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Monday, May 24, 2010
What Customers Won't Say Online
The trades continually are filled
with questions like:
Social media is all the buzz in marketing circles. How do I monitor
what customers and influencers are saying online?
How do I engage with customers on Twitter? How do I best assess,
analyze and
manage the conversations that will impact my brand?
It’s wonderful that marketers are recognizing the power of word of mouth. It’s too bad that they
have forgotten that all discussions of corporations and their brands don’t take place in a totally public forum.
Consumers trust most in what they hear and read from their friends, neighbors, relatives and co-workers, and much of
that communication takes place through phone calls, text messages, emails, and even plain old face-to-face conversations.
While going digital did create new media channels, and broadened the reach of the individual, it didn’t totally
change that dynamic, and it didn’t make other forms of individual communications disappear.
When we look to monitor what customers and influencers are saying, and how that is impacting a brand, we need
to remember that there is both Public Social Media and Private Social Media. While data
mining tools are improving each day in their ability to quantify and summarize the Public Social Media (Twitter, Facebook,
public forums, YouTube, etc.) the often more powerful written and spoken “word of mouth” is taking place in Private,
away from Big Brothers watchful eyes. We strongly recommend corporations take an approach that quantitatively
and qualitatively examines ALL forms of Social Media.
10:49 am edt
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