During the past two weeks, I have been researching different products and services that can help businesses manage their reputations online. These tools, which range in prices from free to several thousand dollars per month, offer a wide range of capabilities. The most common features are the ability to track twitter updates, blogs and other social media tools where customer might be communicating about your brand. Additionally, they provide different levels of analytics to track changes in customer attitude over time.
While it is encouraging to see that more and more companies are looking into incorporating social media as part of their marketing efforts, it seems that most are simply missing the point. Social media is about building communities. Solely tracking consumers’ conversations so you can intervene if it turns negative is like having your best player in the sidelines, and putting him in only when your team is losing. By the time a company addresses the issue, most consumers have already formed a negative opinion about their products and/or services, and the company is forced to constantly play defense.
Companies need to devote more time and effort to become a part of the conversation. They should discontinue their practice of blasting off emails and twitter updates, and simply focus on helping one customer at a time. The power of social media comes in when others see these conversations, and immediately form a positive opinion (whether consciously or subconsciously) about the brand. In addition, if a customer is asking a question about a company, chances are other customers have similar questions/concerns.
Social Media Monitoring and Reputation Management tools SHOULD be a part of your social media strategy. But they should not be your only strategy. Companies should adopt social media monitoring or reputation management tools only to make sure that no questions or concerns are left unanswered. In the next few months, TopSource will evaluate some of the different tools in order to create an offering for our members. If you are familiar with these tools, please submit your recommendations as a comment to this post.
I will get the list started with:
http://www.visibletechnologies.com/
Tags: Grocery marketing, monitoring buzz, Social Media, social media consultant, social media expert, social media help, social networks, supermarket marketing, topsource, topsource marketing
November 17, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Monitoring should not be solely for reaction, but being proactive and building foundation to engage and build long term relationships. Thank you for the shout out as a listening and engagement tool.
Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL