This summer I made the first steps toward creating something of my own. I joined Future Makers, an incubation program for young wannabe entrepreneurs, and started working on my idea: building boardgames to help kids study school subjects.
In my 20s I had a lot of ideas, dropped them all. In time I wanted to sell jewelry I made, build a website where I wrote about how I learned stuff online, I recently wanted to sell my dad’s homemade jams (he makes amazing stuff!). The most important project: I wanted to write and make a living out of it. But somewhere along the way I quit, thinking I couldn’t make it happen.
The idea of designing board games to get kids to study school topics first came when playing Risk and Ticket to Ride. In a last minute frenzy, I jotted down the idea of a board game for pupils. I was among the 50 finalists that made the cut and among the 28 that pitched their business ideas in front of a jury last week. It was a long road this summer, weeks packed of training and courses. tiresome evenings with team meetings debating decisions and next steps.
There’s this cliche quote that runs free on social media: ‘find what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ Yes, it is cliche, but it bears a modicum of truth. I lost track of the hours I put into this project and found meaning in building something. Escaping the digital universe and creating something useful, tangible. I’ve made it here and I do not plan to quit, I’ll keep going and bring ‘Țară, Țară, vrem români’ to life.
Customers do NOT talk on the topics brands want to push out. And us, marketers and brands alike, miss out on important, relevant conversations just because we are too self involved. We want to brag, not to listen.
And maybe that is why Share of Voice is such an important metric, the one you’ll find showcased in every social media analytics tool dashboard. Similar to fans/followers/likes, without context this might just be a vanity metric. Why? Because:
A Share of Voice increase might actually mean you have a problem. I.e a product malfunction, a reputation crisis, the site is down, there are rumors the company is being sold out etc. Ask yourself why the increase before you decide it is a good thing.
A Share of Voice increase might not mean you did good by your brand. It can literally mean that your competitors stopped pushing their product through PR or ads. Or it might mean that the online retailers had giveaways/special offers that triggered online mentions and now they stopped.
A Share of Voice increase might be a blip on the radar if not interpreted correctly. If you track it monthly, it can literally mean just some dozens of online mentions, and they could be just a halo effect of a PR campaign you did a while ago.
There are a lot of solutions for the problems outlined above, but they imply that both the analyst and the Marketing Manager are willing to hone in on what is really important and don’t give in to the reporting frenzy. Let’s just list a couple of these solutions.
Three Solutions To Improve Reporting Focused On Share Of Voice.
Proper set-up of both the social listening tool AND the reporting framework. Make sure that your tool is set up properly by setting up spam filters and including all relevant sources for you.
For example, if you are running a PR campaign on multiple industry publishers’ sites, make sure the tool crawls them (Forbes, for example, has been reported to prohibit tracking by some of the tools I worked with)
Double down on Share of Voice with other relevant data points to paint the whole picture.
This translates into sentiment analysis (how much of the mentions are positive/negative) and follow that trend, Also track main topics of conversation and most shared news.
(For pros with access to a lot of data and in depth understanding of business needs and brand identity): leverage imagological analysis to create an ideal brand persona and measure and report on that one.
How would that look? It’s not an easy job and as an analyst you need full access to the brand strategist/whoever safeguards the brand in the company you work for or on the client side if you work in an agency. This ideal brand persona would focus on two, maximum three dimensions. Let’s work with an example, let me stick with Vodafone as I already wrote about them.
For Vodafone the dimensions I would work on would be (just off the top of my mind, brand execs might not agree on this one): 1) technology, 2) stakeholder relationships, 3) value for money provided. The social listening tool would be leveraged to tag all mentions with one of these three and I’d double check on the sentiment analysis. And then it’s a matter of numbers. And good, relevant reporting on brand health and which of the dimensions is responsible for most of the risks or most of the positive conversation. This will not only paint the entire picture, it will also help brand execs know what dimensions need improvement in terms of brand perception and where more investment would actually turn the needle.
Done with reporting? Let’s look at other ways to leverage social listening for your content.
Reporting is important, but sometimes most of the juicy stuff that comes out of social listening gets lost in translation from analyst to reporting template. The insights sometimes just do not fit into the little boxes, graphs, the quarter of the quadrant you have available to squeeze in all your learnings.
The solution is simple: go beyond this and provide the team that actually creates the content for the brand with the insights you get out of listening in on all those conversations. What to look at?
First of all, look at what your target audiences are interested in/talk about.
See if it matches your content strategy. If not, update it to include trending topics. If yes, ask yourself if you have the right tone of voice, reach the audience at the right moment and have the right distribution channels in place to reach them. Maybe you do talk about topics important to the audience, but not on the right channel. When doing social listening reporting for one B2B business I found a lot of conversation around engineers (the business’s core target), but it was all on … google groups if you can believe it! An idea we discussed back then was to talk with our in-house engineers and identify one brand advocate to enter those groups and share relevant know-how and be helpful for the community there. Similar to Quora, where brand advocates respond with helpful advice and are fully transparent about where they work.
Address the problems your customers experience while engaging with your brand’s product/service.
If they have security concerns you could propose to address those in a lot of ways: improve FAQ section on website, create educational content on how they can protect their personal data, have live Q&A sessions on your social channels on the topic. You get it, be transparent and helpful.
Look out for potential partners out there and get the right people from your team to contact them.
For example, while working for Small Academy, a Romanian start-up focused on delivering quality STEAM courses for kids aged 5–14, I joined a lot of Facebook groups for teachers and parents. Just being part of those communities helped me get names of school principals that we could work with, influencers we could reach out to. You get the idea.
Social listening is far more than reporting on Share of Voice. Just think about it for a while and find ways to squeeze out all the insights that could instruct your brand communication strategy and, why not, even your business plans.
The social media world has gone crazy with the new update from Facebook. Publishers and advertisers are freaking out that the platform updates will once again affect their results and disrupt the fragile strategy they sketched out for using this channel. Facebook seems to not care and marches forward in their mission that ‘time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent’.
They have not said much on the specifics of what will change and social media marketers will have to wait, benchmark and adapt to change. Nothing new there. What Facebook management did say was that some trusted sources and specific content types might get a boost: live videos generating discussion, star social media creators, celebrities, groups posts, local business events and trusted news sources. Apparently, these foster conversation and build community.
Today I want to talk about groups. Do they actually encourage conversation and community building? Yes and no.
I joined a lot of groups in my Facebook life (more than 100) and have a few lessons I want to share on this before you rush out to build new groups and try to push your message there. To start with, I’ll make a list of the criteria I think we need to check before answering yes to the question at hand.
Goal of the group — why are the members there?
I find that the most engaging groups are the ones where every member knows the reason why it was created. And they not only agree, they adhere to its mission and are willing to contribute time and resources to accomplish it.
Group admins need to make sure that the goal is easily accessible and once in a while remind users of why they are all there.
Who builds and manages it?
The admin or team of admins in charge of community management are the ones that make or break it. They need to stay true to the group mission and make sure that everyone does. In order to do so, they need a set of rules to abide by in order to safeguard the group mission, its values and make sure everyone behaves in a manner that helps the community grow and thrive. They have the difficult task of identifying haters and difficult members and finding a way to either make them respect the rules or even ban them from the group if necessary.
What kind of activities the members of the group get involved in
Without offline meetings there is no community. You need to provide the group with opportunities to meet in person and foster personal relationships. This way they’ll build trust and they can try to engage together in projects and see them through. Personal relationships also ensure the group is strong enough to grow, to support and educate each other and, why not, sanction members that do not follow the rules.
My fear is that some marketers will see groups as the new way to circumvent the newsfeed algorithm and will end up polluting even this niche medium. They’ll ruin it with spam and fake groups created just to be leveraged as branded content syndication platforms. They won’t have the patience to invest in groups as part of a long term strategy but will rush to this as they have already rushed to videos or Facebook live, making users resent the platform even more.
Waiting for the long lists on trends, buzzwords and hypes for this year. My guess: it will still matter way too much what glittery keywords you use rather than a deeper understanding of them and a strategical approach to why and how to test or employ new gimmicks in the online advertising world.
In December I met with people from a brand I found interesting. I was asked what ‘new exciting stuff’ I would like to try out in the social media sphere. I refused to drop awesome keywords I had read about in the advertising media. If that is your main ask of a social media specialist, we’ll probably not be colleagues. And even if the recruiting team refused me, I found myself not caring too much.
I had gone to the interview with the hope that this brand I liked and whose tactics and brand voice I admired did have a strategic approach to social media. From my discussion with them I got the clear feeling that we did not share the same vision. Yes, I could have told the digital manager that I would love to leverage chatbots to help ease the consumer flow through careful processes and thoughtful creatives. I could have told her that working for Small Academy had made me more and more receptive to robotics and AI and that I would have loved to try it out with a brand that had both the vision and the infrastructure available to become a player in that sphere. I could have talked about using Instagram stories for real people, not just pushing out content to ‘reach a larger audience’, but reach and build the right audience for the brand. I would have also been honest and declared my concern regarding social media usage of private data, talking about how I believe brands have a responsability to use channels with care for its consumers/partners in order to become a trusted source of information for them. My aim would be to deliver more than just a social campaign that reports big KPI numbers, but poor long term ROI.
All of that made no sense: I had no idea how they saw social media. From our conversation it seemed like social was another channel in the media plan, not a resource to help grow the brand and its business. One catchphrase that convinced me of that: we do not work with the Sales department, we are marketing and everyone does their own thing.
I do not want to work in a company where that happens: if social media is to be the brand persona, the living embodiment of what company stands for, it needs to have working relationships with all the bits and pieces of its organism, including Sales, Customer Support, product development, event management, etc. Otherwise, buzzwords and trends will be just that: cool things we talk about in meetings, test out without really understanding what role they could play in the development of this organism. They will remain pretty names and graphics in colorful presentation decks.
I got my first phone in 9th grade and got on a Vodafone monthly plan. And I was loyal to them for 12 years. That is the longest relationship I ever had. Until I disappointed them. Once. I did not pay my bills. 30 something euros. I will not find excuses, I postponed until it was too late. I went on holidays and forgot to pay. I postponed bills because I got a new work phone. I failed Vodafone. Everyone was very keen on highlighting how I am to blame for me losing my phone number. Yes, they erased it because of the debt.
But then I thought twice about it. In the last 12 years I must have forked more than 1,500 euros to their company. I was loyal despite other offers from competitors. On my first offence they ditched me. Maybe I was expecting more of them out of naivety: I thought 12 years meant something and expected we could sort it all out: me to pay the bills, them to restore my personal phone number. After 2 hours of customer support phone calls, some lengthy useless conversation on Facebook and 2 trips to different Vodafone stores I decided it was not worth it. The brand was not worth my time anymore as they seemed to not give a damn.
What I did do during this week-long saga was to learn a thing or two about their customer support system and why it failed. At least in my case. I wrote down notes on how digital could have saved me this entire ordeal and Vodafone a loyal customer.
Lesson #1: New Tech Can Fail. Double-Check It And Update/Optimize It.
→ Vodafone leverages bots for customer support. All well, I understand the need to be cost-effective. However, what they fail to do is to validate the customer use cases with real customers and update the tech accordingly.
Sometimes scenarios written in the confines of a company office do not stand the test of real life. Go back to the drawing board once every a couple of months and ask users how they engage with bots and where they could be improved. make it easy to use and communicate it flawlessly across channels.
I needed to contact a customer support operator over the phone. A customer support representative in store said I could reach someone at a specific 800 number. I called and got the bot with no option to dial in for a human being. I checked the website: a different phone number for the human operator. Tried that one, got the bot again. I had to try 4 other numbers and a combination of keys to actually get to talk to a human being. Wasted 40 minutes of my life. Frustration level:100.
→ Vodafone also gets you to create this personal account on their website. Customer support does not seem to have access to it/leverage that information to provide…support. Why? Why did I have to tell my story to each and every single support person I came in contact with? They had the data, why were they not able to access/use it?
Lesson #2: Customer Support Should Happen Cross Channels. Yes, Social Media Too. It’s Your Brand Across Channels.
When I first started working for the North American market I was pleasantly surprised to see that customer support was a key responsibility for the Community Managers. And most of the times it was also integrated with customer support and sales teams. In this case, Vodafone’s social media team was completely oblivious to workflows/procedures of the customer support teams in the call center or in their headquarter. And from the looks of it, they did not have access to data on the customer they were talking to. I wrote to them on Monday and 5 days later they came back with the same reply I got from in-store representatives on Tuesday. I offered to give detailed feedback on the entire process. The Community Manager did not seem interested at all and lost the opportunity to actually collect user feedback and try to improve internal processes/workflows.
Lesson #3: Customer Support Should Happen Across Corporate Functions.
In-store representatives did not know the procedure I needed to follow to recover my old phone number. Phone customer support then sent me to another in-store representative and commented on their lack pf professionalism. Social media was far from effective, replying 5 days later. Not once was I contacted by the company to try to solve the issue and mend our relationship. Friends and people I talked to told me I should have called another department — the Loyalty program one, as they are being paid on monthly subscription retention rate. And they had been offered deals they could not refuse. Frustration level with the company: 100. My saga ended a month ago. I will not renew my monthly subscription even if they did make me an amazing offer right now. Because I do not trust them anymore.
If I were Vodafone I would invest in: 1. Customer support training for people in ALL corporate functions that deal with end customers. Even for partner stores like Arsis or others. User cases on customer support workflow. For instance, they only contacted me at the Vodafone phone number, not email. I did not have access to that phone number and was not living at the personal address they had stored for me. 2. Integrated CRM system with permissions and approval processes for all departments involved. And channels. Yes, even social media Community Managers. If I give them my name and an unique identifier, any brand representative would be able to access my information and history with the brand. And from there have a pre approved workflow. 3. Initiatives to refresh customer personal data within the CRM system regularly.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and any idea you might have on the topic.
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