The Cone of Silence is No Laughing Matter
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, May 09, 2011
Tactics for Effective Social Media Engagement
A recurring gag in Get Smart – both the original 1960s TV series and the 2008 film – is the spy gadget the Cone of Silence. Special agents use the Cone of Silence to have top-secret conversations, but the cone usually malfunctions so that they can’t hear one another clearly but anybody outside the cone can hear everything.
Consumers often engage in online conversations with friends and acquaintances about products and services as if they were under the Cone of Silence. And just as with Maxwell Smart’s cone, their conversations can be heard by everybody. As a result, consumers are often surprised when others interrupt this conversation. Who can interrupt, and for what reason, varies. What are the different responses required of service, marketing and market research professionals when interacting with consumers through social media channels?
To better understand the social media conversations they track, market researchers will be tempted to pose questions to social media users to clarify points and probe deeper (for instance, when someone says they returned a product because they didn’t like it, probing to gather more detail on what sparked the dislike). With one exception, this temptation that should be strongly resisted: according to a Vovici survey of 426 online consumers, only 15 percent are willing to talk with independent market researchers. Which means they don’t want to receive status updates or Twitter replies either. The exception is bloggers; if the blog post a researcher is reading has a comments section, that should be considered an invitation to engage with the blogger.
If you can’t converse with most social media users, you can still learn a lot about them. When a researcher wants to learn more about a participant in an online conversation, they can review the participant’s profile on the web site they’re monitoring and follow links to other online resources the individual creates. When I’ve done this myself, I’ve read past status updates that explained an individual’s reasoning behind a recent comment, discovered blog posts that illuminate the issue at hand, and even found image and video libraries that provided additional helpful detail.
Compared to the researcher, the marketer using social media isn’t seeking to understand consumer sentiment (their research department will do that for them) so much as trying to create and extend brand influence. Marketers are especially interested in identifying influencers and detractors. Influencers are valuable because their messages propagate through their lists of “friends”, followers, and subscribers; detractors should be looked at as live cigarette butts in a dry forest -- noisome irritants with the potential to spark wild forest fires that can quickly burn out of control. Many will burn out before causing harm, but the marketer still needs to track them, including how brand mentions and sentiment compare to their competitors over time. A key partner to the marketing department is the service department.
The service department’s mission is simpler and, perhaps, more noble. They look to be the Good Samaritan of social media: finding waylaid consumers by the side of the road, picking them up, dusting them off, and sending them on their way. Many contact centers are integrating social media monitoring as one more contact channel, centrally monitoring customer comments and dispatching them to representatives for resolution. Consumers are happiest to receive this type of interaction with a brand. Consumers’ issues and concerns can be immediately addressed or even resolved, while the organization demonstrates that the brand cares and is proactive.
We’ve come a long way from the vision of spy phones embedded in shoes. In the 1960s, no one could have imagined that the day would come when every consumer would walk around with their own phones. To cope, brands – whether research, marketing or service departments – need to be light on their feet.