New best practices paper on social media monitoring, engagement, measurement

We’ve just release a new study on emerging best practices in social media monitoring, engagement and measurement based on interviews with large corporations like Cisco, Intuit, GE and with the top monitoring technology providers (Visible Technologies, Radian6, Cymfony, Market Sentinel), who have fascinating stories based on existing clients and from the RFP/sales process.

(Economy be damned, one technology provider even had to fire a big brand company because its agency was basically spamming bloggers and Tweeters.)

The report includes sections on:

  • Guidelines for responding, engaging, working with legal, staffing
  • Measurement
  • Biggest surprises
  • Most common mistakes
  • Advice
  • Next steps

What I found especially interesting:

  • Universal agreement that people in companies should be engaging in social media conversations– NOT outside agencies.
  • Creating monitoring systems is straightforward; developing engagement strategies is much more complex, requiring a lot of employee education and process redesign (ex: customer service)
  • The stronger the corporate culture of trust and employee empowerment, the easier it is to implement and scale enterprise-wide monitoring and engagement approaches.
  • Insights from social media monitoring are extremely valuable, but creating the right reports to glean that value for different functions is challenging.
  • For most companies legal has not been an obstacle. But collaborating with legal is essential. (See tips on dealing with legal in the report.)
  • How few conversations require or could benefit from a response. Many companies think the cost would be exorbitant to assign people to respond to Tweets, blogs and forums, but once they analyze the data and do a business case analysis the investment for the value provides a good return on investment, whether it’s for customer service, sales, or reputation management.

To get a free copy of the report, click here.

Would love to hear  your thoughts about these best practices based on your experience. What’s missing?

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Low cost video exceeding 1.3 million black and white views

We’ve been analyzing characteristics of marketing content that gets shared and passed around. Here’s an example of a home-grown advertisement from Red House Furniture in High Point, NC that has 1.3 million + views on YouTube, has been covered by on a number of news programs including CNN, and is being covered all over the Blogosphere.

The reason for its appeal? It’s provocative, employees and customers introduce themselves as being black or white, and talk about how the furniture is good for black people and white people. Racial? Yes. Racist, no way. Just pointing out that blacks and whites like the same kind of furniture. Hilarious? Most definitely

The video is also genuine — real employees, real customers, low production quality and a folksy tune sung by two geeky guys: “The Red House…where black and white people buy furniture.” (The company os also sells tee-shirts with the theme, leveraging the interest in the video

The video was a risky best for The Red House, but good for the owners for taking a chance. I hope the attention is bringing in lots of business.

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Verizon's customer service secret: community super users

What motivates people to help other people in online communities?  Personal satisfaction, recognition, peer respect, and being treated as “insiders.”

Yesterday’s New York Times has a good article about Justin McMurry who volunteers 20 hours a week in Verizon’s online community, helping customers with technical questions. (“Customer Serivice? Ask a Volunteer”)

The secret to success, says Verizon’s director of e-commerce Mark Studness, is creating an online environment that attracts the “super-users” who are the people who so actively post and help other people, answering thousands of questions that Verizon would otherwise have to pay its people to answer. The right environment, says Studness, “is where the magic happens.”

Lyle Fong, founder of Lithium Technologies, a community technology platform, believes that super-users  in customer communities are like online gamers. This is why Lithium offers rating systems for the contributors with rankings, badges and ‘kudo counts.’

“That alone is addictive,” said Fong. “They are revered by their peers.”

In addition to reducing call center costs Verizon has found that the online customer communities have providing new product and service ideas and created a large searchable knowledge base.

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Community of Sweden

Here’s a great example of a online community that delivers on its business objectives.  I just got back from Scandinavia (Denmark) and want to go back after joining CommunityofSweden.com, the community that is part of VisitSweden, the official Swedish tourism site.  Community of Sweden,  developed by Tommy Sollen, does several things right:

Co-creation: First, Tommy co-created the community with people.  He started out with a development blog asking people to share stories and pictures about Sweden — as well as for their ideas on the design of the community.

Design reflects brand: The community was designed to be clean, tidy, bright, positive, warm and friendly — the same feeling people say they get when they visit Sweden.

Photos! The purpose of the community is to inspire people to travel to Sweden. There’s no better way to inspire travel like great photos. The community makes it easy for people to upload and tag photos. I especially like the map feature where you can click on a location and up comes photos tagged with that location. (As well as stories from that area.) The tagging feature also minimizes the back end administrative work.

Board of directors’ fears unfounded: Tommy said that the board’s biggest concern was that people would post negative or inappropriate comments. Since its launch in Nov. 2007 there have been no issues.

Empowered users: the community’s easy-to-use tools allow users to be in control. They can rate content, take down content they might feel is inappropriate or misplace, create profiles, start discussion threads.  Everything is published immediately, furthering inspiring trust. And members can create widgets to put on their own blogs and social networks. In other words, the community belongs more to the community than the tourism organization.

Integrated into the tourism Web site: the community is now also part of the official VistSweden Web site, embedding social intelligence into a marketing web site.  Embedded reviews and recommendations soon will become a fundamental feature of all web sites. Sweden is ahead.

One interesting factoid about the community: Italians are the most active members.

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Brag books

Sometimes the small things can set your products and brand apart.

Yesterday I received a beautiful cloth-covered photo album from  Rag & Bone Bindery. But the company calls the album a “Brag Book.”  Wow, it’s so much more fun to have a brag book than a photo album — and I know what special photos will go into a brag book vs. any old album. (See how a unique name garners word of mouth recommendations like this?)

One of the company’s other appealing product lines is their “Twelve Way” books — Twelve Wishes for Baby, Twelve Ways You Made A Difference.

If someone you know is seriously ill, depressed about losing a job, coming up on a milestone birthday, a wonderful gift would be to create a Twelve Ways You Made A Difference book.   I received something similar on my 50th birthday and it was the most inspiring  gift of my life.  My mother, who is dying, has also been receiving notes about how she has made a difference in people’s lives and she says it’s the best gift of all.

Oops, there I go with the word of mouth again. See how approaching a commodity category in fresh new ways can get you out of the commodity business and into a good market niche?

PS — Jason Thompson of Rag & Bone has a very cool blog, too.

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Odd CEO behavior

This week Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy did something unusual for a CEO. When faced with layoffs he asked his employees for ideas on what the hospital could do to protect lower wage earning employees– the hard working transporters, food service workers, housekeepers.

That’s right, asked an auditorium full of employees for their ideas. Talk about respecting your people and valuing their counsel.

And, boy, did he get ideas.  A floor or nurses unanimously volunteered to give up their pay raise. A finance guy suggested working a day less a week. The ideas kept coming after the meeting — almost 100 emails an hour to the CEO.

Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen wrote a beautiful column today about Levy’s bold leadership step, “A head with a heart.” Don’t miss it. Levy is an example of leadership for a new era, where CEOs trust, embrace and collaborate with employees to together do what’s best for all. Where participation creates solutions far more creative and accepting than those in the old command-and-control model.

“Paul Levy is trying something revolutionary, radical, maybe even impossible. He is trying to convince the people who work for him that the E in CEO can sometimes stand for empathy.”

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Simple social networks for serious problems

Last Tuesday night my mother was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with several fast-growing malignant brain tumors. Life as we know it was pulled from under our feet. By Friday she had had major neurosurgery.

One challenge has been trying to keep all her many friends and extended family members up to date — and  to nicely keep people from coming to the hospital as my mother is in no shape for visitors.

So how great was it to find two free social networking services, CaringBridge and CarePages, that let you update the patient’s progress, alerting friends and family about the posts by email. The social networks also include a guestbook where people can leave notes for my mother in one place.

Hopefully we’ll also use CaringBridge to mobilize casseroles (OK, lobster rolls) and rides to the beach when my mother is able to return home to Cape Cod, her number one priority.

The real beauty of these sites is that they’re so simple, to both set up and for my mother’s contemporaries to use.  I love social technologies that address a real need.  Thank you, thank you CaringBridge. (That’s what I went with because I like supporting non-profits.)

I hope you never have need, but if you know someone who does, please make their life a little easier by recommending these sites.

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The Irish Sports Pages 2.0

My Irish grandmother Norah Kelly use to open The Boston Globe first thing every morning to the obituaries, which she fondly called “the Irish sports pages.”  While some filled their days talking about the Red Sox, she and her friends found the obits a much more satisfying topic of conversation. (And Norah was quite pleased when I got a job in high school writing obituaries for the local paper. The obits, she knew, mattered.)

Now I find that one of the only reasons I read my local newspaper is the obituaries. Two weeks ago I opened the paper and learned that one of my all-time favorite clients had died of cancer at just 59 years old. I was  glad to know the news. Yet I thought, “what if I had been out of town as usual? I would have missed that. What else have I missed?”

The second thing I wondered was how best to send a note to her teenage daughter as I couldn’t find a mailing address.

The third thing was, “what happens when the local paper goes under,” which by the looks of things could be this year. How will I stay on top of my Irish sports pages?

That’s why Tributes.com is such an interesting and potentially big business concept. You can set up alerts for obituaries, write tributes to people who have died that others can also contribute to, and you can email that former client’s daughter about just how generous, funny and smart a woman her mother was.

In this deep recession old business models will die, but new ones like Tributes will find a market.

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U.S. Air Force: guidelines on responding to blogs

Kudos to the U.S. Air Force for developing some smart, easy-to-understand criteria and guidelines for how to engage with bloggers.  While you’d think a branch of the military would be especially rigid and controlling, the Air Force appears to be much more progressive than many companies, recognizing that the way to build and maintain reputation is to help your employees be your best word of mouth advocates.

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Congratulations

“I can’t believe they said congratulations. This iMac must be really special. No one has ever congratulated me for buying something.”

These words from my 13-year-old son on Saturday morning after we bought an iMac. The store manager came out to the floor and introduced himself, handed my son the box, shook his hand and congratulated him. On the way out a young sales assistant said the same thing.  Talk about a shopping and customer service experience and making a lasting brand impression on a young consumer.

One word conveys a lot of meaning.

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