Daniel Tehan’s blog post “Turning Social Media Data into Information” provides useful insights and tips on how to get started with social media data management. It seems Australian enterprises lag behind other countries on the use of social media, according to a recent research by KPMG, with social media adoption rate of 41.6%. Interestingly, some of the developing countries are ahead of the game with adoption rates as high as 87% for China and 70.2% for India. Brazil seems to have advanced its plans to expand current efforts across all social media activities, such as listening and responding to online conversations, defining a social media strategy, dedicating funding, allocating dedicated teams and defining policies.
The good news for Australia is that public services organisations are gearing up to leverage social media. The Department of Attorney-General and Justice in the state of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia has plans to increase the use of social media to directly communicate with the community about crime. In a similar vein, the State Records Authority wants to develop its Web 2.0 communications profile using blogs and photo-sharing website, Flickr. As mentioned by Daniel, setting up such a communication site or a fan page is often a good first step. This will allow you to track your social responsibility status or monitor your brand when you launch a new product or a new advertisement campaign across the chosen market segment.
How about automatically tracking events in the last few weeks, that is, news events that do not have anything to do with your company specifically, but still affect conversations surrounding the brand? For example, a protest on perceived tax-avoidance by a company; emergence of customer frustrations leading up to potential legal action on an organisation because of perceived or real problem with the quality of their product; etc. that can affect the brand value. For this reason, companies are increasingly tracking social media to gauge opinion and public sentiments about products and services.
Public forums, micro-blog sites and main stream online newspaper articles provide excellent source of market sentiments on various topics that potentially can affect your company. For instance, a forum focused on research for purchasing a mobile phone can provide a wealth of information: Who has the best coverage? Who has the best customer service? Who has the best contract? It can provide trade tips on great deals or discounts along with the usual venting about poor customer service. Forums are also used as a great source to seek or give advice. Twitter, on the other hand, tends to mirror real-time news. Additionally, Twitter users post tweets sharing their immediate frustrations with dropped mobile signals or being put on hold for too long by the Customer Service Representative. How about tracking and using such information for your next best activity for the customer when they call the call centre or visit your web site? How about performing further analysis of the data collected to reveal different themes that define specific audiences leading to more targeted messaging strategies based on their sentiments, interests and language?
It is obvious that social media is starting to have great impact on organisations and enterprises need more comprehensive ways of looking at data and pushing information out to different channels in order to improve the customer experience. An enterprise data warehouse (EDW) that integrates unstructured online data with structured customer and product information will help organisations to ensure that information shared between customers and prospects is accurate as well as understand how online sales and marketing campaigns impact incoming customer queries and prepare customer services representative (CSR) to optimise their interactions with customers.
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