The Drew Blog

5 Biggest Social Media Mistakes

04/7/13

When Renegade started doing social media audits several years ago, it was unclear exactly what we’d find. What we soon discovered is that many companies seem to be making the same mistakes, regardless of company size, B2B vs. B2C or the department leading the charge. Here is a quick overview of the five most common mistakes we’re seeing, along with some initial thoughts on how to correct these self-defeating faux pas.

Measuring the Wrong Things
The most common metric mistake is emphasizing the number of fans you have over other markers, an approach that is symptomatic of a larger problem: viewing social as another mass medium through which branded content can be pushed. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how large your social footprint is if fans aren’t talking about your content on Facebook (PTAT) and sharing your videos, tweets and or LinkedIn posts. Enlightened brands use and monitor several more illuminating metrics, including brand sentiment, speed and quality of customer service resolution and engagement (comments, shares, CTRs, etc.).

Too Many Channels and/or Sub-branded Pages
Once the social media bug began to spread across companies, every line extension of a line extension wanted its own Facebook page or Twitter account and/or Pinterest board. IBM, for example, discovered through an audit that it had hundreds of branded handles on Twitter, and ultimately, they decided to reduce that list to only a few handfuls. Similarly, many brands are stretched too thin, jumping onto new platforms without the resources to keep their content fresh and their fans engaged. It is better to just do a few channels really well than to be everywhere inconsistently.

Boring Non-Conversational Content
In social settings, brands, like people, get really boring if they only talk about themselves. Of course, you want to sell more products, but unless you have genuine news or product offers, brands should focus on being interesting and interested in their social channels. Creating content that is interesting requires knowing your target really well—something that is increasingly easier with Facebook analytics platforms. Being interested starts by responding to comments and continues by asking questions.

Social is Isolated in One Department
Since marketers want to market, customer service wants to help and HR wants to recruit, isolating social in one department often limits the multi-functional role that it can play for an organization. This need not be the case. We recently participated in a client’s brand integration workshop and concluded that social media touched the work of seven other agencies, including advertising, media buying, web development, SEO, PR and customer experience, which speaks to the necessity of sharing the social love across your company.

No Social Media Road Map
As the old saying goes, any road looks good if you don’t know where you’re going. And so it goes with social, which sprouted haphazardly within most companies. Establishing a clear road map for your company is imperative, and an effective road map should assign a purpose to each channel, set up an editorial calendar, create an escalation process for customer complaints and determine staffing needs. Lastly, the road map should define the paid or earned media that will ultimately be required to achieve any kind of scale.

Final note: If you aren’t making mistakes in social, then chances are you aren’t trying anything new. The trick is to turn these mistakes into learning opportunities that will ultimately put you one step ahead of your more cautious competitors. Please let me know if you have any great success stories that started from so-called mistakes–I’d love to make that the follow up story. (A version of this article ran on SocialMediaToday.com)

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Marketing as Service
Social Media

Steve Rubel on “The Content Imperative”

03/19/13

Steve Rubel is Chief Content Strategist for Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he is evangelizing about the importance of content marketing. Given that I happen to agree with Steve and having seen him speak at the Brite ’13 Conference, I was delighted to be able to dig into the topic a bit deeper with him after the fact. As you will see, there’s a lot more to content marketing than publishing a few articles. In fact, it requires a comprehensive approach including a clear strategy, a diverse blend of media (paid, earned and owned) and writers that know how to start conversations. But don’t take my word for it, read on…

Neisser: So, what exactly is The Content Imperative?
Rubel: It’s the belief that creating content is no longer optional. Rather, it’s imperative given the significant economic changes that are taking place in both media and, resultantly, marketing. With more ads bought/sold through trading desks, advertising is now far more efficient and effective. This is great for the marketers, but it’s a nightmare for the publishers since it erodes their margins.

Faced with a lack of viable options for generating new/replacement revenues – e.g. subscriptions, significant increases in video views (which have a higher CPM) – media companies are increasingly becoming open to taking sponsored content. Sponsored content is poised to become a significant, possibly even a major new advertising format. And it’s for this reason why it’s now an imperative.

Neisser: When it comes to content marketing, what does success look like in terms of business metrics that a CEO or CFO would appreciate?
Rubel: The metrics of success really depend on the approach. Are you building an asset and trying to attract an audience to you or are you trying to engage the public on other lands? In the case of the former, it’s traffic that leads to sales. In the case of the latter, it’s impressions that create brand awareness and/or potentially lead to traffic and sales.

Neisser: Presumably content marketing provides some kind of competitive advantage. Can you provide a real world example or two of marketers that have gained competitive advantage via their content marketing efforts?
Rubel: Red Bull is just as known for the content it creates as it is for it’s brand attributes. The same is true for GE (an Edelman client). Both have a content vs a message mindset. One is a consumer brand effort, the other is corporate reputation.

Neisser: So, does this mean every marketer needs to become a publisher? And if every marketer in every category is pushing out their own content, at what point does the consumer say, enough already AND/OR at what point does content publishing no longer provide competitive advantage?
Rubel: Not necessarily. There could be a first mover advantage here in some categories. And, yes, it is possible that consumers won’t be receptive. That said, throughout history quality content has prevailed over junk no matter where it comes from. What’s different now is that the playing field has leveled. Brands have a viable way to get their message out and a cadre of media owners ready to help them do so.

Neisser: Creating great content is an art form that not every company can master. And of course, content is what media companies do really well. So, how can chocolate (marketing) & peanut butter (media) get together nowadays?
Rubel: Due to the economic underpinnings mentioned above, media companies are increasingly recognizing that content marketing is a viable revenue stream when done right. Many media owners have set up distinct content studios that exclusively serve marketers. They help customers understand their audiences, create content and build deeper relationships. However, they are limited to doing so within their walls.This is why we believe there will be opportunities for agencies like Edelman to integrate different partnerships in context of a broader program.

Neisser: Given an over-abundance of content (aka the WWW) and a dearth of free time (so we all say), should marketers be more focused on quality than quantity, striving to become a recognized curator rather than a prolific purveyor?
Rubel: Absolutely. Slow is the new fast. Quality is the new quantity. (Although these are old ideas) However, scale is still critical. As is consistency.

Neisser: Content publishing has the potential to be a one way street almost like traditional advertising. Where does social / conversation fit into the content marketing picture?
Rubel: The media owners seem open to experimenting on their social platforms. The faster we together make this about content as a means to building relationships, the better.

As always, if you enjoyed this post, feel free to share it with friends and subscribe to TheDrewBlog.

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A 13-Step Recipe for Great CMOs

03/17/13

If Truman Capote was right that “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor,” then you’re in for a feast as I contrast the typical shortcomings of your average CMO with the amazing success of Terri Funk Graham. As CMO of Jack in the Box, Graham cooked up the outrageously successful “Jack” campaign that began its 18-year run of driving sales and building loyalty. And like the recipes of many world-class chefs, Graham’s 13-step approach is easy-to-digest but hard-to-replicate. (By the way, if this article looks familiar its because you saw it first on FastCompany.com)

1. Wisk in the Risk
Having the courage to take a risk is table stakes for CMOs. In Graham’s case, Jack in the Box “needed to do something to revitalize the brand and make it relevant again” after enduring a food poisoning crisis. So in 1995, Graham helped initiate the Bringing Jack Back campaign, which launched with spokesperson Jack undergoing plastic surgery and taking merciless revenge on the board of directors. This initial risk born of necessity was a mere taste of the Graham’s on-going willingness to “put a lot more on the line.”

2. Have a Heart
Despite evidence that consumer preference is emotionally driven, many CMOs focus entirely on the rational side of their brand. In contrast, Graham credits the longevity of the Jack campaign to the fact that “we tapped into the emotional branding side that really gave it a personality that people could connect to.” Adds Graham, “We were unapologetic about using humor, since it wasn’t going to hurt the brand as long as we were true to who we were.”

3. Don’t Cook by Committee
Though strong agency partners are often behind the initial big idea, it takes masterminds on both sides to keep the other potential cooks out of the proverbial kitchen over the long run. Graham credits Secret Weapon Creative Director Dick Sittig’s irreverent sense of humor for “rising to the challenge of keeping Jack relevant.” Graham held up her end of the bargain, proclaiming, “Approval by committee is the death of a campaign—you end up with mediocre work.”

4. A Tablespoon of Trust
No CMO can succeed without the trust of their CEO. Explains Graham, “Linda Lang [CEO of Jack in the Box] absolutely let me run with it [the Jack campaign] and she always backed it.” However, while Graham “had full support and permission to take risks,” her CEO expected her to “stand tall” if a crisis arose. This meant that Graham “would have to do all the explaining in the boardroom any time something went a little astray”—a reasonable quid pro quo for this kind of freedom.

5. Nothing Taste Better Than Sales
Some marketers make a distinction between brand-driving and sales-driving ads, only holding the latter accountable. Graham considers such an approach a luxury Jack in the Box can’t afford, since they are constantly outspent 10:1 by McDonalds. “Everything that we did we also did with the premise of generating sales and driving traffic,” explains Graham. “We didn’t do funny ads just for the sake of doing funny ads: our goal was always to drive traffic and that’s what we accomplished each and every time,” she adds.

6. Make the Menu
Like the world-class chef who goes to the market to hand pick her ingredients, a master CMO like Graham would not want to be handcuffed by a product controlled by others. So for the last five years, “Menu” reported to Graham because, as she puts it, “we were able to have the true insight as to what the product was delivering to the customer.” The added value of having Product report to Marketing is that “everybody is in sync and it is all tied to an overall strategy,” concludes Graham.

7. Spread the Word Inside
Sometimes the internal audience can be as important as the customer to the CMO, especially when a product problem needs to be addressed. For Graham, the problem turned out to be their signature taco, Jack’s best-selling product that had been “marginalized and optimized over time,” losing both taste and fans along the way. To fix this, Graham launched the “Respect the Taco” initiative, which renewed internal focus on product quality and gave it the sales driving “attention it deserved.”

8. Flavor It with Fresh
Most established brands walk the knife’s edge between being a reliable staple and yesterday’s leftovers. To combat this, Graham recognized early on that “in the quick-serve restaurant business, news is what drives traffic,” and, consequently, she used advertising to promote new products, line extensions and product bundles. The need for CMOs to deliver news via all their communications goes well beyond the QSR world. Graham remarks, “We all like to try new things—it’s human nature.”

9. Pander to Your Patrons
The relentless search for incremental sales can lead any adventurous CMO astray. In the pursuit of innovation, Graham cautions, “There comes a point when you’re starting to put products out there that are so far afield that your core customer starts to question your brand.” Graham cited Jack’s Southwest Bowl as a line extension that was too far off-track, while products like the Sour Dough Ultimate Cheeseburger “was more in the sweet spot and more aligned with the focus of our biggest fans.”

10. Stir the Pot
Typically, even the best campaigns lose steam over time. Aware that after 14 years, Jack’s time might be up, Graham put “the biggest brand equity that the company had on the line to see if people still cared:” In a Super Bowl spot, Jack got hit by a bus. And rather than a typical media schedule, the commercial ran just the one time at which point digital and social media took over. Customers responded famously: “[They] sent cards, teddy bears, flowers and everything you could imagine for Jack’s recovery,” gushes Graham.

11. Avoid Just Chasing the Course d’ Jour
When it comes to media selection, newish CMOs may be inclined to dismiss television as a dinosaur. Having witnessed the power of TV year after year, Graham knows better, warning, “The notion that traditional media is dead is quite false.” That said, Graham also evangelizes about the synergistic power of digital and social, two channels that gave Jack’s bus accident recovery a life of its own after the YouTube video went viral and hatched a campaign within a campaign.

12. Read the Tea Leaves
With the advent of so-called “Big Data,” no CMO can afford to rely entirely on his or her gut. And though Graham abhors copy testing as a means of selecting creative, her annual plan included “a number of studies (both quantitative and qualitative) that would give us indicators on how we were doing.” Not stopping here, Graham knew that since “the message was always tied around a product, it was pretty straightforward for us to tell that the campaign was driving those product sales.”

13. Another Cup of Chutzpah, Please
Inevitably, most CMOs will find themselves in a crisis but few will have the courage to diffuse the situation quite like Graham. After airing a TV spot that featured a hallucinating young man who ordered 30 tacos (an experience that resonated with Jack’s core target), Graham got wind that “protesters and media were planning to show up on the grass all around our corporate headquarters.” Her solution? “We became a water park in the afternoon and turned on the sprinklers,” dowsing the protest before it started. Now that’s chutzpah!

Final Note: After a 22-year run at Jack in the Box, Terri Funk Graham recently joined the Board of Directors at Hot Topic Inc., is working with The CMO Club as the Chairman of its President’s Circle and is consulting for HOM Sotheby’s Realty. Fellow CMOs can meet Terri in person at the upcoming CMO Club Summit in NYC and read my interview with her right here on TheDrewBlog. As always, if you like what you’re reading, feel free to subscribe and/or share it with friends.

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Marketing as Service
Social Media

How Intuit Drives Innovation (and you can too)

02/27/13

Small companies are often founded by innovative individuals who by design or necessity lead their business into new and unchartered territory. As a company matures that innovative spirit is often squashed under the weight of a fearsome bureaucracy. One company that seems to consistently break this pattern is Intuit, extending its product line well beyond Quickbooks and TurboTax with a steady series of innovative offerings including SnapTax, a mobile tax filing app.

Kaaren Hanson, VP of Design Innovation at Intuit, believes that the trick is “creating a culture of rapid experimentation” and is speaking about that very topic at next week’s Columbia Business School’s Brite ’13 Conference. As you will see in my interview below, Kaaren is refreshingly honest, reminding those that want to innovate (at any size business), to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution,” that today “leadership is about experimentation” and “innovation is part of everyone’s job.” But read on. There’s a lot more to this innovation thing than grabbing a white board and gathering the usual suspects!

Drew: Are we currently in the “innovation age” or is innovation simply an imperative for companies looking to thrive (versus survive) in a rapidly changing global economy?
Kaaren: We have a long way to go. I would say we are entering the “innovation age.” Changes in how we work and think are beginning to take place, but most of the results and impact are yet to come.

Drew: Can you share a specific recent innovation at Intuit and speak to how it came into being?
Kaaren: How about preparing and filing your taxes in less than 10 minutes on your smart phone? That’s a recent innovation from Intuit we call SnapTax. After announcing mobile as a key priority for the company, Intuit CEO Brad Smith was asked by an engineer in an employee chat: “What the hell does mobile have to do with taxes?” He told them he didn’t know, but he knew they’d figure it out. A few months later a small team had an idea. Intuit gave this small team the freedom and the resources they needed to dream and develop – and they came up with a mobile app to prepare simple tax returns on an iPhone, easily and accurately. That team’s work became SnapTax, which makes it easy to file a simple tax return on a smartphone in the amount of time it takes to find a parking space at H&R Block.

Drew: Does creating a culture of innovation also require a certain tolerance for failure? Are there ways to mitigate the risks?
Kaaren: Who likes failure? A string of failures and you’re out of business. You have to learn from failure and use it like road signs that direct you to success. Having a culture where people savor surprises is important. That surprise could be a big upside or a big downside. Intuit’s co-founder Scott Cook says it well: “If there’s something that’s really a big surprise, upside or downside, that’s generally the real world speaking to you, saying there’s something you don’t yet understand.” It’s less about mitigating risks and more about carving out space for people to experiment and learn from failure. One example from Intuit is our Lean StartINs. These are one or two-day events where small groups of employees come to test their ideas for new products or services.

Drew: What are the other big cultural changes required for companies to become more innovative?
Kaaren: Leadership models need to change, especially when it comes to how decisions get made. In the innovation age leadership is much more about Thomas Edison than Dwight Eisenhower. Leadership is about experimentation. It’s no longer about the boss making the decision or judgment. Instead, we make the decision based on testing the hypothesis and experimentation. This is moving decision-making from the boss’s opinion to enabling the answer to prove itself with customers voting with their feet.

Drew: Innovation often seems to align with the corporate growth cycle—younger companies tend to innovate more than bigger ones either out of necessity or because the culture is younger and less risk averse. How does the proverbial old dog learn new tricks?
Kaaren: It starts with having a strategy that will fuel growth through big economic and technological changes. Then give employees the freedom to experiment, and ultimately bring to life those groundbreaking innovations that will inspire more innovation.

Drew: Can the big guys do this without creating “skunkworks” or other splinter operations that are not just empowered to innovate but are really required to do so?
Kaaren: At Intuit innovation is part of everyone’s job. If the big guys want to see new ideas come to life at their company, they should democratize innovation. We offer unstructured time to all employees at Intuit, to give great people with great ideas the time and freedom to pursue them. Having an innovation awards program is also a good way to celebrate successes and reinforce the importance of innovation. When it comes to our innovation awards program, we provide the three things that innovators wanted most: recognition allowing access to leaders and other innovators, time to innovate on a project of their choice and financial reward.

Drew: Henry Ford is famous for saying, “if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” and Steve Jobs was also a skeptic of the consumer’s ability to recognize the need for what would become a totally new category. How important is consumer input/feedback in your innovation process?
Kaaren: Just listening to what customers say is a waste of time. Customer Driven Innovation is one of our core capabilities that differentiates us and allows us to deliver solutions that truly change people’s lives. One of our signature methods is something we can Follow Me Homes, observing customers “in the wild” – it may be their homes, coffee shops, or the train. We notice what and how they are going about their daily lives and then probe deeply to understand the motivations and emotions that drive their behaviors. These nuggets provide rich material for our innovations.

Drew: Presumably Intuit has had some failures along the innovation road. Is it true that you can learn as much from failures as you do successes and if so, what have you learned?
Kaaren: You can certainly learn from failure. It goes back to my earlier comment about savoring surprises. We recently learned this important lesson: fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Many of Intuit’s customers are small businesses. We had a team that had been exploring opportunities in adjacencies to our payroll business, and found that health coverage is the most important employee benefit. Yet most small businesses don’t offer this benefit because it’s too expensive and too much work to administrate. The Intuit team took that customer problem and found a way to create a new, low-cost health insurance plan solution. The insurance plan got positive feedback from customers and good overall results in market testing. However, when the team began offering the plan, they only sold four plans in five months. The team then went back to drawing board. They again examined the learnings from customers and added some new members to the team with different perspectives. This led to the team taking insurance out of the solution. Instead, they created a health debit card product to which employers would contribute an amount that they set for their employees to use for healthcare expenses. So the employer sets the cost, and employees get full choice with pre-tax dollars.

A key learning from the failed low-cost insurance plan was, fall in love with the problem, not the solution. In this case the problem still existed. The team needed to have a mindset that as long as they understood the problem, they could be flexible, iterate further and in the end make a product more likely to succeed. The team continues to iterate, and the Intuit Health Debit Card is performing well in a limited market release.

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Social Media

Spoiler Alert: Mobile Advertising Works (Sometimes)

02/25/13

Digital Display is often considered the homely step-child of the advertising family shown up regularly by its precocious cousin Search. So it would stand to reason that Mobile Display would be equally destained. Well as the analysts like to say, “data trumps opinion” and according to Professor Miklos Sarvary, Faculty Director, Media Program at Columbia Business School, who studied the impact of Mobile Display ads, this emerging channel does work “but only under certain conditions.” Sarvary will be presenting his findings next week at the Columbia Business School’s Brite ’13 conference and I am delighted to provide a sneak peak of his report via the following interview:

Drew: I love the title of your presentation “The Truth about Mobile Advertising: Does it Even Work?” Let’s start there. Does mobile display advertising work?
Yes, our empirical analysis seems to show that it works but only under certain conditions (for certain products).

Drew: Digital display advertising has a bad reputation already relative to say Search advertising. Why would or should advertisers expect more from mobile display?
The reason is that it is hard to observe systematic effects for display advertising, which is not the case for search advertising. Search advertising is “self-contained”, in the sense that you can have an independent campaign and if the search words are well chosen it generally works. Our research suggests that display advertising may work but only if it is part of a bigger campaign. The role of the mobile display ad is to remind people of the deeper messages of “higher bandwidth” campaigns. We show that this only works for high involvement and utilitarian products. In other words, it is harder to make the case for mobile display ads.

Drew: For marketers considering mobile display advertising, which success barometers should they focus on in order to most satisfied with this particular medium?
Actually, we found that mobile display ads seem to influence many stages of the decision funnel (we could only verify attitude and purchase intentions but I believe that they may pretty much influence the entire decision funnel). This is consistent with the idea that mobile display ads only remind consumers of another campaign transferring richer information. If this is true, then each stage of that campaign might be affected.

Drew: Can you provide an example or two of successful mobile display campaigns?
Unfortunately not. We are not allowed to reveal the products that we have studied and I don’t have a good specific case study. Moreover, a really successful campaign might not be attributed to mobile ads alone.

Drew: Are there product/services that tend to do better than others on mobile? Are there products/services that simply don’t work at all on mobile display?
Sure. This is the essence of our findings. Specifically, and somewhat surprisingly, high involvement, utilitarian products work better for mibile display advertisemements (as opposed to low involvement hedonic products). Examples like regular cars, expensive durables, heath insurence, financial services come to mind….

Drew: In theory, mobile display has the opportunity to be incredibly customized based on user behavior and/or location. Did this level of customization play a role in your study?
No. And you are right that this is where the real power of mobile may actually lie. We only studies simple display advertisements – little banners appearing on the screen. What is surprising however, is that a large proportion of mobile ads are still these simple display ads. And the forecasts don’t seem to indicate that the proportion of spending on these is going to decline.

Drew: Will the advent of larger mobile phones like the rumored iPhone 6 help the mobile display cause?
Yes, I think that there will be a lot of development here. Ads will do a better job at capturing attention, reminding people of other marketing messages etc. Already now, many people count some rich media ads as display ads.

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Social Media

How to Run a Successful Blogger Outreach Program

02/1/13

So you may have heard talk of blogger outreach programs and wondered exactly how they worked. Well its actually as easy as 1-2-3-4:

Identify relevant bloggers
Send them a flattering note after reading their work
Provide them interesting content (preferably words and images)
Be patient (your bloggers are probably busy doing other things)

Back in mid-December, I was contacted by Rachel Ramsey of Software Advice who followed these steps and lo and behold, I agreed to allow her associate Ashley Verrill to be a guest blogger on TheDrewBlog. I typically don’t allow guest bloggers but frankly, I thought the topic was interesting and I was busy writing for other places like FastCompany.com, Social Media Today and iMediaConnection! BUT since my blog was on hiatus over the holidays and I am just getting to this now, I couldn’t help but wonder what other sites had already shared this content. Turns out Rachel is quite good at her job and stories about “The Great Social Customer Service Race” appeared on a number of blogs including Social Media Today, WOMMA, Swiftpage, Happy Customer and many many others. SO, if you’ve already seen this elsewhere, you can stop now. If not, I hope you enjoy it.

GUEST POST: The Great Social Customer Service Race by Ashley Verrill

Social media has always been about engagement. It’s a place where conversations, networking and relationship building flourish. Unfortunately for business, this is difficult to scale. So many succumb to using the platform strictly for racking up fans and blasting promotions.

But times have changed. Customers now expect businesses to respond when they send messages, tweets or wall posts. It’s up to each business to take advantage of new technologies that help prioritize, route and address these messages efficiently.

Recently, I conducted an experiment to assess whether 14 of the nation’s top brands employ such technologies to achieve social media responsiveness. The test – dubbed The Great Social Customer Service Race – involved sending 280 tweets from four personal accounts, during a four-week period.

We analyzed the percent of total tweets each brand responded to, as well as the time it took them to write back when they did respond. We designed questions that tested specific listening technology features, as well as social response best practices.

Here’s a few lessons we learned from the race that you can use to improve your own social media response.

Listening Technology Should Catch @, no @ and #BrandName

One of the most striking results was the overwhelming lack of response for tweets that did not include the @ symbol and the company’s Twitter handle.

Even though the customer might not be specifically addressing the brand if they don’t use their handle, these messages sometimes present a chance to surprise and delight the customer. Think of it this way: you either capitalize on an opportunity to create a brand advocate, or you risk a negative message traveling further, faster in the wrong hands.

Consider this tweet that didn’t receive a response:

This left a bad impression on me and my followers. Not only that, but competitors could be listening for your brand and capitalize on negative messages about you. Consider this response to a tweet I sent about Bank of America.

Prioritization is Your Best Friend

For large companies, it’s impossible to expect that they respond to everything. But overall, these brands only replied to about 14 percent of the messages we sent. This is frighteningly low. To tackle this challenge, companies should utilize technology that identifies the most important messages and moves them to the front of the response queue.

This is done primarily through prioritization rules that can be customized and programmed into your listening technology. This should include priority triggers such as “thank you,” “angry,” “mad,” “switching,” “buying” and so on. Your team should also spend time finding other keywords that might be more specific to your industry or company.

McDonalds demonstrated during the race that its team was listening for thank you. This tweet received a response in just 13 minutes:

While these important interactions went unnoticed:

Track Your Responses

It’s critical your team have a process for tracking responses once they are prioritized and routed. At one point during the race, we received two responses to the same tweet, one day apart. The first response seemed robotic, and the second didn’t address the question.

A customer service ticketing-type application is one way to achieve this kind of tracking. When a message is received, it becomes a response ticket that is instantly prioritized and routed. Then once it receives a response, it’s removed from the response queue. This is also helpful if the responder that receives the message is busy. Many social listening technologies can instantly re-route the message if it isn’t touched after a certain amount of time.

Consider Customer Clout

A customer’s social activity level or purchase history might be another measure to consider when prioritizing your response. During the race, each of our four Twitter users tweeted the same brand as many as seven times during the four-week experiment. One goals was to see if any of the brands would identify us as active socializers and improve their response time. Not one of the 14 brands did.

To do this, ensure your software records every Twitter interaction with your brand in the corresponding customer’s profile. This allows the next responding agent to quickly see if that customer is a brand advocate or tweeted negatively in the past. Also, program socially integrated ticketing software to increase response priority if a user emerges as an active socializer.

Are You Really Listening?

Customers social media response expectations will only continue to increase. Now is the time to get a handle on your engagement process with the right technology, used in the right way.

Ashley Verrill is a CRM analyst for Software Advice.

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