1. An Ant’s Eye View Review of Radian6 Insights

    Friday, 8 Apr 2011 3 Comments Posted by:

    “Who are the people talking about us, and what are they saying?”

    That’s generally the first question that comes up when companies begin to listen to social media online — and incidentally, it’s been the first question since I started social media listening back at Dell in 2006. I’ve found, that while the question might change slightly based on specific products, brands or campaigns, organizations are still fundamentally trying to gather insights on who’s talking about their brand and what they’re saying.

    Yesterday marked the announcement by Radian6 of a new set of tools for their social media listening platform – Radian6 Insights. Insights are now seamlessly integrated with the standard Radian6 package providing companies new ways to slice and dice data that users collect online to help answer the question who’s talking and what they’re saying. Also announced was the Radian6 Summary Dashboard- a simplified way to get a high-level view of the data coming out of the tool (especially the insights) and perfect for providing information to others within your company who may not use Radian6.

    The heart of Radian6 Insights is its integration of analysis from partner sites for the content that your Radian6 topic profile has collected. The types of analysis differ based on the site which currently include Klout, OpenAmplify and OpenCalais as well as some twitter insights direct from Radian6.

    Radian6 Insights provides:

    • Post level analysis such as the topics, entities and themes being discussed in a stream of posts.
    • New tools for tracking hashtags and trending topics on twitter
    • Author level analysis such as gender, who the author influences and is influenced by
    • A common interface for the insights data to be displayed and interacted with other data from Radian6

    So what does this mean? Is Radian6 now an automated analysis machine that will do all of my work for me?

    Unfortunately for those looking for slack time, the answer is no. The insights provided are similar to what you would find from the site itself, but provided through the Radian6 interface. While the providers do an amazing job of deconstructing language to derive insights, you’ll still need to get hands on to make the most of it.

    But picture the following as a starting point for putting the new tools to use:

    • Split out authors by gender, then pull up a River of News to see the posts to compare themes
    • Split out the topics coming from OpenCalais out by media type to see how strong the blog component is compared to forums
    • Dive into a series of posts that OpenAmplify has identified as detractors to find out what they dislike so a response can be made

    The Radian6 Insights package is just getting its legs underneath it, but as they continue to add new insight providers and refine the tool to integrate that data the future is very bright for Radian6 and their users. If you have any existing questions, feel free to ask in the comments section.

  2. The Cisco Social Media Listening Journey

    Tuesday, 11 Jan 2011 9 Comments Posted by:

    “Social Media is not just a fun trend, it’s something that can really help drive business value.” – Jeanette Gibson, Director of Social Media Marketing, Cisco

    Cisco has been using online social media listening as a way to inform business decisions for some time.  An early example of this was the Cisco Unifed Computing System solution launch where the use of Social Media tools began three months prior to launch.   Through social media monitoring, Cisco learned what messages resonated with the market resulting in a shortened sales cycle, increased engagement and lower cost.

    Stephanie Marx manages centralized Listening efforts at Cisco and has mapped the stages of the Cisco Social Media Listening Journey along the 5-stage Social Engagement Journey that we recently introduced. Cisco’s Journey is a great example of the evolution of Enterprise Social Media Monitoring within an organization.

    Screen shot 2011-01-11 at 7.52.24 AM

    Stage 1 of the social media listening journey is traditional command and control. One-way communication is dominant and there is no effort to listen to online social mentions as a form of insight.  Any social listening would be focused on numbers and not insights from what is being said.

    Stage 2 describes some use of listening platforms to report on the basic conversation landscape (who, what, how much) but the efforts are siloed.  Teams are genuinely trying to understand what is being said.  There may be multiple platforms being used across different teams that are disconnected to one another.

    Cisco has teams in Stage 3 where the data from listening has turned into actionable business insights.  The process has become operational, where workflows for engagement have been created and the insights are shared broadly across the team.  The Cisco Small Business team has an efficient listening and engagement operation that is a “key part of their strategy and contributed to a 200% increase in community growth in Cisco’s Small Business external social channels.” – Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators

    In Stage 4, listening begins to deliver real business results. Executive support is broad, and engagement efforts are built into forecasts and annual plans. Listening data has been matched with traditional data for a real-time understanding of the overall health of the brand.

    Final Stage

    Stage 5 is the ideal use of listening in the organization, where the data informs decision-making. All teams are trained and empowered to engage online, just as seamlessly as they would pick up the phone when it rings.  There is consistent measurement across the company that is shared with senior executives.

    Cisco is still on this Journey and they have found that different teams within the enterprise can be plotted in different stages.  While the Social Engagement Journey describes the stages of an enterprise as a whole, it is flexible enough to apply to business units within the organization.  This is a great example of how the Social Engagement Journey can be applied to a specific activity within your organization.  Thank you to the Cisco team for letting us share this.

  3. Customer Feedback: How to Value It in Your Organization, Part 2 of a 3-Part Series

    Friday, 11 Jun 2010 2 Comments Posted by:

    “Well, that is just customer feedback and this [insert business policy] makes us [insert revenue number].”

    Sound familiar? As a S.P.I.C.Y. leader in your organization, you’ve worked hard to use customer feedback to break down barriers within your organization, as described in part 1 of this series. But, it is inevitable that you either have heard or will face a customer vs. shareholder debate when it comes to reporting out on customer feedback and the root causes driving it. Price, product and policy issues that drive sales and negative sentiment are particularly tricky to navigate within the context of large organizations.

    What makes these conversations so hard and the barriers between silos so thick is that different measures of success are in play. Customer experience measures, derived from customer feedback, usually come in the form of satisfaction, resolution rates and brand favorability while shareholder measures are, well, all about revenue, expenses and profit. And, the concept of missed revenue as a result of negative sentiment can feel very fuzzy for operations, finance and business unit leaders.

    Having an apples-to-apples discussion between the two camps is critical. At Intuit, we heavily used the Net Promoter methodology which asks a simple question – “how likely are you to recommend this [product, service, etc] to someone else”, and it is often used as a side-by-side measure with revenue. Over the last couple of years, Intuit’s research teams did extremely hard work to connect Net Promoter data to revenue.

    But, Net Promoter data is what people “say” they are going to do. What about what people actually say and actually do? Listening on the social web is the best way to understand this other side to the loyalty coin. Using tools like Radian 6 or Scout Labs, you can listen to what’s being said about your brand, apply sentiment scoring and use your real customers’ voice to show how they are, or are not recommending your products or services.

    In some cases, you have listen yourself in specific channels, like my team at Intuit did within Amazon. My team led the effort to have a 100% reply goal on Amazon reviews on Intuit’s flagship small business product, QuickBooks Pro 2010, and we developed a weekly dashboard, shared at senior staff, that showed key topics, number of reviews, sentiment and change over time.

    What that dashboard didn’t show was impact on sales. By adding in simple questions to several surveys that regularly go out to recent purchasers (and not) of QuickBooks, we were able to determine impact on sales.

    We found that online reviews had a double digit impact on sales – meaning that our customers said that reviews were the main & only source or the main but not only source of purchasing. Between the Net Promoter value work and the online review-to-sales research, our team had the opportunity to really connect customer and shareholder measures. Efforts like this enabled the team to drive closed-loop changes within the product that dramatically decreased negative sentiment.

    Valuing customer feedback is the second key step in breaking down the barriers within an organization. Next up, we’ll tackle responding to customer feedback!

  4. Customer Feedback: Breaking Down the Silos in Your Organization. Part 1 of a 3-Part Series

    Friday, 7 May 2010 4 Comments Posted by:

    What do busted computers laptops and broken guitars have in common? The answer…broken customer feedback and busted support channels.

    When Jeff Jarvis complained about his Dell computer in the infamous “Dell Hell” blog posts and when Dave Carroll chose songwriting over suing United Airlines with his wildly viral “United Breaks Guitars”, they gave the companies ample warning that they planned to talk. They were subsequently ignored and then proceeded to unleash a storm of negative sentiment that significantly impacted both companies’ reputations and bottom lines.

    busted laptops_broken computers

    In Dave Carroll’s case, he spent nine months contacting United Airlines, including talking to flight attendants and gate agents the very day the issue occurred. His last exchange with the company, before he created the now-famous video that potentially dropped United’s stock price by 10%, was with a Mrs. Irlweg who said “United would not be taking any responsibility for what had happened and that that would be the last email on the matter.”

    In Jeff Jarvis’ case, he was so dissatisfied with the performance of his laptop and with the service, or lack thereof, that came with it, that he unleashed a storm of negative sentiment through his Dell Hell series of posts on his blog.

    When I’ve chatted with folks about these examples, the conversation often revolves around dealing with the storm. Responding is an important topic, but, in my view, the big opportunity is to prevent the storm in the first place. Why wait? You probably already know what the busted computers or broken guitars are in your organization. Your biggest detractors are already talking to you. They are using every available channel, which sadly, are often silo’d from one another.

    Your job as a S.P.I.C.Y. leader within your organization is to get ahead of the busted computers and broken guitars and break down the silos. In Part 1, let’s spend time on how to connect the customer feedback silos in a way that’s meaningful to your organization and your customers. Parts 2 and 3, coming soon, will be about what to do with the feedback once you’ve got it.

    Part 1: Connecting Customer Feedback

    • Audit your existing “voice of customer” channels: How many are there? What are they capturing? Who’s monitoring them and what’s being done about the feedback? Are they survey-based only or are there data analytics and social web monitoring included as well?
    • Map your customers’ end-to-end experience: When I was a S.P.I.C.Y. leader myself at Intuit, I was part of a cross-functional team that mapped the experience from the moment a small business owner lost the ability to get business done to the moment she got back to business. We also identified the key “moments of truth” in that experience – which things really mattered to the customer not just which ones mattered to us – by using our own data first and then interviewing customer to validate the moments or adjust them based on the interviews.
    • Overlay the moments of truth with the feedback channel audit: Where are the gaps? Where do the channels overlap? What feedback has come through to show how you’re doing against the key moments of truth for the customer?
    • Establish a baseline of customer experience and priorities to improve: Based on the audit, mapping and overlay work, you’ll likely have a clear picture for where you’re doing well on customer experience and where you need to improve. From the baseline, in alignment with your company’s objectives, you’ll want to create measurable priorities to improve the experience.
    • Establish a regular process for reporting: You’ll have a couple of levels of reporting. You’ll have ground level, emerging issues reporting that is much more real-time. You’ll also want a report-out that should go as high as you can in your organization where hard, longer-term decisions can be made. In some cases, decisions can be made quickly that have a big impact on customer experience, like Southwest Airlines going back to black & white text on their online boarding passes based on customer feedback about the cost of printing in full color. In other cases, the decisions are harder and more complex.

    You’re probably asking…now that I’ve done the heavy lifting of connecting the feedback, what next? Part 2 in the series will cover how to measure the value of customer feedback and Part 3 will cover closing the loop on the feedback, even in heavily regulated industries.

    I’d love hear more from all of you. How are you connecting customer feedback channels today? What’s working? What’s not?

  5. Is your Brain ready for Great Customer Service?

    Tuesday, 22 Dec 2009 No Comments Posted by:

    Great customer service starts with a healthy brain. I believe if your employees are happy, informed, engaged, and energized; then they produce better products and deliver great service. If your employees have negative feelings, this clogs the Prefrontal Cortex in the brain,  where empathy and reasoning reside.

    I attended a great workshop from the Hand in Hand organization (a non profit started by Patty Wipfler). Hand in Hand is a parenting resource, but I saw many parallels to adult business relationships. Hand in Hand’s approach is based on the principles of respect, listening, leadership development and the importance of interpersonal connections. The way to break thru the negative emotions is to Listen on a personal level. Bad behavior can be a request for help.

    Case in point: American Airlines – I have flown over 30 segments with American Airlines in last 6 months and have been paying a lot of attention to the flight attendants, gate agents, ticket counter agents, and pilots (greet you at end of the flight). My service experience has been either great or terrible. Why? It comes down to the employee’s attitude– some are enjoying their job and others hate it. Unfortunately over the last 30 flight segments, about 75% of my observations appear to be hating/regretting showing up for work. This comes across as some rude behavior in boarding and in flight service (“HURRY UP take your seat”  “we can’t take off because YOU are not seated”, “Turn off your device NOW”). December 3,  I was on a flight from AUS to DFW, they started loading the plane 12 minutes before scheduled departure, then complained that the passengers were holding up scheduled departure. The reason was the late arrival of the plane (inbound to AUS) and late loading delayed the departure. Compare this to stories of Virgin America or Southwest – customers talk about the positive experiences. I met one business traveler in San Francisco that has changed his schedule to fly Virgin America over other airlines. So I asked why? What does Virgin America do differently? Answer: “they are nice to me, say hello, they smile”.

    People smile when they are happy. People are happy when they are informed, empowered, and energized. Management has a lot of jobs and get dumped on a lot. A management philosophy I followed (while in the U.S. Navy and at Dell, Inc.) was to listen to my team, remove roadblocks, praise in public, and counsel when necessary. If you take care of your team, they take care of you. What is yours?

    American Airlines: if you happen to read this, I would be interested in discussing some ideas to improve your customer service. As a frequent flyer, it is in my best interest (along with millions of other flyers to improve the status quo).  I believe your employees are not the core problem. Improved communication and engagement can help.

  6. A Strategy that Worked

    Wednesday, 9 Dec 2009 2 Comments Posted by:

    I walked away a little confused after reading Isn’t the Value of Social Media What Business Is All About? in the Huffington Post yesterday.  Manish Mehta, VP of Social Media and Community at Dell Inc., wrote an excellent article about the importance of connecting with customers in the social space. The confusion comes down to the last sentence: “No strategy necessary.”

    What’s that now? Manish isn’t serious, is he?? 

    Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept of having a ‘Mom and Pop’ shop approach to building relationships with your customers.  Having solid customer relationships are a big win and a solid reminder of how to do business. But let’s not forget that half of small businesses fail before their fifth birthday. 

    And why? In my mind, it’s largely (but not only) because of a lack of strategy and clear direction.  Of course you need a strategy. 

    Ironically, most of what Manish talks about in this article actually is Dell’s strategy.  After Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell series educated everyone on Dell’s opportunity to connect with their customers in 2005, Dell built a strategy to do just that.  A clear direction was outlined, to listen and connect with their customers, and IdeaStorm, Direct2Dell and online customer outreach ensued.  A social strategy will define the direction and scope of your activities through objectives and goals, and ultimately drive resources to the environment (tactics, tools, processes, etc.) that will benefit stakeholders.

    Give yourself some credit Dell, your strategy has been effective!

  7. Listening Online and Offline

    Thursday, 12 Nov 2009 6 Comments Posted by:

    Two days ago I wrote a post, Personal Touch, about a WOM (Word of Mouth)  moment during my stay at Omni Hotel, Fort Worth Texas.

    The WOM moment was set in motion because Omni listened (offline at the Fort Worth site) really well about my interest in their Select Guest program. But then they also listened online by monitoring mentions of their brand – LOVE IT!

    Here is tweet exchange with my blog post and their two replies:

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  8. How Do You Listen? I Use My Eyes

    Tuesday, 6 Oct 2009 14 Comments Posted by:

    I’ve had a number of conversations lately, where I have explained my new job at Ant’s Eye View.  Many people I’ve spoken to are interested in the technology used to listen for brand mentions and customer support needs.  I am interested in the technology too.  It’s often the starting place – the foundation to a good listening program.  I have used a number of great tools that help weed through the noise and lead you to the information you need to read.

    What I have learned is – online listening to your customers is about reading.  There is no tool that is going to eliminate the need for you to truly listen to your customers.  The tools just make it quicker, easier, and even a little fun!  Listening only to influencers will not tell you what your customers are saying.  You need to listen to all discussion on different media types (forums, blogs, tweets, tags).  Forum discussions can give you a very different view than blogs alone.  For example, forums can help you understand the pain-points for customers and where they are having to use the community to fill a void (questions not answered in user guides or problems with performance).  A blog mentioning the same product might take a look at features and compare to competitor products.  Both are valuable to someone in your organization.  Of course, these media types are not restricted to these roles and reverse often, making it imperative to listen to discussion on all media types.

    Comments are where a lot of the value resides – It’s more to read, but do not pass up on the comments.  They are a huge indicator to what people are thinking. A blog post may (or may not) be influential, but the comments tell you what other people are saying – sometimes in large numbers.  This is powerful stuff!  While not always negative, the 1oo+ comments to: Thousands of Hotmail passwords leaked online indicate that people are genuinely concerned about the security of their accounts and they value more details on the issue.  The post itself will not do that for you.

    Lesson for the day: A tool is anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose.  Don’t expect a tool to listen to your customers without you.

  9. Listening is a basic, human element of your business. Why is it so hard?

    Tuesday, 15 Sep 2009 26 Comments Posted by:

    Listening is a personal challenge for most of us in our daily relationships. It is primary tenant of our communication, but too often not practiced or practiced poorly. Why? Sometimes is the sheer number of messages that surround our brains, or we are too pre-occupied on getting our message communicated. We don’t stop to listen to all of the ongoing, relevant conversations around us. Brands and companies are no different with the challenges of listening first, speak second. For business it can be hard to start and harder to sustain.

    One of my favorite authorities on Listening is David Alston, VP Marketing, Radian6. Last year David coined a term “social phone” in a post “Consumers are shouting into your brand’s social phone”. The message was consumers are now using multiple communication tools to reach your company, but some web 2.0 tools did not appear on company’s radar. That was the problem of 2007-2008. In 2009, many companies have experienced 1 or 2 benefits from listening case studies (Southwest Airlines, Dell), but still question about why do I (insert business name here) need to listen.

    For the pragmatic audience, here are 7 business reasons to listen:

    1. Early Warning Radar for product quality issues or customer dissatisfaction
    2. Become Visible on the Web - learn the keywords your customers are using and fine tune your SEO
    3. Learn from your Competition by tracking conversation about your industry and competitors
    4. Identify and Thank your Fans – you have brand ambassadors and detractors, find them and engage to get your brand story told and re-told
    5. Enhance Customer Service by providing support where customers are online
    6. Humanize Your Brand by participating in relevant conversations
    7. Identify Industry Influencers – and identify where they are online so that you can connect with them

    OK, but it is still hard, do I hire a VP of Listening for my business? Probably not best starting point.

    Ant’s Eye View’s methodology working with brands has 4 steps:

    1. Listen
    2. Organize
    3. Engage
    4. Measure

    What we found was our first step of Listening was understood; but too often our clients did not have the time or expertise to set up a listening process. Without Listening, updates and course corrections to strategy and implementation are at risk for being outdated and non-relevant. So Ant’s Eye View made a great hire – Jennifer Hughes – and launched Listening 360 – a economical way for companies to start listening without delays to conduct the rigor to set up shop inside the enterprise: technology evaluation, staffing/training, and producing reports. 

    Listening 360 is a turn key solution. Data is great, but I want business insights. Listening 360 provides the data + insights of the topics relevant to your business, enabling business action to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity.

    You will be surprised what you will find out about your: brand, products, services, competitors, or industry. If you’d like more information or to schedule a briefing on our listening service, please contact me or Jennifer Hughes.

  10. Recommended Read: Made to Stick

    Saturday, 12 May 2007 4 Comments Posted by:

    You wake up in a bathtub in Las Vegas….it’s cold…you look down and see a note…it says, call the hospital, we’ve taken your kidney.

    Ever heard this urban legend?  I bet you have.

    The question is why do ideas like this "stick" in our heads, but we can’t remember (or make others remember) the critical ideas we’re trying to communicate.

    I would give an Oprah sized recommendation for Chip & Dan Heath’s book:  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

    Thanks to Lee at Commoncraft for the recommendation that I am happy to endorse as well.

    There is a lot to like about the book.  It’s a relatively straightforward read.  It is very instructional – meaning I can see how to implement – vs so many books that are purely conceptual.  The Authors introduce six Key qualities of an Idea that is "made to stick."

    • Simplicity:  How do you strip down an idea to its core without turning it into a silly sound bite.
    • Unexpectedness:  How do you capture peoples attention…and hold it?
    • Concreteness:  How do you help people understand your idea and remember it much later?
    • Credibility:  How do you get people to believe your idea?
    • Emotional:  How do you get people to care about your idea?
    • Stories:  How do you get people to act on your idea? – I loved this – I see myself often as a story teller – it’s the core of Part 1 of convincing the unconverted.

    A few things really stand out for me in this book.  One is the notion of "Commanders Intent" in relating to the principal of Simplicity.  Commanders Intent is a military planning concept that essentially assumes that most planning is flawed because at the moment the enemy engages, the plan no longer applies.  The idea of Commanders Intent is describing a clear and specific enough objective such that when the enemy does engage, those on the front lines are clear enough about the end goal that they know how to adjust.  In other words, what matters is the clarity of the desired outcome over a rigid process for how to achieve the outcome.  There’s a useful description of Building Commander’s Intent from  a military standpoint here.

    I also really liked the exploration of the "curse of knowledge."  This is particularly evident around online communities.  How often have you heard yourself say "man, they just don’t get it" when talking about the value or importance of community to others – especially those in your company who may have to fund the investment!  The truth may be that you are so close and intimate to the topic that you make it overly complex, provide too much information, not enough information or don’t map the benefits to the goals of the other party.  If you are selling an idea, and "they don’t get it" – who is underperforming – the listener or the communicator?  Hint:  It’s not the listener!

    Lastly, the value of unexpectedness.  I loved this and thought it tied in very nicely.  I tried using this recently.  To set this up, I run a multi-million dollar organization focused explicitly on the value of communities.  In a planning meeting I was asked if we were in the "community" business?  The expected and easier answer, which would have made a great question totally forgettable, would have been "yes."  The Sticky answer, was "No!  We are in the answers and feedback business!"  This simple, clear, concrete, unexpected answer provided great clarity (I think).  In one statement, we took something very nebulous and often confusing to people (community) and converted it to much clearer language that supports a commanders intent in ways that a "community" mission doesn’t.  Yes, everything we do is in communities, that doesn’t change, but clarity of purpose for what your doing there is amazingly liberating!

    Sean

     

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