DISQUS

davidalston67 · 3 months ago

Thanks for the shout out Sean. And great 7 points every biz should be considering. It's funny but if we could wave a magic wand and have the regular telephone and social media emerging at the same time I wonder which technology brands would embrace first. Considering the fact that they are both two way channels for customers to reach out on would put them on an equal footing but because social media is also "public" in nature, cached forever by Google and pushed up on search results (thus effecting the opinions of hundreds to millions more) I think most companies would focus on social media first. I think this latter point is being overlooked - probably due mostly by lack of awareness of what social media really means.

And congrats on the new role to Jennifer.

Cheers.
@davidalston
Radian6

seanmcd · 3 months ago

David
Good question about which business would use first - phone or social media. Definite benefit to broadcasting in public favors social media, but still businesses are not comfortable with airing dirty laundry, and believe there is a way to control it - not true, but still believe/desire remains. Last 2 years were spent on building awareness that customers do have a social phone. This year and next can be demonstrating the power and benefit of the social phone.

kbeares · 3 months ago

Good point Sean on companies fearing or not being comfortable with customers airing their dirty laundry, but if they are in that frame of mind, they need to realize that this conversation will happen whether they like or not.

Another distinct problem exists around the disclosure by people inside the company sharing what they think is harmless information, but when rolled up with all the harmless sharing of inside company information, it adds up to a leak of a companies trade secrets or information on an upcoming release. Companies need to make sure that their employees are aware of their disclosure plans and what are safe things to talk about and what are not.

Kevin

seanmcd · 3 months ago

kbeares
there is always risk of employees sharing sensitive information. While at Dell, I had that bite me a few times. Each time the damage was more severe internally than externally (basically me/my staff freaked out and the public barely noticed until we made it a bigger issue). You need to provide a policy or guidelines for your employees to abide by. 99% of time employees do the right thing. 1 % of the time either accident on intent errors occur. You deal with the 1% of the time according to your employee policies.

kbeares · 3 months ago

Exactly! You can never prevent a leak, you can only potentially lessen the damage with making sure people know what is safe to talk about. Hopefully the leaks are only what you described, more severe internally than externally. The worst thing you can do with a leak is add more fuel to it.

seanmcd · 3 months ago

kbeares
do you have any examples of ways to communicate what is "safe" to talk about?

kbeares · 3 months ago

Historically, we have always had a rude Q&A and a disclosure plan that our marketing teams wrote up early in the development life cycle. In the past these documents we used to prepare our employees for how to have a discussion before something like a large trade show with customers who are in attendance as well as press who may engage you in a discussion.

Once these documents are created, we communicate out to our product teams and/or bloggers through email and face to face meetings. We share these documents and discuss their meaning to make sure that there is no ambiguity. As a community lead, this is a topic of discussion when I am communicating the community plan to the team.

This process and set of documents easily translates to our more Web 2.0 savvy employees who like to blog / tweet / fb.

It certainly does not completely insure that you will not have a leak, but definitely helps to communicate to the employees that there actually are people who are concerned with what is said to the public. Most employees do not even know that they could play a role in leaking company trade secrets.

This problem has always existed, it is just a lot easier to have a conversation with our customers than in the past.

dominiq · 3 months ago

Thanks for this great post. I'd like to take the opportunity of this comment to point out the limitation of listening using "keyword based" solutions" for influence development and community outreach (it works perfect for customer support).

The truth us that, sometimes in listening, there is more value in "what is not said" than in "what is said".

Let's take Microsoft . It's good to know that there are xxx mentions of their brand, yy coming from influential people. But the really actionable knowledge are things like:

- within the IT security community ( as an example), what's MS share of voice and how many influencers have positively written about them.
- who are the key people that don't talk about them but that should.

So to your points: 1, 2 , 6 and 7, require more than cross the board listening and that you start mapping and understanding your target social eco-system, the tribes that are relevant to you. It takes more time but it also bring deeper value.

As for 1: Silence could be the worst early warning that your product is not noticed or used.

Best.

seanmcd · 3 months ago

dominiq
agree, what not is said and by whom can be telling. It starts with listening to establish what is and is not being mentioned. Output can be a list of top sites and influencers for your brand/products. Then you can monitor these sites and see where your mentions are going up/down on multiple topics. Without listening you do not have a starting point.