Did You Know 4.0

A number of services are now available that will help marketers not just identify what is being discussed online, but how people  feel about products and services (and whatever else one wants to monitor).

Alex Wright highlights this trend in an article in NYT and lists a few services that are giving it a go:

Scout Labs
For as little as $99 per month, this SFO startup offers real-time monitoring of “sentiment, trendspotting, buzz trend, share of voice, email alerts, customer rants and raves.” At first blush, the interface seems fairly robust. The “sentiment” interface is shown below:

Jodange
Billing itself as the world’s first  opinion utility, Jodange “automatically filters and aggregates thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media. The NYT article describes some interesting features:

“…the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.”

“Jodange…is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.”

Twitteratr
As the name suggests, this free service focuses just on Twitter. While the interface is fairly simple, it seems they still have some work to do in order to avoid false positives, negatives and neutrals. In the capture below, you can see that what’s clearly a negative comment “don’t ever go to Chase/JP Morgan…” has been identified as a neutral.

Tweetfeel
This free Twitter-based monitoring service attempts to boil things down even further, providing you not only with the relevant tweets, but a ratio of happy faces to frowns. Again, one has to wonder how sophisticated the filters are that run behind the scenes. The English vernacular is a tough nut to crack.

Related articles:

• Digital Signage Today: The convergence of digital signage and Twitter
• John Ryan Blog: How to use Twitter and social media to fuel your offline marketing
• John Ryan Blog: Can user-generated and commercial content coexist? Thoughts on the future of digital signage
• John Ryan Blog: On the Internet, it’s “caveat venditor” (seller beware)

We’re definitely in a moment of transition. A moment where an old media system is dying and a new media system is being born. An era when spectatorial culture is giving way to a participatory culture.

So begins this video thoughtpiece by Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program:

Although Jenkins describes the political and educational implications of this media shift, the thrust of his message should not be lost upon us marketers. If you develop content for digital signage, you need to realize that the rules are changing. Visual language is changing. What people find interesting and credible is also changing. And quite possibly, peoples’ desire to influence and affect the content they see in malls, train stations and banks is going to change as well.

Questions abound:

• As participatory culture continues to grow online (and in the increasingly interrelated realm of mobile), how will it begin affect the content we produce for our clients?
• How will user-generated content become part of — or even drive — commercial content?
• How will our content-creation tools need to change?
• How does this fit with the trend toward individualized (i.e., Minority Report) digital signage content?

Please tell us your thoughts! This could be a whole conference unto itself (or at least a meaty panel discussion).

An early example is the case of the customer who asked for Neiman Marcus’ cookie recipe and was outraged when the quoted price of “two-fifty” turned out to be $250. Unable to get a refund, she distributed the recipe via email chain letter. The story actually was a hoax, as Snopes explains. Neiman Marcus themselves explain (followed by the recipe in question):

An urban myth is a modern folk tale, its origins unknown, its believability enhanced simply by the frequency with which it is repeated. Our signature chocolate chip cookie is the subject of one such myth. If you haven’t heard the story, we won’t perpetuate it here. If you have, the recipe below should serve to refute it. Copy it, print it out, pass it along to friends and family. It’s a terrific recipe. And it’s absolutely free.

Social media and Web 2.0 have changed the rules of the game. Whether the allegations are true or not, complaints about the misdeeds of big, evil corporations are able to spread and gain traction in ways never before imagined. Every PR practitioner now knows that a PR nightmare can appear on the horizon in a matter of minutes.

Below are some recent and striking examples of social media PR distasters:

Motrin Moms

In November 2008, when a number of consumers (particularly a subset of bloggers sometimes referred to as “mommy bloggers”) found this commercial offensive, they launched a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Twitter. Within hours, Motrin.com site was down, and stayed that way for nearly a day. When the site came back up, the ad was gone and in its place was an apology.

Domino’s Pizza

In April 2009, some employees in a North Carolina Domino’s store filmed themselves violating all known food safety laws and posted the results on YouTube. The original video has been taken down, but you can see segments at The Consumerist.

Word of the video spread quickly, especially on Twitter, where users wondered why Domino’s was not weighing in on the issue. Hours (a lifetime in Internet time and an eternity in Twitter time) passed before Domino’s spoke out publicly. By then, Consumerist readers were working hard to track down the identities of the Domino’s employees. Ultimately, they succeeded in identifying the store location and passed the information on to the company.

Domino’s president responded a day later in his own video:

Whether Domino’s could have responded sooner is debatable, but there’s no denying that the company was simply blindsided by wreckless employees and could have done little to prevent the situation. In an email exchange with The Consumerist, Tim McIntyre, Domino’s Vice President of Communications summed up the situation quite nicely.

The “challenge” that comes with the freedom of the internet is that any idiot with a camera and an Internet link can do stuff like this – and ruin the reputation of a brand that’s nearly 50 years old, and the reputations of 125,000 hard-working men and women across the nation and in 60 countries around the world.

United Breaks Guitars

As of this writing, the above video, posted to YouTube only 4 days earlier, has 1.4 million views, up from yesterday’s midday count of 600,000. In other words, it’s hot. The song tells the story: United Airlines mishandled this fellow’s guitar and then refused to compensate him for it. Since posting this clever video to YouTube, Dave Carroll has appeared on CNN and the Ellen DeGeneres show and has been covered by many major news outlets. In fact, five of the top-10 Google search results for “United Airlines” are about this story.

Needless to say, United is now paying attention and trying to make the best of a bad situation. On its Twitter account, the airline stated, “This has struck a chord w/ us and we’ve contacted him directly to make it right,” and “(The video) is excellent and that is why we would like to use it for training purposes so everyone receives better service from us.”

Can this happen to banks?

In fact, a similar kind of social media nightmare happened recently in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when the regional Metro Bank changed its name and some back-end systems. One customer complained on his blog that his ATM card stopped working and that he had to wait on hold more than an hour to be told that his direct deposit was unaccounted for.

The blogger must have struck a chord. Other angry customers left supporting comments on his blog. And so did some Metro Bank employees, one of whom told the customers to “F-off” and stop complaining.

The whole sordid affair caught the attention of The Consumerist, a local TV station and this blog, among others. In fact, the story is still unfolding, with the possibility of an investigation by state regulators.

What does this have to do with branch marketing?

Well, on the one hand, nothing. As a retail marketer you certainly have no control over corporate commercials, product design or back-end systems. On the other hand, when customers have complaints, who do they contact? Front-line employees, often in person, at the branch. And how prepared your branches are to react to emergencies — by fielding tough questions, diffusing customer anger and constructively solving customers’ problems — may be your single greatest defense against a social media nightmare. Taking over the digital signage network with emergency messaging at affected branches is a capability that could help alleviate a situation like Metro Bank’s. Yet few banks have the ability to do so on a moment’s notice.

It seems that branch-level crisis management should be a top priority for banks in this day and age. Because you simply never know which one of your customers has a huge following on their blog or on Twitter, or knows how to craft a clever country music video and post it to YouTube.

 There is no question the tools to manage one’s reputation exist in abundance. New media provides methods to gain insight from a diverse array of segments, and to respond with rapid speed.  In store interactive allows us to capture information about the customer experience as it occurs in branch AND gather opinions from all segments rather than just those who are tech savvy information sharers.  To become truly resilient, brands will need to reaffirm what they say through shaping the customer experience.  Today, it seems the public is as hopeful as it is cynical.  Rather than saying “let’s move on,” let’s ask, “how can we continually do better?”

• Dutch Fond Of Social Technologies, But Why? – Jeremiah Owyang (a must-follow if you even remotely dabble in online marketing) points out an interesting phenomenon: that the Dutch adopt social-network technologies at more than twice the rate of other Europeans. Which makes us wonder: What other anomalies do marketers encounter as they try to extend business models across countries and ethnic groups?

• What Target Learned from Channel Red: 18 Tips from Mark Bennett – Christie Liu at Digital Signage Insider was apparently taking good notes when Mark Bennett Target’s executive producer and group manager for media production spoke at the Content Strategies Summit. There are some universally applicable learnings in his talk. At the same time, it’s hard not to see the tremendous difference in the content needs of a store like Target or WalMart, which is primarily dependent on vendors for promo spots — and a bank, which generally needs to generate 100% of its own content. Same digital signage technology, but two different ballgames.

• YES Bank launches “Bank Branch of the Future” – Using RFID for customer identification is not a new concept, but until now has been implemented mostly in “branch of the future” videos created by tech companies. But Mumbai-based YES Bank is taking the technology to the street in its new South Extension, Delhi branch. The bank hopes to use RFID to identify customers as they enter the new branch, which YES describes as a “Service Oriented Advisory Center.” See also: YES Bank to identify you at the door

By now you’ve most likely heard about Twitter, the online social network that lets people express their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Until recently, Twitter was a phenomenon that was only of interest to Internet professionals, but all that is changing quickly. You see, last week Oprah started using Twitter. The service had already reached 13 million users worldwide and was the fastest growing network on the Internet. The so-called “Oprah effect” resulted in 500,000 to 1 million new Twitter users. All that to say, Twitter is now mainstream.

Twitter is part of a larger phenomenon called social media, which is nothing more than people networking and sharing their thoughts with their friends, family and others who share common interests. Here’s a great video that explains what social media is in simple terms.

Other social media networks you probably already knew about include:

• Facebook – more than 200 million users (100 million daily users)
• MySpace -  around 60 million users
• YouTube – 73 million unique visitors per day
• LinkedIn – 15.8 million users (mostly white-collar professionals)
• Flickr – 25 million unique visitors per day
• Blogs (not a site, so much as a category) – 900,000 new blog posts each day; blogs are read by 55% of active Internet users

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg. The only point here is to ground you in the sheer size of the social media phenomenon.

What it means to you
Given that social media is essentially about individual Internet users posting their own thoughts, photos, videos, etc., it is an ideal source for marketers who want to understand what consumers are thinking about (and possibly what they think of your bank).

What you learn by “listening” to social media can help you prepare more relevant content for your marketing campaigns or your digital signage network. By being more aware of what your customers are talking about, you might be able to tailor your in-branch content to grab their interest. Here are just some ways in which you might incorporate social media into your marketing routine:

• Listen for negative commentary – When consumers don’t like what your company is doing, they’re more likely to say so online to their friends and contacts than to you. Motrin found out this a few months ago. If you detect a consumer backlash you can respond accordingly.
• Listen for rave reviews – Even better yet, you might find that some consumers love your new product or service. If so, you could actually create a digital signage spot that features favorable tweets.
• Watch for general trends – Some of the monitoring sites mentioned below will help you keep up on what folks are talking about online. This can be helpful if you are looking for ideas for in-branch campaigns that piggyback on a popular trend (e.g., Earth Day, Susan Boyle, Twilight, etc.)
• Find reusable content – A good percentage photo and video content online is posted under a Creative Commons license and allows for commercial reuse free of charge.

How to become a social media spy
So, how does one go about listening? There are many, many sites and tools available for snooping. Below are some basic tools, selected for their potential usefulness to retail marketers.

• Addictomatic – A great starting point if you’ve had little exposure to social media monitoring. Addictomatic is basically a search engine that scans multiple social media networks (most of the ones above and a few others) and shows you the most recent mentions of your search term. I recommend trying a few different search terms and comparing the results. You’ll probably notice that some searches produce more useful results than others.
• Compfight – This is a tool for searching the millions of photos that have been posted to Flickr. Just change the setting at top to “Commercial.” Then enter your search term. The resulting photos are all available for reuse in your marketing campaigns. For example, here are the results for a search on “Seattle.” Of course, you should make sure you understand how Creative Commons works before you reuse any content.
• Digg – Digg is a social news site that lets users share and vote on news articles, blog posts, etc. And it’s a terriffic barometer of public sentiment. For example, looking at Digg’s listing of top Business and Finance articles, we see one on how to save money during the recession. Additional searches might confirm that frugality is indeed a hot topic. What could you do in your marketing to tap this sentiment?
• Facebook Lexicon – Given the sheer number of users on Facebook, it’s a shame we don’t have better access to content search and analysis tools, but it is a proprietary network, so we have to settle for what Facebook is willing to provide. And for the moment, it’s Lexicon, which is under development. For now, Lexicon provides some prefab searches on terms like “republican,” “democrat,” and “superbowl,” which are only marginally helpful. Let’s hope the tool matures before the Facebook phenom dies out.
• Google Alerts – Enter any search terms and Google will provide you with continual or periodic updates of any mentions it picks up on blogs, video sites, in the news and even on Twitter (although it’s coverage of Twitter appears a little shaky).
• Tweetstats – See the most popular subjects on Twitter displayed visually.
• Tweetmeme or Twitturly – Like a mix of Twitter search and Digg, these sites show the most popular links being shared on Twitter.
• Twitter search – Enter any search term to see the most recent posts (or “tweets” as they’re called) by Twitter users. To conduct a similar search on two or three different search terms at once, try using Monitter.

Got any tips for fellow bank marketers?
One of the amazing (and frustrating) aspects of social media is that it is growing and changing all the time. You simply can’t be aware of every network, site and monitoring tool. So, if you have found a tool or site that has helped you raise your social media awareness — and improve your marketing — please let us know!

See also: How to use free online research to feed your offline marketing

Photo credit: Beard Papa