Interesting news about social media world, online communities and communication.

,

4 Steps to Monitor Criticism and Seal Your Reputation

criticism

Criticism is a natural part of any company – but how you respond to criticism is what will mark your company as either a friendly, customer orientated organisation…or as a profit hungry, callous corporation. Having a reputation as a company that truly cares for its customers will draw in further customers as they know that, should something go wrong, they’ll be looked after; however, having a reputation as a faceless conglomerate that cares more for its shareholders than its clientele will put off potential customers that know, should something go wrong, they’d be out of pocket and on their own.

Monitor feedback

Complaints and social media go hand in hand, so use it to your advantage. Find where people are talking about your company, whether it is Twitter, Facebook, or even personal blogs…and read! The first step to solving a complaint is finding out what it is. Once you know what people are unhappy about, it is much easier to try and find a solution to appease them.

Control the situation

A simple but effective step is to bring the complaints to you. Monitoring feedback works well, but it works even better if you cut out the middleman. Create a prominent feedback/forum section on your website and encourage people to leave their comments – that way you may deter people from venting their frustration on high profile complaint websites and blogs, and you can use the opportunity to show that you take feedback seriously and are willing to try and solve their problems.

But remember: you’re not a dictatorship!

However tempting it may be, resist the temptation to censor people’s comments. It didn’t work out too well for the Soviet Union and the chances are it won’t work out too well for you either. Once people realise – and they will – that you’re removing unfavourable comments, people will distrust anything you say from then on. It’s best to embrace such comments and turn a complaint into a compliment about your customer service skills.

Act – and act fast

It is much easier to be proactive and solve criticism if and when it occurs than to allow events to snowball and have to face an avalanche of angry customers. Delaying a response will only make the situation worse. The customer will still be angry that the product wasn’t what they expected or wasn’t delivered on time – plus they’ll now just be angry that it took your company so long to offer a response. To prevent this from happening, consider having you customer service team work alongside your reputation management team (if you have one) because nobody likes to be told two different things from two different people.

Follow these simple tips and you are on your way to sealing your company’s reputation as a friendly, customer orientated enterprise and, with it, the hearts and minds of both existing and potential clients.

,

Upcoming conferences for social media marketers (Part 1)

A couple of great social media conferences are coming soon – check them out!

The_Next_Web_Europe_screenshot-1024x393

The Next Web Europe will cover various topics on the latest web trends. More than 3500 people will take part in TNW. Among the speakers of the conference will be Pieter van der Does, Werner Vogels, Neelie Kroes and David Allen. The schedule is still in a progress of crafting. There will be 4 stages – red, blue, green and yellow, so you can choose to register according to your business interests. Special attention will be paid on early-stage startups with ten Boost Sessions for two days (check the green stage).

 

Marketing_innovation_summit_2015-1024x452

The conference is focused on B2B marketing – concepts, analytics, strategies, best practices in the field, successful brands. In addition, it will take place at a baseball stadium for much more inspiration and fun. One of the most important advantages of the conference is the opportunity to network with B2B marketers in the industry. There is a list of the companies which will attend this year’s Summit. Speakers will be Adam Blitzer, Megan Heuer, Michael McLaren, Heather Zynczak, Holly Bounds and others.

 

social_tools_summit_screenshot-1024x459

The main focus of the Summit is how to increase the ROI of social media through implementation of various business tools. There will be a Trender Panel (a group of users) involved in some of the sessions. The agenda includes the topics of optimization of the workflow with social media dashboards, best practices in social listening and monitoring, building a social advocacy program, social media analytics tools, content marketing and more. Some of the key speakers at the Social Tools Summit will be Neal Schaffer, Brian Mahony, Emeric Ernoult, Ron Schott, Nicole Kroese, Tanya Donnelly.

 

Social_Media_Camp_screenshot-1024x356

This year’s theme of the camp is “Social integration”. The attendees will learn how to create effective social media strategies which integrate all components of digital marketing. The Social media camp gives the opportunity to provide social media coaches for new participants. The schedule consists of sessions in social media trends, omni-channel marketing, brand culture, crowdfunding, social media ROI, influencer marketing and much more. Some of the main speakers will be Marc Stoiber, John Jantsch, Lisa Larter, Hussein Alibhai, Nicole van Zanten, John Yap.

 

The_Social_ShakeUp_screenshot-1024x354

The Social Shake-Up Conference provides a variety of sessions and case studies. There are 5 tracks – Data & Analytics, Conversation, Creativity, Challenges and Collaboration, as each of them consists of particular sessions. Attendees can create their own schedule based on their preferences. The main topics include creative thinking in terms of customer experience, analytics for engaging mobile users, real-time marketing, social media management, social generation, crisis management, content marketing, best brands on social and much more. Among the key speakers will be Daina Middleton, John Yembrick, Doug Busk, Tracy Bell, Robert Cancalosi.

 

Social_Media_Strategies_Summit_NY_2015-1024x321

The conference is focused on creating a successful social strategy. The agenda covers the following workshops: B2B social business tools, CRM, Blogging, global content marketing, social media strategies for financial services (all day). Speakers will be Adam Miller, Kevin Dando, Mindy Stockfield, Amar Ravi, Soniya Monga, Buddy Teaster, Ryan Lewis and others.

 

Big_Social_Media_Conference

The key themes at The Big Social Media Conference are connected with boosting sales with social media, omni-channel marketing, marketing automation, mailing lists, and social media strategies. The list of speakers includes Mari Smith, Melonie Dodaro, Lilach Bullock, Yossi Erdman, Sharon Flaherty and others.

 

MozCon_screenshot-1024x377

MozCon is about SEO, community building, brand development, CRO, content marketing, analytics and much more – all presented in a non-traditional way. Some of the speakers will be Adam Singer, Cindy Krum, Courtney Seiter, Dana DiTomaso and David Mihm. The agenda should be published soon.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

,

Marketing Today: The New Challenge in the Digital Age

Online Reputation

Slowly, but surely, the business world is changing. The antiquated world of product design is being replaced by that of service design – and it shows no sign of stopping. The information age that we were promised in so many childhood cartoons looks like it could finally be coming true (although I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a Jetson-esque utopian lifestyle just yet!)

Since the days of Arkwright and Watt, mankind has come a long way. We’ve developed planes, trains, and automobiles (minus John Candy and Steve Martin, obviously). We’ve developed the telephone, the computer and the atomic bomb. These things, however, are being consigned to the annuls of history for one reason – the days of the tangible product are numbered.
The concept of ‘experience’ has become the key. What should the customer experience be like? Could we improve it? It is this focus on people rather than the product that is most intriguing. While you can easily measure something tangible – it is easy to count the number of laptops in a warehouse, for example – it is, however, much more difficult to measure emotions and feelings, especially the emotions and feelings of something as unpredictable as man.

The last three decades have seen a clear shift from the tangible to the intangible. Although it is true that the economies of western industrial nations are still 60-70% product focused, it is, likewise, true that almost exclusively new business start-ups are service based. Businesses are more concerned than ever with their online reputation – and rightly so. The blogosphere, alongside social media in general, has the power to make or break a company. One bad review that goes viral and your start-up that you have worked so hard to create is ruined before it has even begun! The answer? The beauty of online reputation monitoring and management.

,

Review on Merkozy’s popularity on Social Media

Merkozy – the moniker that symbolizes the marriage of convenience between the German chancellor and the French president became a popular expression. Rankur – a tool for social media analytics performed a research on the term’s popularity and the expressed sentiment by Internet users. The term is already used in internet search and increased its fame after the deal on December 5th.

The geographic location of the users who adopted the nickname shows that it is most popular in the UK and Spain.  It was introduced back in September, 2011 and gained popularity after a publication in The Telegraph. Currently it is gaining terrain after the EU summit from December 9 but unfortunately, as we’ll see below, the overall sentiment in the publications is negative.

Geographic spread of the term

Screenshot from Rankur.com

The demographic report illustrates the profile of the adopters and it is quite definite: an adolescent man in the age group of 19 to 32 years old. The finding is probably related to the men’s psychology – the testosterone gears up the will for negative attitude and usage of monikers.

The sentiment analysis report confirms the hypothesis of negative feelings.  Sentiment analysis from text is part of artificial intelligence studies and reports the author’s positivism in an automated and unbiased way.

Concerning our research term online users are very tough when using the sobriquet. 45.3 percent of the users express their thumbs down emotions, surely induced by the worsen Euro perspectives. Further exploration can be done in a few clicks by filtering the results by language, location, period and more. The results will be shared in future posts – stay tuned to our blog for follow up!

One more interesting thing to explore is the topic cloud – it gives the summary of what is being or has been discussed, together with a quantity indication and trends.

Important phrases used in comments and articles

Important phrases used in comments and articles

That’s a short review of our research, obtained from Rankur.com. Thank you for reading our blog post.

Stay tuned to our blog and receive our tutorial on how to discover top influencers, opinion leaders, topic trends, sentiment analysis and more. Our services are also available by API.