Let Them Talk, Let Them Talk, Let Them All Talk
Posted by robertford on December 1, 2008
Well, it’s not as if you have a choice in the matter, is it?
Today, we’re looking at the third tool in the social media marketing toolkit, and that is brand monitoring. In his article, ‘The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan‘, Peter Kim cites Dell and MINI as two examples of companies who are effectively using brand monitoring. Before we look at their use, let’s first understand what we mean by brand monitoring, and what problems it can solve (or opportunities it can help take advantage of).
In ‘Brand Management 1001 (directors cut)’, Mark Krupinksi distilled it down into the three key questions that brand monitoring can answer:
- Who is talking about you?
- Where are they talking?
- What are they saying?
For those of you haven’t read it yet, I strongly suggest you read ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual’ by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger (for readers with short attention spans, try Christian Sarkar’s summary of Cluetrain’s 95 Theses) . What they’re basically saying is that technology allows people (employees, customers, etc.) to talk about your company and your products and services in a way that you don’t and can’t control, and that you can either pretend that it isn’t happening, or choose to join the conversation. Of course, before you can join in, you really need the answers to those three questions (who, where and what) before you can even think about joining in.
| when | ||
| (Inter)networked Markets |
meet | (Intra)networked Workers |
| The connectedness of the Web is transforming what’s inside and outside your business — your market and your employees. | ||
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Through the Internet, the people in your markets are discovering and inventing new ways to converse. They’re talking about your business. They’re telling one another the truth, in very human voices.
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There’s a new conversation | Intranets are enabling your best people to hyperlink themselves together, outside the org chart. They’re incredibly productive and innovative. They’re telling one another the truth, in very human voices. |
| between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices.You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation. | ||
Brand monitoring gives you a variety of tools to help, from free services (e.g. Indeed, Google, Summize, Technorati, BlogPulse, FriendFeed, etc.) to more complex ‘marketspace analytics’ tools (Christian Sarkar has a good summary of some of them here).
Since Michael Dell returned to the CEO slot, Dell has been credited with having one of the better and most integrated social media strategies. In terms of brand monitoring, Dell uses Radian6 which provides ‘a complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in social media’. Here is a video of Bob Pearson (Dell’s VP Communities & Conversations) being interviewed by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester, where Bob covers some of the ways that Dell have used these tools to increase revenues and reduce costs .
Similarly, “Mini USA, the American branch of BMW’s Mini Cooper line, tracks everything being said about its brand everywhere on line — in blogs, discussion groups, forums, MySpace pages and much more — then uses what it learns to guide advertising campaigns” (source: Knowledge@Wharton article title “Not a Site but a Concept”: Tapping the Power of Social Networking).
This entry was posted on December 1, 2008 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Social Media. Tagged: Brand, brand monitoring, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
