Feb 13

Why organisations should listen…

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It never ceases to surprise me that there are organizations that still wonder why they should listen to social media. Listening organizations are simply more responsive and that does have a direct correlation with the brand’s reputation and yes indeed, sales.

Here is a case in point that a friend shared with us recently.

He was looking for a book and found it on a site called Infibeam.  But he hadn’t heard of them.  So he visited their site but was not convinced. Then he googled, read a blog, and ordered his book.

Why did our friend decide to buy from Infibeam?

Because he saw this blog post dated ‘Tuesday 9 February 2010′ titled ‘Infibeam Rocks‘ on a blogger’s site.

It seems this student had bought the wrong book on Infibeam and there’s no way to cancel after making payment. When he realized his mistake, he went back to the site and checked the FAQs and found that they don’t support cancellation of orders after payment has been made.

Having realized that there was nothing he could do about the situation and understandably disturbed about the whole thing, he decided to tweet about it. Later, he received a few missed calls on his phone from a strange number followed by an email from Infibeam saying that they had received his request for cancellation of his order through twitter.com. And they offered to credit his Infibeam account with the amount which could be then used for next purchase.

They cancelled his order and refunded the amount. His reaction is absolute delight.

What the blogger says about Infibeam

“I don’t know about you, but I’m very impressed by their customer service. The fact that they took the initiative to monitor twitter for tweets mentioning “Infibeam” for any problems that users face is a strong indication that they aren’t just some random E-Store. They have definitely made a permanent customer out of me!”

So why should organizations listen?

  • So they can respond to customers
  • So they can convert one-time customers to life-long customers
  • So they can generate positive word-of-mouth
  • So they can get new customers
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Jan 25

Can Insight be automated?

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Software, technology and BI tools are taking over. The charting, graphing is all very exciting. The amounts of data processed and the speeds at which it is done is indeed staggering. But, here’s my question. Is this really taking us closer to the interest group we are studying or further away?

Take social media monitoring tools for example. They are wonderful, as I have said in an earlier post, but only as a start point.

Like Nathan Gilliat says in his article On the (Non-) Automation of Insight, “Social media analysis tools are software; they do some of the work, but to get the most out of them, you need someone who knows how to use them. Regardless of the tools used, at some point people take over. It may be earlier in the process (manual content analysis) or later (analysis and reporting), but eventually, a person takes what the computer produces and does something with it.” Another brilliant article by the same author compares the value of human-assisted software analysis versus software-assisted human analysis. Either way, software alone is not enough.

Another very simple take on the matter is by Mark Goren in his blog post Social media monitoring He writes, “It’s easy to look at numbers and statistics. It’s fun to watch your influence and reach grow far and wide across the web. However, if you’re not bothering to click through and read, don’t bother at all. All the real insights come from reading.”

That is my position too. Eventually, whether you use a 600$ a month subscription for a tool or use some of the brilliant free tools available, someone (ideally with a qualitative research frame-of-mind) will have to read through the actual posts and draw insights from that.

If you have a take on this topic, please share it here.

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Jan 21

SMM Tools – What they cannot do

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In an earlier post, I have said how amazing some of the social media monitoring tools are as a start point for any social media based research.

Here are some of the limitations of what any tool can provide, in my opinion:

1) Keywords: Most of the social media monitoring tools available today have a mechanism of identifying the top keywords associated with a search term, but really what does this tell you? For instance, how is it helpful to get a list of say words like bharti, telecom, mobile, india, free, subscribe etc, when you search for comments on Airtel. Does it evoke a picture of the attitudes and perceptions surrounding the brand or the hot themes/ topics surrounding the brand that are being discussed?

2) Natural language processing: Some of the professional tools available have a NLP component in them but what happens to typos, which social media is full of, sentiments that are not just positive or negative but fall into a thousand shades in between, and what about subtleties, nuances, irony? And most importantly, in a country like India, a lot of the comments in social media use the English script but the words could be Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam or any of the other Indian languages. What happens to standard NLP when faced with that kind of variety of expression?

3) Sentiment Tagging: First of all, sentiment is not merely positive, negative or neutral. Human sentiments would be hard to measure and quantify, even in the best of scenarios, but let us start by acknowledging that there is a very vast range of sentiments possible. And even in this simplistic positive-negative model, ordinarily the SM tool tags a statement like ” Good show, he got thrown out” as a positive sentiment based on the word ‘good’ in the comment. Bloopers like this are a matter of course in using SM tools.

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Jan 20

SMM Tools – A start point

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Here’s my two bits on the social media monitoring tools available today. The ones mentioned in this post are the free tools, but even the paid tools will have mostly the same pluses and minuses.

The positives first – an SMM tool is of course, the best and most logical place to start if you want to track the visibility of a brand or issue. All of them do pull out the posts that match the search term and present the same to you. Some are better organized than others. Icerocket and socialmention.com are two great start points for any search. And of course, there are a plethora of twitter specific tools like twazzup, monitter, twitalyzer and tweetbeep.

Visibility stats or scores are fairly interesting measures as provided by the tools. Of course, one must remember to cross-verify these numbers across tools, so as to not propagate the tool bias. Howsociable has its own visibility score and personally, I find their simple presentation of various SM sources, a great portal page to start the drill-down to the actual comments and posts.

Another interesting graph or chart some of them provide is one that compares the number of mentions of a certain keyword (brand) vs. another. Definitely an indicator of sorts, even if you then use your own methodology to confirm this. Trendpedia is a great example of comparison charting.

Most of the tools will also give some idea of the key influencers who are talking about the brand or issue and that is certainly useful.

My next post will be on what the tools cannot do and why a human analyst is required to derive anything meaningful out of social media monitoring.

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Jan 19

Is anybody listening to customer cribs?

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Yesterday, I spent an hour on the phone with a call center executive from a reputed insurance company in India. She called, obviously, to deliver the spiel on “product features” robotically in a monotone. However, as part of the introduction, she mentioned that the call was being recorded for managerial purposes.

Her message delivered, she customarily went into the “can I help you with anything else?” bit, and yes, I did have a sorry tale to share, especially since the call was being recorded and I did hope that someone would listen eventually.

I painstakingly and in great detail went over an experience of walking into their branch office a fortnight ago, with clear indications of:

a) what my basic expectation as a customer would be

b) what actually transpired

c) how that makes me feel, including doubting the purchase decision itself

I also went into suggestions of the small changes that could be made to enhance any future customer experience.

Call centers being one of the main customer contact points for an organisation must be getting thousands of such calls each day. The researcher in me wonders whether this wealth of spontaneous feedback, recorded as I was informed, will ever be tapped into for “guiding the decisions and strategies” that can actually make a change. Is anyone  analysing this data from a business intelligence perspective or does it lie quietly in a separate silo called “call center operations”?

Simply put, is anyone listening?

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Jan 18

Musings on the new revolution

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Fact is social media is here, now!

From a social observer point-of-view, it is heartening that media is no longer the purview of the few but many, nay, all can have a say.  This is the new revolution and is changing the way people connect, exchange ideas, perspectives and opinions with each other.

Interestingly, people seem to trust other people’s opinions expressed in social media even  though they may not know them personally. This fact alone, can change the way organizations split their marketing budget, with traditional forms of advertising having to share the pocket with new media initiatives.

From a researcher point of view, I am most excited that we can now tap into a wealth of spontaneous feedback and overcome the usual questioner bias because social media is the space in which opinions, views, perceptions, attitudes are being sought and shared. All we need to do is tap in and listen!

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