Bernaisesource

Negative comments. They cause legal departments fits and are often one of the biggest reason why companies don’t want blogs, forums or social networks.

As a communications professional, I’m not wild about negative comments either, but I am willing to accept them given the advantages that social media offers. Deploying social networks:

• help you track and manage what the public is currently saying online
• let you better address these comments
• can actually help you score points with customers

There are plenty of examples of users rallying behind companies that acknowledge mistakes and make good faith efforts to correct them.

To convince reluctant executives, there is a business case to be made that doesn’t involve value intangibles like engagement and authenticity. It’s about data mining. Social media can generate data – tons of it. The key is to tap its power to deliver customer insights.

But before anyone raises privacy concerns, let me say that I am not encouraging companies to monitor private conversations or sell personal data to third parties without a customer’s permission. I am also not talking about ways to serve up ads to customers. Analyzing social network dynamics yields insights that can improve products and processes, reduce costs and allocate resources based on customer behavior. In short, it helps us better understand our customers.

What form does this data take?

Social network analysis or social data mining focuses on the relationships and interactions of people, groups, or organizations and not individual users. It views user actions interdependently rather than independently. It follows the linkages between users and how they share information. It tries to identify patterns and understand their significance.

Joe Cothrel understands data. He works at Lithium Technologies. I have mentioned him before. His company builds forums for other companies.

From his perspective, not having a forum is far worse than negative comments. Forums can help clients hear about problems weeks before they begin hitting customer support centers and become expensive crises.

Harvesting insights goes beyond content (what is being said) and sentiment (how it is expressed). It’s about the patterns and connections - who is saying and how often. When do supporters engage, when do detractors chime in and why?

And it’s not just the social networks or forums themselves. It’s the space around them. What blogs and networks are connecting to yours? What are the key nodes, and is your social network one of them? Where are users coming from, where do they go when they are there and where do they go when they leave? If your social network is an ecosystem, how does it work and how does it work in relationship to the wider ecosystem outside of yours?

And for managers of social forums, when do you listen, when do you speak and what voice do you use? What does it mean to manage beyond the community?

Helping to answer these questions are tools like Google Analytics and customer relationship management (CRM).

Google Analytics is a free service that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

CRM helps an enterprise manage customer relationships. CRM is a combination of policies, processes, and strategies implemented by a company that unify its customer interaction and provides a mechanism for tracking customer information.

Together they are powerful tools in distilling and making sense of valuable data about your customers from social networks. You can track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, generate sales leads and identify new product ideas. In turn, social networks can help with a company’s CRM efforts. As Denis Pombriant wrote,

We have all kinds of CRM systems today that systematize and organize our customer facing processes, but what we lack right now are effective ways of capturing customer feedback….Social networking is an important new contributor to front office business processes. It gives us a way to look at the world through the eyes of the customer, and makes good on some of the promises of CRM.

For example, a company can link a customer record to a social network or forum login and track activity and comments back to its CRM system. This enables a company have a more complete picture of the customer’s interaction with the company.

I realize that CRM and web analytics generally fall outside the purview of traditional media relations. Our role rests in the realm of what is being said, not shaping business processes. But in championing social networks to reluctant executives we need to think more creatively and expansively.

It is time to stop focusing on negative comments and stress social media’s strategic value. Understanding social data mining not only helps with our advocacy; it helps give us a seat at the table. It moves PR away from simply shaping perception to helping the enterprise better understand and serve customers.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Data Mining; CRM; Web Analytics; Social Networks; Lithium; Joe Cothrel; PR;

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