It may be hard to put a dollar amount on what social sentiment is worth to your company, but it is one of the most valuable tools your company can harness. Whether your organization is already aware of its social sentiment, or it hasn’t yet begun to monitor it, companies should take heed to the power of sentiment. A customer’s perception and attitude towards a company has a tremendous impact on the success of the business in the realm of social capital.
Last year, notable director Kevin Smith was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight because he was considered an oversized passenger by Southwest Airline’s “Customer of Size” policy. With over two million twitter followers, Kevin Smith took to social media and started a PR disaster for the airline. Southwest lost a significant amount of customers because of the way the situation was handled. While it is true that not everyone has over 2 million followers but almost any social media user knows how to influence their network in just 140 characters.
Sentiment is subjective. If you provided the exact same service for two customers their perception of that service could be polar opposites. Companies will never be able to produce a perfect experience for their customers one-hundred percent of the time. So if you can’t make everyone happy what’s the point in monitoring sentiment?
Sentiment allows companies to know what’s being said about their brand. If your company is investing money into building social capital there must be a reason. Whether it is brand image, awareness, or increasing sales, the goal must be tied back to a company objective. Knowing what is said about your brand can affect all three areas.
Sentiment can potentially show areas of growth. While monitoring the conversation new ideas might be presented by customers. Getting feedback of existing services and products might provide valuable insight into areas that you might not have thought of.
Positive Sentiment can provide new customers. . Peer to peer recommendations typically carry more weight than business to customer. If customers are happy and excited about what you have to offer they will use their influence and social reach to tell about a service or product. In fact, many social media users turn to their network of followers or friends specifically for recommendations on restaurants, products and more.
In the age of social communications customers cucuare quick to turn to their social networks to share the details of a bad experience or a disappointing product. One bad review to a large audience is all it takes for the airwaves to catch on. Big and small brands are at the mercy of the consumer’s opinion and outcry of unhappiness.
pwyro, I like your point that it's not a social media issue, but a corporate need to take the feedback gained and use it to build better quality engagement with customers. Exactly! It all gets down to how well they're serving clients on a regular basis.
to me, it's unrealistic to expect all local companies (franchises in the case of most places like Chili's) to manage social media without adversely impacting the "mother" brand. Let's face it. Social media is a refined skill that even the best don't always manage (McDonald's recent debacle).
However, the opportunity for immediacy is easy given our digital world. It certainly would require a methodology for how to deal with a complaint not only at the big corporate level where a gift certificate is forwarded, but also a way to queue feedback to the appropriate manager so that he/she comes along side and does the coaching needed with the franchise owner and that owner with his/her staff.
All of this truly depends on corporate engagement and buy-in, though, to adoption of feedback. A good example of a company that turned their company around in this respect is Exxon after the major oil spill in Alaska. They took that accident to heart and purportedly adopted a zero-tolerance to negligence and accidents throughout all levels of their organization.
So, it can be done, but for companies to make this leap, they must engage themselves. Their ability to engage internally will almost certainly be the bottom-line in whether they make the adaptation to external engagement.
janice
@Janice R Hughes The Valdez spill happened when I was in college (pre-social-media) and I remember something that Exxon did that was social-savvy or at least PR-savvy. Either directly or indirectly through other organizations, they hired crunchy, green students like myself and paid them outrageous hourly rates to clean up beaches and geese. A smart PR move, win over the people that hated you most by purchasing their goodwill.
On other fronts, you're definitely addressing one of the big important operational issues about engaging your audience . It's important that each organization's level of engagement is balanced with operational priorities and resources. Most franchise organizations would have little trouble devising a structure that included local community champions, centrally coordinated in concert with their internal or external strategic communications partners.
That doesn't mean that you have to be big to be engaged. I would argue that for many small businesses, an effective community building or social business program can be just as important or even more effective than any other media. There's nothing more powerful than an influential endorsement with reach into a local community. Advertising just isn't the same. It comes pre-packaged with a certain amount of disbelief and distrust.
The mistake that most small businesses make isn't that they don't value social marketing, it's that there is a knowledge-gap in how to be truly engaged with audiences and often, they mistake activity for effectiveness. @Blake McCammon 's nice blog post generated a useful and thoughtful discussion and was infinitely more valuable than 10 posts that were completely ignored.
Listening, storytelling and strategic intent are still important parts of any effective social business platform.
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It's great to know how that's done. If I can, let me take it a bit further and pose the question in a different way. How can corporate PR/social media teams use the information they gather and direct that toward making changes on the local level, without their being a significant lapse in time? Like in the Chili's example, their corporate PR agency took advantage of that small window to make up for the bad experience, but the same problems still remained at that local Chili's location.
Obviously not all companies are large corporations, but in situations where that is the case, do you believe that each location needs to have a social media presence, and is that feasible? Or in other words, what is the best way for specific locations that are part of a large corporation to take advantage of sentiment?
@Greta Gray The real honest truth, is for corporations to stop thinking about the media part of social media and to start thinking about how the organization get's "operationalized" around deeper engagements with their customers. The roles of public relations and advertising firms are changing and there are a lot of tough questions being asked of them and their roles with clients.
How are companies becoming a part of the conversation? Are they sending in surrogates to intervene on their behalf or are they developing partnerships that help facilitate the conversation or provide actionable intelligence?
10 years ago. Chili's wasn't even invited to participate in that conversation between a patron and her friends about a bad experience. Chili's found out about it because someone up the corporate food chain noticed a decline in attendance (many months later). Now, that conversation doesn't just happen behind closed doors; it's all out in the open and you can't even put your fingers in your ears, close your eyes and say "la, la, la" and tune it out. Not listening is a matter of choice, not access.
There are strategies and techniques and technologies for listening, developing communication strategies and measuring the various ways that people interact and take action as they share and click and so-forth. But let's take it down a bit further. For each organization, I'd argue that they need a community strategy. For Chili's? Maybe that's someone in charge of developing a region who also shared responsibility with store managers, requiring them to maintain an effective "net promoter score" or to seek out and address any negative feedback. And all of this would be closely integrated with strategic efforts from partnered strategic communications firms.
For each firm, this might look a little different.
If we start with the assumption that companies with deeper relationships, greater responsiveness and more customer collaboration will dominate markets, we can start to put pictures together about what that might look like from company to company.
-peter
Latest blog post: Local - Coming Soon
@pwyro Thanks for the insight. It will be interesting to see how all of those things shape up (and change, and then shape up again...) in the coming years. I completely agree that it will be those companies that are actively engaged in the conversation AND take action accordingly, that will be the front-runners in this race. As they say, talk is cheap. It has to be backed up by something stronger that consumers can see.
In my opinion, this is/will become a big factor in ROI. If social sentiment is such a valuable tool, as I agree with you and Blake that it is, then we're going to have to look at it as such. (And help companies understand what they're buying into when they bring on a team that specializes in this.) I think organizations probably have a general grasp of what it means for their company, but it's going to take some diving in and investing on their part to fully benefit from it. They may as well get on board, though, because wherever these conversations are happening, (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, or whatever is next) they're here to stay. Just some thoughts!
Greta, great example from Chili's. There's certainly a short window of opportunity to do anything about a negative experience, but you can see how this kind of monitoring is a customer service necessity. To answer your question about how companies monitor or measure this - most companies, including our company, use various technologies that mine social platforms for targeted keywords, phrases, etc..; but that's about where the automated process stops. Our philosophy is to use real humans to actually score the tone of the communications. It's difficult for any automated system to understand sarcasm, i.e. #winning.
When we have a great volume of messages, it's a science project. We use a small army of Ph.D. researchers to design a study and select a sample, score and statistically analyze trends and come up with a smart interpretation.
Good stuff and thanks for your feedback.
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This is a great topic and is so relevant. I especially like the part about monitoring sentiment and using it to help you identify areas of growth. However, I do question exactly how companies do this.
For instance, several weeks ago I had a negative experience at Chili's and tweeted about it. Within an hour, someone tweeted me back from the restaurant's corporate account and apologized. They told me to email my info to them and they would make it up to me. A few weeks later, I received an apologetic letter and a gift card in the mail. This was all very nice of them, but nothing has changed about the restaurant. (And yes, of course I still used it!) But the problem that I see here is engaging specific franchise or corporate locations in the conversation when the social sentiment is being monitored by corporate entities. Any ideas on how this can be done?
On a separate note, I do agree with Janice about feelings influencing what people say and that being an unfortunate part of using social media. From an organization's viewpoint, it's not fair. From a consumer's viewpoint, it could create a missed opportunity. (Such as making a decision not to go to a restaurant because someone says they had bad service, when in reality, their own personal problems may have amplified a minor issue.) In the long run, though, you have to take the bad with the good and hope that positive sentiment outweighs the negative sentiment your organization may receive.
Anyway, this is a great read!
Janice -
I completely agree with you that the consumers behavior shifts from day to day. That's why every time a service or product is launched there are 100 different products and services that are similar being introduced into the market. It's important to monitor what people don't like about your product because companies are being forced to adapt to consumer behaviors, which happens quite frequently. That's why monitoring sentiment is important. You want to be known as a leader which acquires adapting fast.
Janice, thanks for your feedback. You're definitely right about the emotional connection between our perceptions and our behavior. That's also a big, important issue for all companies, obviously important when it comes to doing something that creates bad-will, but also when it comes to evaluating the overall tone and perception of good things. Sentiment helps companies evaluate if their brands are loved or completely ignored. The great thing about negative sentiment is that your audience is tuned in and when people are listening, there's an opportunity to solve a problem or get feedback. I bet there are even a few companies that test the waters of negative perceptions so that they can "get on the radar" and have some influence.
Blake, I dunno...to me, this is one of the unfortunate realities in our current age. The thing about sentiment is that it's based on feelings and feelings shift if I'm hungry, tired, ...
While I think companies would be wise to not do stupid things like not appropriate deal with "united broke my guitar" situations, I also think there's a place of personal responsibility that many shirk because they can play upon the harp strings of people's sentiment. Southwest, for instance, put the policy in for a reason that reflects other people's complaints. They may not have handled that instance well, but in a day-and-age of online purchase & check-in, it's a little difficult for them to screen requests ahead of time.
Not to get distracted with that particular instance, I think treating people graciously and sticking to business is far better than intentionally manipulating sentiment, which seems to happen far more than would be best.
Anywho, no obligation to agree/comment. Just expressing MHO. ;-)