Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb uses the recent experience he had with a Twittering Comcast customer service rep to talk about how some companies are taking a proactive approach to reputation management.
Kirkpatrick cites as an example a partnership between WebTrends and Raidian 6 to provide a monitoring and reporting services that track online conversations about their products and services.
Moreover, the system gages the influence of those making the comments, ostensibly to give the company some means of deciding how much effort to put into remedying the situation, should it be something negative.
Further on down, Kirkpatrick lays it on the line about why he finds this rising business to be disturbing:
It looks like it's just you and them, but behind them there's a curtain covering a whole mess of cogs and pulleys, analyzing you in different ways. How many followers do you have? How did you respond the last time a company rep used your name publicly? Who's in charge of discussing your concerns with you on Twitter, on your blog, or elsewhere?
Add the fact that many of these positions are, or will someday be filled with sales people, have them view these conversations through a closed system of predetermined criteria, and set it all inside a big CRM database. What do you get? Is it a story of authentic connection in a democratized public conversation - or is it a charade?
Are Kirkpatrick's concerns well founded? Perhaps.
On one hand, engaging dissatisfied customers with a positive tone is way better than sending in the rapid response legal team armed with cease & desist letters and a collective snarl. I talked about my objections to that approach in a post a few weeks ago.
I think things start to go south when the metrics software goes so far as to rate the level of influence a customer has. If I had to guess, this metric was designed by a marketer, and as we discussed in this space about eight months ago, marketers can be pretty lousy estimators of influence.
If you have a large customer base, singling out the "influencers" for the lion's share of attention misses the whole point of being real with your customers. It shows that you're not committed to producing the best product or service you can. You're only committed to doing enough to make sure you look like you're doing that.
Take the cable company, for example. No amount of net celebrity pampering is going to change the perception of the majority of unhappy customers. Years of spiraling rates, over bloated packages that force customers to subsidize channels they don't want to watch, and lousy customer service have cemented that reputation.
A celebrity gushing over the great service they got from the cable company isn't going to fix things. For every celebrity blogger there is an army of angry nobodies who relate their experiences in comments online and to their friends in person.
With a growing number of shows being available online without a subscription the cable companies are fearing now that they may well go the way of the newspapers. Judging from the comments on that linked to post, I wouldn't be surprised if the demise is met with cheers.
I think at some level, software along the lines of Radian 6 has the potential to be a great tool for larger businesses. When you have so many customers interacting with so many different points of contact within your organization, objective data can help you see how you're being seen, much as anyone looks in the mirror when getting ready in the morning.
But like any tool, it can be used and misused. I think a good example of misuse is the idea of mining that data for potential sales leads and then pursuing them overzealously. Kirkpatrick's closing anecdote is a prime example:
To me that's no more of a relationship than a fox has with a hen. Rather than treating your potential customers as prey, why not treat them with a little respect and try letting them come to you via search. Blogging on a regular basis can help you achieve that goal.
Think of it as Customer Acquisition 3.0.
Kirkpatrick cites as an example a partnership between WebTrends and Raidian 6 to provide a monitoring and reporting services that track online conversations about their products and services.
Moreover, the system gages the influence of those making the comments, ostensibly to give the company some means of deciding how much effort to put into remedying the situation, should it be something negative.
Further on down, Kirkpatrick lays it on the line about why he finds this rising business to be disturbing:
It looks like it's just you and them, but behind them there's a curtain covering a whole mess of cogs and pulleys, analyzing you in different ways. How many followers do you have? How did you respond the last time a company rep used your name publicly? Who's in charge of discussing your concerns with you on Twitter, on your blog, or elsewhere?
Add the fact that many of these positions are, or will someday be filled with sales people, have them view these conversations through a closed system of predetermined criteria, and set it all inside a big CRM database. What do you get? Is it a story of authentic connection in a democratized public conversation - or is it a charade?
Are Kirkpatrick's concerns well founded? Perhaps.
On one hand, engaging dissatisfied customers with a positive tone is way better than sending in the rapid response legal team armed with cease & desist letters and a collective snarl. I talked about my objections to that approach in a post a few weeks ago.
I think things start to go south when the metrics software goes so far as to rate the level of influence a customer has. If I had to guess, this metric was designed by a marketer, and as we discussed in this space about eight months ago, marketers can be pretty lousy estimators of influence.
If you have a large customer base, singling out the "influencers" for the lion's share of attention misses the whole point of being real with your customers. It shows that you're not committed to producing the best product or service you can. You're only committed to doing enough to make sure you look like you're doing that.
Take the cable company, for example. No amount of net celebrity pampering is going to change the perception of the majority of unhappy customers. Years of spiraling rates, over bloated packages that force customers to subsidize channels they don't want to watch, and lousy customer service have cemented that reputation.
A celebrity gushing over the great service they got from the cable company isn't going to fix things. For every celebrity blogger there is an army of angry nobodies who relate their experiences in comments online and to their friends in person.
With a growing number of shows being available online without a subscription the cable companies are fearing now that they may well go the way of the newspapers. Judging from the comments on that linked to post, I wouldn't be surprised if the demise is met with cheers.
I think at some level, software along the lines of Radian 6 has the potential to be a great tool for larger businesses. When you have so many customers interacting with so many different points of contact within your organization, objective data can help you see how you're being seen, much as anyone looks in the mirror when getting ready in the morning.
But like any tool, it can be used and misused. I think a good example of misuse is the idea of mining that data for potential sales leads and then pursuing them overzealously. Kirkpatrick's closing anecdote is a prime example:
One of my co-workers says that within minutes of his wife Tweeting about her art studio last night, she was friended by scads of art companies and salespeople. Who wants to have a conversation in that context?
To me that's no more of a relationship than a fox has with a hen. Rather than treating your potential customers as prey, why not treat them with a little respect and try letting them come to you via search. Blogging on a regular basis can help you achieve that goal.
Think of it as Customer Acquisition 3.0.
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