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A tip for business on social media
By Stephen Pritchard
Published: January 19 2010 16:41 | Last updated: January 19 2010 16:41
It was the tale of two Tweets. In June last year, Habitat, a UK furnishing retailer, found controversy when it used messages posted on the Twitter social networking website to promote its furniture sales.
That same month, computer maker Dell reported selling $3m worth of refurbished hardware, also via Twitter.
Dell’s experience was widely heralded as a success; Habitat’s led to apologies as it linked its promotion to unrelated subjects such as Iran’s election and Apple’s iPhone.
These experiences show how difficult it is for large brands to read the mood of a social network – but many are now trying to achieve just that.
“Social media outreach today is a natural extension of the way we started to interact with the internet when we started the Dell brand,” says Manish Mehta, vice-president for social media and community at Dell.
“In 2006, we recognised the need to listen to all of the conversations happening in the blogosphere. If you now look at our reach on Twitter and Facebook, we are trying to embed social media in the fabric of how we do business.”
But the key to engaging successfully with social media – rather than antagonising its users – is to listen first and participate second.
Mr Mehta says: “Where we are launching a product or part of our business, we will be proactive in telling our story, but it starts with listening.”
Effective listening, though, needs effective monitoring. The scope and variety of social networks and the numbers of individuals who use them make this a challenge.
According to researchers at IBM’s TJ Watson laboratories, there are about 100m blogs – defined as those with an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. Then there are the individuals using websites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, as well as users of Flickr, YouTube and others.
Tracking what they are writing about, and attempting to understand the underlying sentiments, is complex. IBM, however, has developed Banter, a technology it uses internally to monitor and analyse the contents of blogs, and to assess their likely influence.
“The first thing we set out to understand is relevance. Next is the authority and influence [of the writer],” says Dr Richard Lawrence, a researcher manager at the labs.
IBM’s Banter tool attempts to find the central point of a social network conversation, and then follows the links to see how far-reaching and influential a post might be. Dell has adopted a similar approach – what Mr Mehta describes as a ripple effect.
“Your post might only have a few comments on it, but if behind you there are thousands of followers and those followers post thousands of times, the effect will be much greater,” he says. “That is what we are trying to determine.”
Monitoring blogs might be computationally intensive, but technologies such as web crawlers and RSS feeds make the content accessible. Monitoring posts on closed discussion groups, or websites such as Facebook and Twitter is more difficult.
In the US, brands such as electronics manufacturer Samsung have been monitoring social networks and consumer websites for some years. It uses software such as BrandAnswers from Bazaarvoice – also used by Dell – to track the questions consumers are posing.
But, according to Samsung’s Kris Narayanan, director of marketing in the US, there is an important difference between the way consumers interact with brands on, say, a retailer’s website, and on a site such as Twitter.
“Through BrandAnswers we can reach consumers at the very last stages of the purchase decision, so they need answers quickly and accurately. Our ability to be there is essential,” he explains. “On a social network they are not purchasing, but we can direct them towards a positive [sentiment] from a neutral position.”
Samsung, though, has also used Twitter successfully to point consumers towards retailers’ offers, for example.
But often the power of the network itself does most of the work. “We can highlight the deals – but often we don’t need to,” says Mr Narayanan.
Analysing sentiment on sites such as Twitter also remains a challenge. Short posts – the microblogging site is limited to 140 characters per message – limits the context available to monitoring tools. At IBM, researchers found a partial solution by analysing links to other websites in posts, as well as the “hash tags”, which are used to highlight topical subjects, that brought trouble to Habitat last year.
But the next task for social network analysis – and for brands that rely on it – is to understand not just what people are saying, but who is listening and how opinion travels so fast.
Then managers can react to positive, or negative, sentiment before it is too late.
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