Doing an assessment for how and where to learn social media to better understand your business drivers can be daunting, especially when you want to overlay how those drivers affect your goals, customers, suppliers, employees, partners…you name it.
I came up with this process which happens to mimic my name (shameless self-persona plug) to ease the assessment process while providing a guided assessment plan.
First, ‘Learn’ to Listen: learning from the voice of the customer/supplier/partner is an extremely effective way to understand how well you are doing retaining, acquiring or losing your relationships with those who you rely on to operate your business.
Second, Analyze what matters, ignore or shelve (for later) what doesn’t; data should be actionable, (metrics in your control to address), reporting key performance indicators that are tied to corporate strategies and goals to ensure relevancy.
Third, Understand your constituent groups; it isn’t just your customers, but also your shareholders, employees, partners, and suppliers who can make or break a business through word of mouth and social networking.
Fourth, Relate your root causes to your constituents value perceptions, loyalty drivers and needs to ensure relevancy flow through from step 2. Map these to your business initiatives and goals exercise from step 2. Explore gaps between initiatives, value perceptions, loyalty drivers and corporate goals.
Lastly, create Action plans to address the gaps discovered in Step 4. If you analyzed truly actionable data in step 2, this should be easy to do.
To apply this to social media in order to turn it into social intelligence, you need to make the chatter of the networks meaningful and actionable.
To do this, think about this example:
A person tweets a desire to stop using a hotel chain because of a bad experience. In marketing, this is known as an “intent to churn” event; when social intelligence reporting systems ferrets out this intent based on scouring the web commentaries of social networks, an alert can be automatically forwarded to your customer loyalty, marketing/social media or customer response teams to respond, address and retain said customer.
A posting might say “trouble with product or service” – That type of message can be sent to customer operations (service) or warranty service departments as a mobile alert.
And a “having trouble replenishing item; out of stock” question on a customer forum can be passed along to your supply chain or retail teams — all automatically.
The Wynn has a great feedback loop using social media to alert them in real-time of customers who are dissatisfied with their stay who Tweet or comment about this during their stay.
The hotel manager and response time will find this person to address and rectify the situation before they check out. And before long, the negative tweet or post is replaced by an even more positive response, and best of all, WORD of MOUTH to friends and family.
Its sad to say, in this day and age, we are often left without a voice or one that is heard by our providers of services / products. When good service comes, we are so starved that we rejoice about it to the would. And why not? That is how good companies excel and excellent companies hit the echelon of amazing companies!
Musings on ML, Deep Learning & AI 