This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Managing a Community.

Dealing with the negative can be a pretty scary proposition for any company stepping into social media marketing, let alone having to manage it with a community.  Some industries have a propensity for attracting negative opinions,  conversations and experiences for their audience.  Most of the time when people are sharing their negative experiences they are doing so because they were disappointed by the company in some way, shape or form.  Most likely it was not intentional, your customers can sometimes have very high expectations and when your company cannot meet those expectations the disappointment ensues.

Upset Customer or Constant Complainer?

These situations are opportunities for companies to step up and resolve the negative issues at hand.  If the person is sharing their experience in a somewhat rational manner, you can pretty well conclude that you have a disappointed customer on your hands.  How you respond and react to this situation is critical, you’ll either turn them into a raving fan or leave them even more disappointed and spreading their negative experience to all of their network.

But what about those “other people”, you know, the ones that will never be happy?  The ones that time and time again keep coming back at you telling you how horrible your company is?  What do you do with these type of people in social media communities?

Will They Ever Be Happy?

There’s a term for these types of people, when you’ve been in and out of many different communities you can easily spot them as well, a lot of communities refer to these types of members as “Trolls”.  Communities are smart, you can talk to that administrators and ask them “who are the trolls” and most likely they can readily point them out.  These people are the constant complainers or every other day there’s some injustice done to them.  Most of all no matter what anyone does or says, they are never happy – or the happiness is fleeting until the next day when some new unjust situation arises.

How do you know the difference between these “Trolls” and the “Disappointed Customer”?  There’s some tall tale signs that once you do your research into your social media communities you’ll be able to tell rather easily who are the people that tend to be legitimate & valuable contributors to the community and those who are just there to constantly complain.  More than likely those “trolls” aren’t just on one community spouting their story either, they are on several because at the end of the day their satisfaction is gained by the attention they receive by complaining.

Publicly Offer to Take the Conversation Out of the Community to Be Resolved

The best approach in dealing with these types of community members is to first acknowledge and then apologize for their negative experience.  Once you do that, then offer to speak to them about how you can amend the situation offline, give them the opportunity to contact you privately through the community’s messaging system.  This does two things, it stops the “troll” from saying “no one’s listening to me” or “they won’t do a damn thing”, then it also shows the rest of the community that you are serious about engaging with them and resolving even negative situations.  If you do this in a calm and professional manner, you’ll earn respect from the community members.

If the troll comes back and complains then that your resolution to the situation isn’t sufficient for them and they’ve displayed this pattern in the past, the influential community members tend to ignore or even step up for the company that offered to resolve the situation, putting the troll in their place.  Just resist the temptation to come back and “flame” the troll, this is what they want.  Sometimes silence or a controlled response is the best response.  The community has already seen you attempted to resolve the situation, and they most likely know this person is a constant complainer.  At the end of the day if you are true & transparent in your efforts with the community, your efforts won’t be ignored, but the troll’s constant complaining will be.

I’ve got a saying I like to share with companies dealing with situations like these:  “Don’t feed the Troll your baby goats, just pass by silently“

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

If you’re aiming to tackle social media monitoring, then finding a suitable tool is simple. A stable of popular products such as Alterian SM2, Radian 6, and Sentiment Metrics offer users the ability to conduct complex searches through millions of historical records. The process generally entails inputting a list of important keywords–some of which are bound together by Boolean operators–and examining the output of records in order to answer questions such as, “which web communities are the most popular for a given keyword?”, and “who are the key influencers in these communities?”.

In theory, the social media monitoring tools provide these answers along with a variety of pretty charts and graphs that further illustrate the point. In practice, however, those of us that are tasked with reporting on this output are occasionally encountered by a sea of unintelligible records in which the charts and graphs are at best, misleading, and at worst, completely erroneous. Every client is different, and the variance between each keyword set can make one project a breeze while another project a burden. If you aren’t experienced in finding coherence within a large data set, you’re likely to be left with a disproportionate number of burden projects. But have no fear, adhering to these five key principles can drastically improve your efficiency and help you fully navigate through a sea of records.

1. Start with the most recent data – Your end goal may be to provide six months of historical data about a product, brand, or a specific subject area, but there may not be a need to immediately query all six months at once. If you’re critical, you’re operating under the assumption that the first set of search terms will need to be tweaked several times before returning acceptable results. By starting with the most recent results, your social media monitoring tool spends less time searching and returns fewer total records. This allows you more time to find negative terms, and more time to find recent relevant records that may warrant new keywords. It has the added bonus of ensuring that the top domains returned are likely to still be active and the sentiment will reflect the most current market perceptions.

2. Branded terms may be your bread and butter – When prioritizing which questions you want to answer through social media monitoring, you should consider that the most specific keywords will often return the most relevant results. Branded terms often offer the kind of keyword specificity that can perform the heavy lifting required to filter irrelevant results. For example, imagine how much more targeted and relevant search results for “Sausage McMuffin” would be instead of results for “Sausage Biscuit”. By leveraging specific branded terms, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend manually filtering spam.

3. Be aware of ambiguous terms – Sometimes, branded terms are not the silver bullet for relevancy.  For example, for every specific car brand such as “Volvo”, “Mercedes-Benz”, or “Lamborghini”, there may be a “Dodge”, “Saturn”, or “Smart”. The latter terms also offer little in the way of negatives that could refine these searches; attempting to create a comprehensive list of negatives can potentially open a can of worms that sucks time away from other valuable areas of investigation. Therefore, if you are trying to gauge the relative volumes of conversation about Volvo versus Dodge, you’re better off comparing specific models such as the “Volvo S40” versus the “Dodge Avenger”.

4. Do not always equate high volume with high influence – When reporting on key influencers, it may be tempting to choose the domain in which a keyword appears the most often. Make sure you consider factors such as multi-channel reach, unique monthly visitors, PageRank, and other factors that may enhance the authority of one domain over another.

5. Show no mercy for Twitter – When searching for short-tail keywords, spammy Twitter feeds can often overcrowd the result pool. The solution to reducing the volume of these results can be to use more complex search terms that reduce the likelihood a result will be returned given then 140 character limit. You may miss some important domains, but you can be confident that the ones returned are more likely to be targeted and relevant. A better way to find important twitter feeds may be to find high value domains that also use twitter to release content and engage their audience.

Social media monitoring is a work in progress, but hopefully these five key principles will help you decide on how to proceed. Surely, semantic analytics will advance by both process and technology, but in the meantime, there is a large enough space for ingenuity in social media monitoring to drive a truck through.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Help Your Online Marketing Strategies

Buzz monitoring and the tools you need to use to monitor the key words and key phrases that are important to any online marketing strategy whether it’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), eMail (yes, it’s still alive and kicking!) and even Affiliate Marketing endeavors are vital to putting your strategies on the right paths to success.  However, where buzz monitoring tools can play a significant, foundational role, is with Social Media Marketing.  Buzz monitoring tools, whether they are your basic entry level tools like Google alerts, or enterprise level, such as Alterian’s SM2 (formerly known as Techrigy) can give you insight into things you would never find just by using a search engine.

That being said, buzz monitoring tools may seem like a god-send for any marketing researching planning or beginning to plan a social media marketing strategy.  However, marketers need to keep in mind, buzz monitoring tools cannot tell you everything.  They certainly can give you the “scent” of the conversation, but there’s a lot anyone can miss if they rely solely on buzz monitoring tools alone to set up their social media strategy, pick marketing tactics and set goals and metrics by.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Give You the Basics

Buzz monitoring tools give you the essential, basic information you need about the conversations swirling around the chosen key words or phrases you are monitoring.  Unfortunately, sometimes even the basics can be misleading, especially when it comes to sentiment.  Unless you have a buzz monitoring tool that allows you to change the dictionary in the sentiment area, you could either be falling down a lot of rabbit holes or worse yet, missing some conversations entirely because your buzz monitoring tool placed the conversations into the “general” or “neutral” area.  Your bare bones buzz monitoring tools, like Google Alerts, don’t even give you the option of sentiment analysis, so when using that tool, you really are at the basics of buzz monitoring.

• They Tell You What
  Any of these buzz monitoring tools will tell you either in a long or brief description, what’s being said around the words or phrases you are choosing to monitor for your strategy.  That’s a basic need of any strategy.  Understanding what’s being said about you, your company or it’s products or services is vital, without it you are pretty much operating in the dark.

• They Tell You When
  Did the conversation happen withing the last 24 hours, or the last month or the past year.  Depending on the tool you use, will depend on how far back your research in buzz monitoring can take you.  Some tools can go back into the databases for as long as they’ve been collecting data.  Others limit you to 90 day, 6 months or a year.  Google alerts will let you go back as far as it has the data, however, that’s very manually intensive work for anyone on your team.  Deciding on how long to look back at is important too.  90 days (or 3 months) can be a relatively short space of time that you won’t be able to see the ebbing and flowing of conversations, on the other hand going back 2years could be too much data and overwhelm your researchers..

• They Tell You Where
  Buzz monitoring tools also give you a vital clue, or a scent / trail to follow by telling you where the conversations are happening.  However, that being said, marketers doing research have to keep in mind, sometimes buzz monitoring tools cannot get into each and every niche forum.  If they are behind a “walled garden”, where usernames and passwords are required, those conversations generally will not come up in the buzz monitoring results.  While buzz monitoring tools can give you a pretty detailed pointer to go and look at a particular thread in a particular community, or a tweet stream, or a Facebook page, no one tool is going to tell you where every conversation that has gone on..

• They Tell You Who
  Finally, buzz monitoring tools can tell you who is talking about you.  For the most part you can at least see the major players in the conversations about the words you are monitoring.  Now they aren’t going to tell you name, address, phone number and email.  However, they will tell you their twitter name, blog URL, avatar/moniker in a forum  and some  tools might even give you an idea of how influential the conversationalist is.  This can help you a lot in your research in deciding how to approach and engage with different individuals.

What Buzz Monitoring Can’t Tell You: How or Why

The missing pieces with buzz monitoring tools is the how and the why conversations are triggered.  How did the buzz about your product get started?  Why did someone feel compelled to share a conversation in a forum?  These questions are also very basic and fundamental pieces of research that should be answered before you pick any online marketing tactic to place in your social media marketing strategy.

Buzz monitoring tools are great at pointing you in the right direction.  Much like a hunting dog aids the hunter, they are indispensable tools you need to get the job done.  Without them, you wouldn’t be able to know the conversations go on at all.  But just as important as knowing Who, What, When & Where is the “How” and the “Why“, and to understand those you need human analysis.  Someone actually needs to go in and perhaps watch or lurk, as well as listen and learn in a community to get a feel why conversations happen they way they do.  They might even need to ask questions of your targeted community’s participants to get a better handle on how they originally found out about your product or service.

In our next series piece on the Research Pillar of the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, Kevin Olson, Serengeti Communications’ research guru, will be explaining how Human Analysis affects the research process for social media marketing.