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Last Thursday I spoke on a panel at BlogWorldExpo (#bwe09) entitled “Social Secure-ity: Managing Your Brand’s Online Reputation.” Audience questions drove the discussion; I managed to jot down some of the audience questions/ panelist responses and have compiled them below. In my role at Scout Labs, I have seen a wide range of corporate responses to these questions, as I’m sure had the other panel participants- Connie Bensen of Techrigy, Amber Naslund http://altitudebranding.com/ of Radian6, Melyssa Plunkett-Gomez of Crimson Hexagon, and Aubrey Podolsky of Sysomos.

Thinking back on it later in the day, a lot of this advice just isn’t useful with some resources and corporate commitment to social media- and from the tone of many of the questions, resources and commitment are still an issue. There’s no doubt that social media is here to stay whether or not companies want to “formulate a response.” The real question is which companies are going to recognize that better understanding their customers through social media is a source of competitive advantage- whether they decide to turn Twitter into a customer service channel or not.

From a travel industry representative from Las Vegas: How should we deal with negative criticism? How should we respond to it?

• There will always be negative criticism. Develop a framework for what you need to respond to from a business perspective, and try not the take the rest too personally.


• There are trolls and there are people with genuine issues. You can’t please the trolls, so don’t try.


• Your social media presence can and should be about more than damage control to the brand.


• Let the community respond on your behalf.


• Get ahead of the negative criticism- change the business so that consumers aren’t complaining!

David Spinks, a community manager, asked about the importance of responding to content on sidewiki:

• The sources of feedback are multiplying and will continue to do so. Very few brand manager have the time to respond to every single last comment anyone has ever made on any platform. If Sidewiki gets more traction in the market, vendors like the ones on the panel will eventually help marketers figure out how to track and respond to it. Right now it’s a small blip on a crowded radar screen.

• Having a social media presence can help humanize the brand or the industry, and demystify what it is that hedge funds do for the economy


• Whose opinion are you trying to influence, and why? Make sure you know and have the resources to follow through before you set your social media strategy- there are some inconsistent, useless attempts at building a community out there, and they’re not helping the brands they represent


• If you do something for your community that does not directly serve your own interest- for instance publishing free analyst repots- it build brand goodwill


• If they care enough to hate you, they may care enough to love you. There are things the company does that would help them to love you. Make people aware of them.

• Reframe the conversation through competitive analyses- what do people love or hate about your competitors? It’s myopic to only focus on the negative posts about your own brand


• Another way to reframe is to focus on the positive- what is it that customers like about the brand? What strengths can the brand build on? This is the long term strategic response to negative feedback- not just a crisis communications plan

• Have a policy in place helps guide employee behavior- and know that there will still be problems. Be prepared to deal with them as decisively as any other personnel problem


• Employees are trusted to have email addresses and phones- they are already representing the company. Employee behavior is a hiring and training issue, not a social media issue. If an employee can’t be trusted, they can’t be trusted


• Employee trust is an enormous issue for every organization. Social media is forcing massive organizational changes on companies, ones that are really challenging for managers and employees. This is a big change for everyone involved and training is crucial.

• Monitoring customer satisfaction/ ability to meet corporate requirements is already a part of franchising. Extending that to social media will become a corporate function.

I found it encouraging that there were a fair number of B2B marketers at the session- leveraging social media is just as crucial for them as it is for the B2C brands, if not more so, and they rarely get the same level of media love.

Some other memorable sessions at BlogWorldExpo were the ROI smackdown- very smart thinking and good examples from Deb Micek, Rob Kay, Beth Harte, and Stephanie Agresta- and the Real Time Web session from the ever thoughtful Louis Grey. The sessions were all taped and will theoretically available online at the conference site but I don’t see the links up yet. Much thanks to Jason Falls for organizing.

The Scout Labs application has a whole new look and feel today and it supports an exciting new feature.

New Feature: QUOTES

When you dive into the dashboard of one of your searches today, alongside Sentiment and Graphs and such is a new tab called QUOTES. Scout Labs already give you lots of quantitative metrics to help you measure your brand (buzz is up, positive sentiment is down…) But QUOTES is a little different. Inspired by WeFeelFine (although much harder to execute, because we are looking for opinions and emotions about a particular product or brand), QUOTES offers qualitative insight into the mind of the customer, for companies wanting to know: “What do our customers love, hate, want, think and feel about us right now?”

The QUOTES feature pulls from social media customer opinions and emotions being expressed about any topic. Today, Scout Labs automatically populates QUOTES relevant to the following categories:
• Love: Raves for the product or brand
• Hate: Rants by unhappy customers
• Wish: What customers WISH your company would do, add, change, improve. Feature requests and ideas.
• Compare: Ways that your brand is being considered alongside others. Who’s better than who? What are customers switching to when the abandon you?
• Recommend: When people highly recommend you, what do they say? What’s the favorite thing? What do they recommend you do differently?
• Issues: What problems are customers having with you? What concerns are lingering?
• Caveat: Your brand advocates LOVE your product BUT… (or however….)

You can see how QUOTES turns social media chatter into a live focus group of millions. Scout Labs is already a leader in the use of natural language processing to analyze social media for the world’s best brands. With the addition of QUOTES, we raise the bar and deliver even more insight to the hundreds of marketers, brand managers, product managers, communications professionals and executives who rely on Scout Labs to help them build better products and sell more.

New Design
The changes to the user interface will be apparent as soon as you log in. We really wanted to make it easier to scan through all of your searches and to find your collaborative actions. We also wanted to lay an architectural foundation for new features, new data and new actions that will be coming live shortly. To those ends, we have made the following changes:

• Your list of searches are persistent on all pages now. This will make it easy to jump between searches. You can also choose to sort your searches now by alphabetical order or by the change in buzz. (A nice little touch: if you are looking at Twitter results for one search and you jump to another search, you will go to the Twitter results for the new one. That way you can scan through your searches by media type, now!)
• All team activity (bookmarks, discussions and alerts) are front and center, in the now-persistent left nav. We have added counts, so you know how much team activity is underway.
• Oh, and we made the design look simply AWESOME. We hope you like it.

And since we moved some things on you, here are a few important tips: to create a new search now, hit the little “plus” icon in the left nav next to “Searches”. To manage (delete, edit) your searches, click the “gears” icon in the left nav, right next to the Create a Search icon.

We get feedback all the time that our application is intuitive and easy to use, so we were careful not to mess anything up. Let us know what you think (we know you will!)

The other day an analyst asked me about the different ways companies use Scout Labs — why they start using it and all the ways they end up using it. It got me thinking about the evolution I see when companies decide to use a service to help them tune in to customers across the Internet. In fact, it reminds me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In 1943, Abraham Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a theory to explain human behavior. Maslow suggested that psychological needs are hierarchical, and you can’t move up the pyramid until the underlying psychological needs are met. Many have since challenged his strict hierarchy, pointing out several exceptions to the rule. But as a pop-culture metaphor, it helps describe the various ways companies use Scout Labs.

Here is Scout Labs’ Social Media version of the Hierarchy of Needs:

1. Find and fight fires (or CYA)

Many organizations get interested in consumer-generated media (CGM for short) because they want to find fires—exploding laptops, rants from prominent bloggers, a rumor leak, a copyright violation—and fight them as quickly as possible. This is an absolutely essential way to apply a service like Scout Labs, and the reason why whatever service you select needs to:

• Be real-time (so you can find those fires as they happen).
• Find the fires for you, prioritizing what’s important / worth paying attention to right now.
• Have alert capabilities built in (email, SMS, RSS).
• Help you quickly mobilize your response and take action.

In this time of highly vocal customers who are connected to each other real-time and whose seething blog posts about you can show up within the first few results on Google, companies worry about the sheer volume of CGM and their lack of visibility into it. There are huge dollars at stake. Finding and fighting fires are fundamental reasons to scout the Internet, and your organization must become good at it. This means you need to have confidence not only in the tool you use, but in your team’s judgment and ability to take action in time of threat.

2. Build relationships with customers

Only after a company is a good listener can it jump in and start building relationships with customers. If you’re new to the social media scene, watch for a while. Learn who the key influencers are. Get a feel for the language, the concerns, and the issues. See which companies enjoy a good rapport online and which get flamed. And when you’re ready… jump in. Be part of the conversation. Answer questions, ask questions, and inform the best you can.

I like to think of it like a schoolyard game of jump rope. The customer conversation has its rhythm, pattern and players, and you don’t want to barge right in before getting the lay of the land—you’ll just get all tangled up. (Scout Labs lore: At one point, many moons ago, we toyed with the idea of naming the company Double Dutch!)

Of course, building relationships with customers being key to business success is nothing new. That idea is as old as commerce itself. But what is new is the accessibility of customers (thank you web 2.0!) and the availability of solutions like Scout Labs to actually build relationships on a mass scale. It’s not easy to evolve to this place. You have to really understand your customers and their communities before you can be welcomed in. AND you have to trust your employees to have these conversations and build these relationships. But if you can get there, the rewards are great.

3. Seek out feedback on products and marketing

Once an organization gets good at finding and fighting fires and starts to engage in dialogues with their customers, it’s going to start hearing what customers are actually saying ;-) I joke, but in the early phases of a company’s social media evolution, a person talking about your brand is often a “mention”—an event to log and tally. But pretty soon you start reading the content of those mentions and you see a rich tapestry of feedback—rants about customer service issues, wishes for features the product is lacking, competing products they are considering switching to, people with problems (that lo and behold, your product can solve).

Rather than monitoring for the huge PR nightmares, companies ask lots of its employees to listen every day, seeking little insight they can use to improve products and marketing. Product managers, research groups and marketing managers love using Scout Labs in this way.

4. Be a customer-centric organization

The apex for an individual, according to Maslow, is self-actualization—making the most of your abilities and striving to be the best you can be. For an organization that wants to listen to customers, the pinnacle is being a truly customer-centric organization. For a company at this stage of evolution, customers are partners. Listening to customers and engaging with them to build better products and sell more is a strategic priority and part of a company’s culture. Everyone—from the CEO to customer service, from product to PR—is tuned in to what customers are talking about, coming up with new, customer-inspired ideas, jumping into conversations to build relationships, and truly innovating.

Being a customer-centric organization is more than a nice-sounding aspiration. We believe it’s a strategic competitive advantage. Whoever listens better, innovates faster and builds stronger relationships, wins.

Note: this is an update to a post I did a year ago.

It’s been been less than 24 hours since the most exciting Superbowl game in recent history has ended, and buzz is off the charts for the Steelers — and the Cardinals — and Santonio Holmes — and Larry Fitzerald. Looking at the graphs, you can barely tell who even won:

This kind of buzz is great if you’re a smaller brand and you bought that spot specifically to drive awareness — look at Cash4Gold:

But while graphs and charts can do a good job of event detection — something happened! — they don’t give brand or product managers insight into what, exactly, just happened, or inform what they should do about it. There’s no doubt that major marketing events like superbowl ads have some, perhaps enduring, perhaps fleeting, influence on brand perception. Witness responses to the Doritos ad from Twitter:

@dmgerbino Are you not “aware” of Doritos? What about launching new flavors or packaging, some reason to buy?

I have watched the doritos crystal ball commercial like 5 times now but I still won’t buy chips.

Or GoDaddy, which so alienated both male and female customers that by midnight Sunday their one competitor was offering a “DumpGoDaddy” coupon to anyone who wanted to switch hosting companies, and that competitors 1and1 and Register are getting awareness bumps:

@kdpaine oppty for someone to provide a classy, female friendly web host alternative to GoDaddy I’d switch now.

Whatever the fallout from the Superbowl ad spot, it’s the flavor acquired over time that lingers on the palate. Think about Steelers fans. I dare you to walk into the Steelers bar in your city or town (and chances are that you already know which one it is) and talk smack about Roethlisberger or Holmes. At any point in the next 25 years. You do not, if you follow sports AT ALL, need to know that this would be a bad idea. I could almost hear them in Florida from here in San Francisco. Yeah their buzz is up- the most Superbowl wins ever!- but the basic Steelers identity remains unchanged: tough, blue collar, fanatic, an American legacy, the beloved flagship franchise of benighted post-industrial Pittsburgh. That’s the Steelers brand. Never seen an ad about it.

For those professionals who need to manage their brands and companies in the everyday, in the here and now, with few Superbowl moments to provide glory, there aren’t always cues that say “Look here. Look at me now. Pay attention to my opinions” and if there are, they’re likely to be PR disasters (how familiar were you with the Peanut Corporation of America before the salmonella outbreak?). The best way to do conversational marketing, to mine the world of consumer opinion and stay on top of customer zeitgeist, is not to be event driven. It’s to be everyday insight driven. A smattering of relevant blogs and tweets for Superbowl advertisers:

i just saw a kid crush up 2 bags of doritos and pour them over his salad.

Nice, gas light just came on at 450 miles on the tank! #hyundai

Toyota working on solar-powered cars. Will it work in Seattle? Doubtful.

How much more interesting than ad ranking is the insight that people smash up Doritos and use them as toppings on other foods? Could that become a product extension or a marketing campagn? How interesting that people are noticing miles per tank for their cars — talk about a viral promotion idea! How interesting that there are doubts about the efficacy of solar powered vehicles in cloudy climates. Is this a real product deficiency or a marketing challenge? These are the customer insights, this is the context that product people and marketing people and customer service people need to have in order to understand, to evolve, to compete. In marketing, every day is game day.

If my mom, my dad, my Aunt Mary, or anyone under the age of 60 actually read blogs beyond the Huffington Post, I would be worried that this post would blow my Christmas surprise, but I think I’m safe. I just ordered $2K worth of shoes for them from Zappos. I bought everyone multiple pairs and figured they’d get to keep one and that would be their present.

It’s not the down economy that is making me buy my relatively affluent relatives new shoes for Christmas. Nor do they “need” new shoes, per se. It’s that a) I’m a working mom and have NO time to shop anyplace but online and b) my favorite online shopping site is Zappos. I love the richness of the customer reviews, which help me feel like I’ve hit on just the thing for mom’s size 5 narrows, dad’s size 11 wides, and Aunt Mary’s bunions. I love the wide selection, so I can get a couple backup pairs. I love the free shipping both ways policy, and the well- engineered returns process, which makes buying from them so painless that the only shoes I’ve purchased elsewhere in the last 5 years have been bike shoes and Campers, neither of which they carry (I blame this on Camper). What also strikes me, after reading literally hundred of reviews of shoes in pursuit of the pair that will alleviate Aunt Mary’s suffering, is how almost EVERY review, whatever it says about the shoes, has to mention how great Zappos is. Here’s a random sampling of the Twitter stream:

just signed up for to be a Zappos VIP - free overnight shipping “till the cows come home!” yay!
less than 30 minutes ago
Kids Nike Skeet Jr. !! JUST MY SIZE!!! http://zeta.zappos.com/product/7416570/color/150475
less than 30 minutes ago
I did indeed sign up for Zappos VIP :) I have a pair of boots I’d like… will have to try it after next paycheck
less than 30 minutes ago
roxyyo, @jbillingsley, Great tip on adding live chat to 404 pages. We’re adding it to our Zappos Zeta 404 page: http://zeta.zappos.com/show
less than 30 minutes ago
zappos really is un-frickin-real in their access to consumers. Serious kudos to you guys for re-defining customer care
about 1 hour ago

Zappos is doing a great job of active listening- they have listened to what customers wanted and proactively given it to them, from free shipping to live chat on 404 pages. It seems like a cool place to work though I’m not sure how successful they will be in commoditizing their way of doing business. But compare this to Target, which also has great merchandise and where I actually began my holiday shopping journey:

• Items recommended for Christmas were not available to ship for 2-4 weeks (Um, it’s December 17)
• 7 out of my 8 items were eligible for free shipping, but the eighth one wasn’t, so they wanted to charge me shipping for the whole cart (Um, I PUT some of those things in only because they had free shipping)
• When I tried to find a place to complain, I got a web form. Really makes me feel the love.

Apparently I’m not the only one feeling a lack of love these days: Why ban mobile price checking? And check out this random dip into the Twitter stream for Target. Where is the customer joy?

while wearing a red sweater at target, a fellow customer asked me for help.
less than 15 minutes ago
Has to go to target before work to replace the christmas lights he broke last night.
less than 15 minutes ago
DealNews: Battery-Operated 4-Piece Flickering Tealight Candles for $14 + free shipping: Target offers t.. http://tinyurl.com/5cjpbn
less than 15 minutes ago
heading to target
less than 15 minutes ago
here’s my thing though…i need to stop at target to get a few finishing touches to my gift for my boss tomorrow.
Stupid Target.
less than 30 minutes ago
never going to Target in Newbury Park again… yuck.
less than 30 minutes ago

I’m just sorry to hear that Zappos, like so many other internet companies, in this down economy, trimmed their team. Hope it doesn’t erode the CS that has their customers constantly reviewing, blogging and tweeting about them.

Merry Christmas Zappos - you got my whole holiday budget.

PS: The new shopping interface is a definite improvement, but still needs some work. CALL ME!

Hello. My name is Julie. I recently joined the Customer Support team at Scout Labs. I am very excited to be here, as I feel this product has incredible potential. (Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be here!) A reminder to current beta users: feel free to send any questions or comments you may have about Scout Labs to me at beta scoutlabs com, as I am here to help you get the most out of using the app. To those of
you who have requested access and are still waiting, we will be extending access to you soon! It’s a promise.

I also look forward to blogging about interesting events in the social media monitoring space. So I just had to post about ‘Motrin Moms’ — the most recent ‘big story’ of corporate
social-media-mismanagement.

Motrin ran an ad
online and in print this fall regarding ‘baby wearing’, which is a term for carrying a baby in a sling, BabyBjorn, or one of those backpack-type devices. The ad claims that it is painful for moms to carry babies this way, and reminds moms that Motrin can help relieve
the pain. I’m not a mom, so I do not really know how offensive this could be, but apparently, it was REALLY offensive to A LOT of moms. They banded together with brute 2.0 force, and within days of the ad being aired, there were droves of moms Twittering and Blogging and Vlogging in outrage. Motrin, slow in their response, did not even acknowledge the movement until weeks later. When they did notice, they had no choice but to take the ad offline, but not before serious brand damage was done. They probably lost a lot of current customers, and more importantly, future customers. Mothers, being the major purchasers within households, are not a good group to alienate. (After all, that
was why they created the ad in the first place - to try and “connect” with this valuable market segment.) AdAge did a great job covering the episode, here.

This is a great example of why a service like Scout Labs should be mandatory for any company putting messages out in to the world. It is essential to put out these fires before they get out of control.

The Business Technology blog over at WSJ reports on a recent study of more than 100 corporate social networks. Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant, found that:

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members — despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects.

Moran’s conclusion is that companies get seduced by the technologies involved without understanding the terrain. These sites fail, he believes, because companies don’t invest enough money or manpower in supporting them, and because the things the companies measure don’t really align with their professed business goals.

The title of the article — “Why Most Online Communities Fail” — is misleading, since Moran is talking specifically about corporate social networks, and the very premise of these sites is flawed if you ask me. I haven’t seen the list of companies he looked at, but I would guess that most of them actually have thriving online “communities” whose activities just happen to be distributed across the Internet. People are twittering. They’re posting about those 100 companies on their blogs and MySpace pages.

I understand the urge that companies have to contain this activity, but it’s a pipe dream. You can build the snazziest playground in the world, and most of your community still won’t show up. If you want to connect with them, you have to do it on their turf. If you want to quantify their effect on your brand perception or your sales numbers, you have to find tools that can do that.

That’s what we’re aiming to provide of course, and that’s why I believe in this product. Companies are willing to spend millions on the fantasy that they can bring their communities to them because they don’t have very good ways of tuning in to the communities that are already out there.

But that’s changing.

On my flight to LA last week, in Spirit (the Southwest Airlines’) Magazine, I read about Arthur Rosenfeld and his random act of kindness in a drive-through line at a Starbucks in Florida. For those of you who missed it, the guy in the car behind Rosenfeld got angry because Rosenfeld hadn’t moved his car forward enough to free up space at the microphone. The guy in back lost it — honking and yelling. Rather than reciprocating the insults, Rosenfeld, a Tai Chi master, calmly told the barista that he wanted to pay for the coffee of the guy behind him. He paid the tab for the honker, which actually set off a spontaneous chain reaction of people paying for the next car’s coffee that lasted throughout the day.

While it’s true that Starbucks promotes angel behavior by encouraging “cheer chains” during the holiday season, Arthur Rosenfeld said that he had never heard of such a promotion. He said he did it to steady himself - to quell his own anger. But it was the unexpectedness and the stark contrast of his action that moved the honker, and the car after and the car after and the car after…

The story made me think on the random acts of kindness that I have encountered, personally. Thank you to the “trail angels” who have left snacks and water out along hiking trails for me to find. Thank you to the man in the green shirt at the airport this weekend who bought us a bottle of water after overhearing my daughter complaining of thirst and me explaining we couldn’t get out of the boarding queue. And on and on…

But Arthur Rosenfeld’s story also made me think about the marketing world, in which we often face angry customers, ranting on their blogs or in emails to customer support. Instead of yelling back, or issuing a cease and desist, or even ignoring the whiners, what if the company did the unexpected? Invite a particularly angry customer to the company headquarters to meet with the product team so that they can properly express their frustrations. Even a personal note sent from a person who matters at the company is unexpected enough (in this day and age) as to potentially turn the angry tide.

That’s what Dell did. It asked the angry Jeff Jarvis to the Dell headquarters to meet with the CEO. And while it wasn’t the meeting by itself that turned Jeff around, but the series of proactive changes that Dell put in place afterward, Jeff Jarvis ended up pretty happy. So tell the lawyers to step down. Tell your own employees to step up and to connect. You never know what might come of it.

Remember the game “Telephone”? You sit in a circle and one person whispers a phrase or sentence into the ear of the person next to her. That person repeats the message to the person next to him and so on. When the circle is complete, the originator speaks aloud his original message and the last receiver repeats what he heard. Uproarious laughter usually abounds (depending on how much beer is involved). What began as “faster than a heard of turtles” becomes “master of the nerdy girdles”.

The rumor mill is alive and well and operating at lightening speed online as Ford Motor Company found out today. It’s still a bit murky, but it looks as if Ford had an issue with the use of the Ford logo on the Black Mustang Club’s annual calendar and in no time rumors were flying across the BMC community that they were liable to be sued by Ford for taking pictures of the cars that they own.

It looks like Ford, in fact, did “wake up and smell the CGM” and dialed right into the conversation with a spring in their step. With impressive responsiveness, Ford dispelled the unfounded rumors and made clear their policies of trademark protection. Whether founded or unfounded, Bravo to the BMC members for ranting online about their perception of Ford and double Bravo to Ford for listening.