengers have a blog to go with their new organization (via Andy Lark).

Tags: travel airlines American Airlines flight 1348 PR crisis management

Have you heard about Disney's involuntary transparency? This time it's old media feeling the heat of citizen media, and Disney's doing everything wrong.

KSFO radio hosts apparently enjoy talking about killing people—even dead people—on the radio. It sounds a really lovely radio station. They talk about politics a lot, and they say what they think. The problem is, they think the kinds of things that get the occasional teenager into big trouble post-Columbine. If you write it for a class assignment, you get arrested. In talk radio, they call it "creative freedom."

KSFO is an ABC-owned and operated station. ABC parent Disney's complaint was that a blogger who doesn't like the station shouldn't be allowed to share audio clips on the Internet. Copyright vs. fair use—you can fill in the blanks. So they shut down an unknown blog, Spocko's Brain, who suddenly has attorney friends at the EFF and a much larger audience.

Let's rehearse lesson one: Corporate attempts to silence a critic through legal threats draw more attention than the original story they are supposed to suppress. The coverup is bigger than the original story.

Spocko appears serious about changing KSFO, and he/she is being smart about how to apply pressure. The blog names advertisers—not just companies, but individuals:

For example, I can not imagine that Dr. Julian Feneley, Chief Executive Officer of BriteSmile Inc. which is headquartered-in Walnut Creek, wants to hear right before his ad Lee Rogers say this about a listener, "I've got to try and track that email address and do something unpleasant to his cojones, if he has any." "None." says Melanie Morgan as she launches in to the BriteSmile commercial.

Would you advertise on this station—would you voluntarily associate your brand with this mess? And then there are the negative comments about advertisers written in defense of the station. If the comments are really coming from someone at the station, that's another big problem—KSFO needs to find (or hire) a responsible adult to speak for the station and muzzle everyone else.

The real bottom line here is what I started with: involuntary transparency. Companies don't get to decide if the public is going to find out what they're doing. Especially in mass media, where your product documents your actions. If you can't handle critics who talk about your business practices, you should take a look at your practices. The critics have a press, too, now.

Disney's choices are:

1. Stand by KSFO's programming and defend their on-air personalities' rights to speak their minds.
   
2. Repudiate the on-air statements and make the station change.
   
3. Ignore the issue and tacitly acknowledge that your critic is right.
   

Disney copyright PR blog

Familiar song, different dialect. The recruiting blogosphere has introduced me to the concept of employer brand, which relates to the perception of the company as a place to work. From blogs and YouTube videos to stock boards and rate-the-employer sites, social media create new challenges to those who would manage perception. It's just another example of how a company's interaction with social media is necessarily multidisciplinary—in this case, blurring the distinction between HR and PR.

Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" opened one floodgate with its invitation to post reactions on their blog, but the continuing action is on purpose-built sites like JobVent (via C.M. Russell):

It's getting to a point where employers are going to have to hire someone just to troll sites like this and tecross to find and fight the digital dirt being spewed on them.

To the list of ways that bloggers and other social media users can relate to a company, add employee—past, present and future.

Tags: employment branding HR social media JobVent

Headline: Harvard Business School professors Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee publish a case study on Wikipedia. Confused readers wonder why their version stops before the conclusion. While the analysis and recommendation are left as an exercise to the reader, the case includes a wealth of detail that anyone dealing with Wikipedia should read—and if anything related to your business is in Wikipedia, you should be paying attention. A lot of people get their information there now.

I first wrote about reputation monitoring on Wikipedia in October. I learned about some of the risks of trying to fix errors from a corporate PR guy who was trying to correct material factual errors related to his employer. The challenge—made clear in several recent incidents—is that Wikipedia norms generally oppose changes by anyone who has an interest in the entry. That includes PR agencies and anyone else editing on behalf of a client, and it includes employees making changes for the benefit of their employers.

You might be the world's leading expert on a topic, but if it's related to your income, you're not supposed to change it. The approved method is indirect—you're supposed to suggest changes on the discussion page and let someone else make them on the entry.

Wikipedia on more radars
Wikipedia versus interested parties is almost a meme lately. Steven Colbert summarized it in a bit on "wikilobbying" (via SEOmoz). Someone at Microsoft offers to pay an expert to fix an entry, and the whole world hears about it. Wikipedia adopts the "nofollow" attribute for all outbound links, making it likely to outrank its own sources in Google results. SEOs are not pleased. Should word of mouth marketing and viral marketing be merged? Boy, talk about bias! Sometimes it seems that anti-business is the exception to NPOV.

But the process worked
The Wikipedian aversion to PR and proprietary interest makes things challenging, but a funny thing happened: since we talked, a page that was bothering the unnamed exec above got fixed. The bias toward a competitor is—well, not entirely gone, but greatly diminished. The entry has been renamed from the competitor's brand name to the generic term, and it describes both competitors' brands as examples.

So I looked up some other examples, and they were fixed, too. The entry that inaccurately linked Dow Chemical to the Bhopal disaster has been corrected and has lost its activist bias (it does link, appropriately, to information on the lingering controversy). The entry on public relations no longer describes some of the worst bad PR practices as if they're typical, and the entries for word of mouth marketing and viral marketing were not merged. Maybe the process works, after all?

Lessons learned at others' expense
The lessons for marketers are clear. Pay attention to Wikipedia entries related to your business. If you see material errors or negative information, address them, but tread lightly. Work within the Wikipedia system to address problems, and be extra sensitive to the appearance of violating its norms. If you represent a commercial interest, you are not considered a member of the community, and the fallout from a botched effort to correct your entry will be worse than the entry itself.

Wikipedia includes many entries on how to do Wikipedia. The new HBS case study will give you a quick introduction in a much more manageable form.

Tags: wikipedia PR HBS

For a while, it seemed that every conversation about companies interacting with bloggers fell back on the same few anecdotes. It was as if our economy were based on Dell and Kryptonite. For better or worse, that's changed now. We're seeing more examples of bloggers calling out companies, and all too often, the companies don't understand the culture. Today it's the National Pork Board.

Jennifer Laycock is a work-at-home mom and founder of The Lactivist, "a site that aims to promote breastfeeding through humor." One of her activities is selling shirts with funny slogans at CafePress, and one of her designs—The Other White Milk—was too close to The Other White Meat® for the eat-more-pig crowd.

We understand the need to defend trademarks, but the Pork Board skipped a step and went straight to the threatening letter (PDF). Look at Jennifer's complaint:

Now let me make one important point. I don't much care about selling the shirt. In fact, CafePress had removed it from the site before I ever even saw the letter from the law firm. It really doesn't matter to me if I ever sell it again. It's certainly not the cleverest slogan I've come up with so it's no big loss. What I'm ticked about is that rather than taking two seconds to send me a nice email to request that I remove it, they came in guns a blazin' with a lawyer crafted nasty gram that actually includes the phrase "We trust that after you have reviewed this matter, you will conclude that the better course is to promptly comply with National Pork Board's demands herein."

I don't have a lot of tolerance for bullies.

I still have a few days to decide what I'm going to do. Anyone know a good pro bono lawyer that's sympathetic to the breastfeeding cause?

There's a great summary I've seen too many times to attribute: Social media are about people. We tend to be more casual and personal here, so when you can, try a casual and personal approach. There must be some way you can ask nicely while preserving the ability to get nasty if that doesn't work.

Choose your battles
The popular perception of a fight like this is easy to predict. They're messing with Motherhood. How's roast pork with Apple Pie, anyway?

Just to make this more interesting, Jennifer's also the editor of Search Engine Guide, which means she hangs out with people who change search engine results for a living. As a result of this incident, her post is likely to rank well for "National Pork Board," since other search marketing bloggers are picking up the story.

The story, by the way, is "national trade group picks on advocate for mothers' milk." And a few people have seen it—remember, this happened today.

It's been Dugg.
It's on Reddit
It's on Netscape
It's on The Small Business Ideas forum.
It's on Marketing Pilgrim
It's on Traffick
It's on Breastfeeding 1-2-3
It's on Search Engine Land
It's on Shoemoney
It's on Search Engine Guide
It's on The Feeding Choices Board at BabyCenter
It's on I don't Know

Social media are about people. People with their own presses and empathetic audiences. Try engaging the person before you send the attack dogs; you might get what you want if you just ask.

Update: They apologized. Matt Bailey has an insightful view into how blogs and citizen marketers change the environment for these disputes.

Update2: The last word.

Tags: SERM bloggers motherhood PR

Two airlines, two tough days for air travel. The contrast between American's reaction to the mess in Austin and JetBlue's reaction to last week's chaos will be a good case study for someone. Have you noticed that passenger groups from both incidents have blogs? There's a difference, though. JetBlue's passengers got an even quicker start.

American's bad day was December 29. The stranded passengers blog launched January 9th—11 days after the incident. JetBlue Hostage launched February 15th—the next day.

At this rate, the next incident will have a dedicated blog before it happens. How's your reaction time?

Two bank stories crossed my reader this week. On the surface, both are posts from unhappy customers who happen to have blogs, although an important difference affects how the banks can respond. Dig just a little, and you'll also see that these bloggers have more than the usual visibility. Should that influence the banks' responses?

Bank of America
Seana Mulcahy tells how a bank merger started a chain of events that drained her account. It's a typical complaint post, except that Seana writes on a MediaPost blog, so she has an audience.

Months later I finally found a bank manager at the actual branch to help me. After pulling records, I was able to put it all together. Somehow I was being billed monthly for an account that was closed. It was a mortgage for a house I sold in May 2004. When BofA merged with Fleet, somehow my old mortgage payment got activated.

But what do you do when an expert criticizes your policies publicly?

AmSouth
Winn Schwartau doesn't like his bank's security policies, and he says so. After complaining to the bank for some time, he's written about it on his blog. Schwartau is a security consultant with a column in Network World, so it's safe to assume that he knows something about poor security:

Suffice it to say, for example, AmSouth uses SSNs as proof positive ID. I have bitched about this to them for 15 years... after all, it's just a nine digit number... but noooooo... AmSouth, in its infinite wisdom... (or should I say Regions) wants my nine digits to make it easier for ID thieves.

So, as I battle them, I will be posting bits and pieces of the conversations etc. from AmSouth, to keep you and others from being victimized as I have been.

Will the bank even notice before the promised part 2?

Once they notice, how can the bank respond? This isn't a simple customer service complaint. It involves policies and systems that can't be changed overnight.

Should they engage?
I would argue for a fairly high-level contact with Schwartau and consideration of the issues he brings up. After all, the issue is in his field, and there's a good chance that he has a point. Ignoring him is unlikely to make him go away quickly, but a constructive dialog could redirect his energy to a positive resolution. AmSouth could view his post as a form of unsolicited consulting, however unwelcome.

Anyone want to argue that the bank should not try to engage him? What's the case against moving this topic from his blog to personal contact?

Tags: blog monitoring bank BankofAmerica AmSouth Regions

Is fear the leading motivator for clients who want to monitor social media? A new BusinessWeek article focuses on companies' fears of online attack, but most of the people I talk to are more focused on using social media for market research. Even defensive monitoring activities aren't necessarily motivated by fear.

Most companies are wholly unprepared to deal with the new nastiness that's erupting online. That's worrisome as the Web moves closer to being the prime advertising medium—and reputational conduit—of our time. "The CEOs of the largest 50 companies in the world are practically hiding under their desks in terror about Internet rumors," says top crisis manager Eric Dezenhall, author of the upcoming book Damage Control. "Millions of dollars in labor are being spent discussing whether or not you should respond on the Web."

I'm not sure grouping social media analysis companies with ReputationDefender under a "counter-vigilantes" label is much of a compliment, either. I can read it as "opposed to vigilantes," but I think most readers in a hurry will interpret it as "the vigilantes on the other side."

B2B presents a more representative view of social media analysis as a tool for reputation management:

While public opinion surveys and media analysis have been traditional tools for measuring reputation, monitoring and analyzing online blogs and forums increasingly is important.
...
Blogosphere sentiment also can constitute leading-edge intelligence, since bloggers tend to pick up industry trends almost immediately and, unlike mainstream media, flog them heavily.

Tags: social media SMA blog monitoring reputation

Joshua Sinel brought up an important point in a comment today: social media analysis involves more than blogs. So much of the hype has centered on blogs and their role in stirring up trouble, but that's only part of the story. You might also look at online communities for insight. As usual, the question of what to analyze (and how) goes back to what you're trying to accomplish.

Conveniently, today's xkcd cartoon deals with a similar topic. Do these names look familiar (click through for a larger view)? Blogs are only part of what's going on.

Blogs get a lot of attention, because interesting things are happening in Blogistan. Mainstream media stories sometimes originate on blogs, so paying attention online can provide an early opportunity to take corrective action. We have case studies to encourage blog monitoring. But blogs have some limitations if you're looking for insight into the general population.

Bloggers aren't representative. Even with easy-to-use blogging platforms, blogging requires knowledge, effort and commitment. Bloggers are outspoken and opinionated, and most probably have an agenda. So while bloggers may be insightful or opinionated, they (we) probably aren't a good sample.

Josh's company, Kaava, was the first I interviewed for the Guide to Social Media Analysis. Kaava does its research on online communities—newsgroups, discussion boards and such—which have lower barriers to participation. As Josh wrote in his comment:

Threaded message boards have been around for a very long time, truly represent the most massive deposit of consumer insights online, and also truly represent an ongoing, mixed-constituency, consumer conversation.

Blogs have their use, even in the context of research in communities. They can give a preview of topics that may move into communities. But those communities may be the better place to performs research that attempts to gather insights that traditionally came from survey research.

Or, to summarize the roles of blogs and communities as Josh and others have described it:

• Blogs for awareness.
  
• Communities for consumer insight.
  

I like questions. They're frequently more useful than statements.

Tags: social media analysis, communities, Kaava

Does your organization have more time (and technical chops) than money? The World Bank today launched The BuzzMonitor, an open-source social media aggregator that provides a platform for monitoring and participating in social media in multi-user environments (via Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski). The catch is, you have to install and run it yourself.

The Buzzmonitor promises some handy features:

• Elimination of duplicate items from multiple search feeds.
  
• Automated keyword extraction & tag cloud generation.
  
• Embedded Alexa and Technorati rank information.
  
• Digg-style voting within your user base.
  
• User tagging and bookmarking.
  
• Internal commenting (visible only to other users on your system).
  
• Internal tag and search feeds.
  

The Buzzmonitor's sponsors at the World Bank suggest the program for "non-profit organizations, NGOs, foundations and think-tanks to see and hear what people are saying about them, their programs and understand the perception around important issues." Its GNU General Public License makes it free for anyone who wants to try it.

Now, here's the catch. The platform requirements put The Buzzmonitor out of reach for marketing managers who want something quick and easy. You'll need a server (preferably Linux) and someone to configure it, so this is a do-it-yourself job only for the technically skilled. More likely, this is something for your IT department to experiment with before you roll it out to users.

If all you want to do is see how it works, take the tour, which offers limited access to a live demo. I'd post a screenshot here, but if you really care, you'll go through the demo, anyway.

Tags: buzzmonitor blogmonitoring social media analysis

Today must be the day to think about online product reviews. With all the buzz about blog monitoring, it's important to remember other ways people share their opinions online. Monitoring product reviews is harder to automate than monitoring blogs, but their relevance is all but guaranteed.

Riva Richmond's article in today's Wall Street Journal points out the importance of online reviews to small business: Look Who's Talking. The key lesson here is that you don't have to have a high-profile brand to be reviewed online. Customers are reviewing local service businesses, too. The article includes practical advice on dealing with negative reviews (starting with fixing the problem).

Meanwhile, Greg Howlett relays key points from JC Whitney's Geoffrey Robertson in four things you should know about collecting user reviews:

1. User reviews have a huge impact on sales.
   
2. Companies need to aggressively solicit reviews.
   
3. User reviews do not necessarily improve customer loyalty.
   
4. User reviews do not necessarily drive more organic search traffic.
   

I wrote about an unhappy example of what you can learn from product reviews last October. Hasbro discovered a serious product problem by monitoring reviews on Amazon. At the time, the social media analysis vendors I was talking to generally didn't track product reviews. I still don't know of any tools to automate the process for do-it-yourself monitoring (aside from web-to-RSS services), but a number of companies in the Guide will monitor them for you.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring reputation product reviews

A little SEO-related reading will temper any naiveté you may harbor about how social media will make marketing everywhere all clean and shiny. While the advocates promote transparent, honest, personal new ways, someone else is figuring out how to game the system. Rand Fishkin just introduced a new term for a very distasteful idea (which he doesn't endorse): social media poisoning.

The practice involves proactively generating spammy comments, posts, links, etc. from a competitor's domain in order to make bloggers, social media contributors, forum owners, journalists, etc. view that brand in a negative light.

Dirty pool meets social media marketing... What's next, crude suggestions and URLs in truck stop rest rooms?

Tags: seo smo reputation

Let's play a quick game of word association.

Reputation

...

Did you say "PR"? Certainly, that's one group that has a major concern with reputation in business.

If you spend too much time online, as I do, you might have come up with "search engine," especially now that mainstream media have picked up on the existence of search engine reputation management.

Our grandmothers might have thought about what the neighbors think, but these are all the same thing. They're concerned with what others think about us.

Turn it around
What if a company were to apply reputation-monitoring techniques in evaluating potential business relationships? They could use reputation, not as it reflects on themselves, but as a source of insight into the other party.

Enter Ecofact, a Zurich-based consulting firm that advises clients, mainly in the financial sector, on business risks associated with global issues: the environment, social issues and human rights. Their new RepRisk service is a web-based due-diligence tool that evaluates potential reputational risks associated with proposed business deals.

You've probably seen charts like this based on sentiment or message volume. But this chart indicates the target company's negative associations with major issues as an indicator of the risk involved in a particular deal or project. The metric incorporates quantitative and qualitative views of exposure on pressure group web sites and in the media (social media evaluations are more experimental for now).

Imagine you're a commercial bank evaluating a loan prospect, or a manufacturer looking for offshore production partners. If Human Rights Watch or the National Labor Committee had targeted your potential borrower/supplier for its practices, would that factor into your decision? Reputational risk is contageous, you know.

Media analysis, but not marketing
RepRisk is an example of something I think we'll see more of: practical applications of media analytics for market intelligence outside of marketing functions. The source data and analytical techniques have much in common with typical practices in social media analysis—the difference is in the customer base and objective of the analysis.

In the end, an appreciation for reputational risk in business decisions means that the traditional concern for one's own reputation—and its potential financial impact—has been fully internalized. RepRisk is an application for businesses who've realized that one way to protect their own reputation is to choose carefully the company they keep.

Tags: RepRisk social media analysis

For a word that's so concerned with appearances, reputation sure gets around. In an online context, it plays with PR, search and e-commerce, showing different personalities in each setting. So when someone says "reputation," it's not always clear what they mean. But now, there's an effort to define standards around reputation metrics and their use in online interactions. Depending on how the project's scope shapes up, social media analysis companies might want to pay attention.

Defining reputation
You know what your reputation is. It's what people think of you. Which is actually very close to the dictionary definition and close enough to how corporate reputation specialists in PR describe it. You can aggregate reputation into a metric, but it doesn't fundamentally change the definition. Your reputation is what people think of you.

Throw it on the Web, though, and reputation shows different personalities. Search guys will talk about search engine or online reputation, meaning what shows up in the search results for your name. Auction sites and, apparently, peer-to-peer networks have their own systems based on your track record of good behavior in their specific contexts.

Like social media measurement, reputation is an interesting and useful concept that has different meanings depending on context. So the first thing I wonder is which version(s) people are talking about when they suggest creating standards.

TLA Soup: OASIS ORMS TC
Last week, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) announced a new Technical Committee (TC) on Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS).

OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new technical committee to make it easier to validate the trustworthiness of businesses, projects, and people working and socializing in electronic communities. The new OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee will define common data formats for consistently and reliably representing reputation scores. ORMS will be relevant for a variety of applications including validating the trustworthiness of sellers and buyers in online auctions, detecting free riders in peer-to-peer networks, and helping to ensure the authenticity of signature keys in a web of trust. ORMS will also help enable smarter searching of web sites, blogs, events, products, companies, and individuals."

Depending on how the TC defines its scope, this project could turn out to be relevant to social media analysis companies. The first meeting is on 1 May in Santa Clara, with a dial-in option for those too far away to attend.

A Better Influence?
I don't usually see reputation as a metric in social media analysis, but influence analysis is common. It's helpful for weighting and prioritization, so it's not going away (though it could do with some agreement on definition, itself). A readily available reputation metric could figure into an improved influence metric, and it could be an important part of site/participant profiles.

Gartner says that ORMS is worth watching, but don't expect it to lead to anything for a while (via Dion Hinchcliffe).

Thanks to Joseph Fiore at Repumetrix for the tip.

Bloggers who complain about their bad experiences with airlines: outspoken but unrepresentative, or the tip of the iceberg? When one blogger details the kind of travel day we all hope to avoid, what purpose is served? Is any airline learning anything from all this, or is it just the new way to escalate a customer complaint?

It's been almost 18 months since stranded passengers incidents started making headlines (and passengers started organizing online). Since then, the conventional wisdom has accepted that the U.S. airline industry is broken. The new standard is to be thankful if the airline can get you to Point B, never mind on time or with a smile.

David Ignatius writes about the problems in his column in today's Washington Post. He included an amazing quote from Robert Crandall, the retired chairman/CEO of American Airlines:

Our airlines, once world leaders, are now laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality and international reputation. Fewer and fewer flights are on time. Airport congestion has become a staple of late-night comedy shows. ... Airline service, by any standard, has become unacceptable.
—Robert Crandall, 10 June 2008

• Joseph Jaffe had a bad day with Delta Airlines.
  
• Continental didn't do any better for Boris Evelson.

Why complain?
Aside from the interesting reading about the bad luck of others—and face it, it's painfully fascinating stuff—what's the purpose of the complaint post? What are the benefits of complaining, in general as well as specifically about airlines?

1. Escalation. One possibility (explicitly stated in Jaffe's post) is that the blogger is still looking for a resolution of the complaint after the failure of normal methods. A side effect of company listening is that blogs can become an alternative channel for customer service, which bloggers now know. Delta noticed Jaffe's post; so far, there's no sign that Continental saw Evelson's.

2. Warning others. It's hard to think of a U.S. airline that doesn't have similar examples recently, but in less challenged industries, complaint posts can warn others of potential problems. From the blogger's perspective, it can be a valuable contribution to a community.

3. Ulterior motives. Commenters on Jaffe's post make an issue of his work on behalf of American Airlines, which he discloses in the post. I don't question his motives (nor do I care), but it does raise the point that some may complain because of an interest in a competitor.

4. Craziness. Complaints aren't always rational (not implying anything about the example posts!). Some people make a hobby of it and don't necessarily have a valid complaint.

5. Venting. Sometimes, you just have to let it out at the end of a bad day. A blog provides a public spot for a very visible primal scream.
   

1. Customer satisfaction. If customers are blogging in an attempt to receive service (escalation), companies need to decide whether and how to respond. Companies in the computer industry are answering this with formal links between customer service and social media monitoring activities. However, as David Churbuck points out, listening for customer service has side effects worth considering.

2. Insight. Complainers have been known to have a valid point. Monitoring and analysis of online discussions can identify issues (or opportunities) that you're not aware of. While you're busy defending yourself, don't miss the opportunity to extract the insights that are available in both quantitative and qualitative forms.

3. Online reputation management. After dealing with customer complaints and extracting insights, what's left is managing the fallout. Online reputation management combines a variety of strategies aimed at influencing search engine results, online conversations and, generally, opinions in the company's favor. This post is already too long to go into the details, but ignoring online complaints is not usually the recommended strategy.

As for the airlines, I think we're past the point of worrying about the reputation of any individual U.S. airline. The anecdotes cover too many companies. Now, the whole industry is the before picture in a turnaround story.

Research vendors: Is anyone working on an analysis of online discussions and airlines? I would think it could make a good source for the next industry-in-distress article in your favorite business publication.

Add BackType to the list of useful, free tools for monitoring social media (via IntelFusion). BackType, which launched this week, is a search engine for blog comments. The web site provides a convenient mechanism for finding comments by an individual or on a topic, with a social network-style "follow" feature and the now-standard RSS feeds for any search. This looks like a solid addition to the toolkit, useful for tracking your own mentions and for developing an understanding of interesting individuals.

Some ideas for first steps with BackType:

1. Search for comments about your company and products. Subscribe to the feeds.

2. Create an account with your usual handle and complete the profile. You want to give the right impression to people who search for your comments (and use the link to send them to your blog/site).

3. Develop a better understanding of individuals by searching for their comments. What blogs are they reading? What other topics do they find interesting? Influencer profiling is one application; hiring is another.

4. Follow a thought leader (subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be stealthy) to discover new sources.

The Conference Board's new report, Managing Reputation Risk and Reward (press release, via Leslie Gaines-Ross), reveals that intensive social media monitoring and engagement are still early-adopter activities. In order for these practices to move into the mainstream, business leaders must first be convinced of the relevance of social media to company reputation. Then comes the opportunity to apply metrics and modern tools to the perceived challenge of monitoring media activity.

Social media for early-adopter businesses
Almost two years after Business Week published Web Attack, the fear motivation hasn't made the rounds (greed is less prominent in a study on reputation). While 82% of respondents in the new report say their companies make substantial efforts to manage reputation risk, most don't think social media have a large impact on reputation.

As much as everyone inside the social media bubble is tired of hearing the same old stories, a significant population hasn't learned the lesson yet, and so shouldn't be a surprise that they're not doing much to manage their reputations online. Only a third of the companies in the survey have extensive social media monitoring programs in place, and 75% report little or no active participation in social media.

Monitoring media, but wanting more
Beyond the relevance of social media, many companies are stuck with dissatisfying, simplistic media monitoring models (replaying a hundred Katie Paine comments in my head as I write this). While most companies in the survey monitor traditional media, they were less likely to use automated systems in the effort, and simple metrics predominate.

Ironically, almost half listed "monitoring media coverage" as a very significant challenge.

The boss agrees, reputation is critical
CEOs agree on the importance of corporate reputation, though most think they don't have enough information about it. In the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 12th Annual Global CEO Study (via Jennifer Rice), 63% of CEOs surveyed rated strength of the company's brand and reputation as a critical source of long-term competitive advantage, while only 31% think they have the information they need about them. A similar gap exists between CEOs' knowledge and the importance of customer preferences and needs in the market.

Applied listening strategies
I see three related challenges here: lack of understanding of the impact of online activity, inadequate media analysis practices, and a need for new sources of market insight. Especially as social and traditional media become indistinguishable, I see these as closely linked. Listening strategies will help with each.

• Understand the reputation risk potential in social media.
  Review the oft-told tales of reputation crises that started or developed online. Notice how many online crises ended up in traditional media news coverage. Perform an initial audit to discover the company's current online reputation and its impact on company reputation in general.

• Upgrade monitoring of traditional media to measurement of all media types.
  The media monitoring and measurement market is evolving rapidly. If your current methods don't deliver useful and timely information, look at new options. Pay attention to the types of media sources they track to ensure that you find current developments that affect your company.

• Evaluate online sources for customer/market insight.
  Social media blur the boundary between media and social activity; evaluation of social media provides insight for both sides of the disappearing line. Measure online content for what your customers are saying to each other online, not just for general sentiment but for discovery of important topics.

Thanks to Frank Tortorici at the Conference Board for sharing the report with me.