On the 15th October we wrote about corporate management of social media. The article was titled "Manage the conversation with Comment" which introduces a new platform for larger organisations to engage their audience through social media.
The article also demonstrates the key issues which face corporate business where social media is concerned. We feel that these issues are extremely compelling and certainly pose a very real challenge.
The key concepts which we are sure are keeping many marketers up at night are the ways social media can be used to promote products/services and brand along with crisis and negative feedback management.
It's the crisis and negative feedback management which poses the real threat. Flare-ups of negative attitude and posts occur within the Twitter time-line stream, as an example, on a daily basis. Just a few weeks ago, a major mobile telephone network had significant outages and their brand name made it to the top of the Trending Topics (TT). That may seam like good news for some in the marketing department, until they actually looked at the posts from disgruntled, upset and downright annoyed customers. So how can such organisations manage such criticism?
Social Media is real-time, business doesn't have a 24 or 48 hour window of opportunity to devise a response and react to negative reports in newspapers, television and radio reports. If it's happening now on social networks, it needs to be addressed now!
The key to tackling this very real and growing problem is to take more control.
Companies can attempt to engage their customers and prospective customers on their own turf and setup networks of their own. In order to do this they need to build solutions which they can integrate into there own Internet Marketing Landscape. This is where we feel Comment Technologies can help greatly. Its platform is sophisticated and feature rich and provides the tools required to setup such an environment.
However, the corporate companies also require the tools to allow them to keep track of mentions on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, Google Wave etc. This is one of the most important parts of the puzzle. So we have started our search for what looks to be the holy grail of social media reporting. We'll keep you updated on what we find. Please feel free to add a comment if you know of any such solution.
Here are a few links you may find of interest;
Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com) is a Twitter client which allows organisations to manage their Twitter accounts as well as reporting on Brand and statistics.
Comment Technology (http://www.commenttechnologies.com) is a Social Media technology company which provides a feature rich platform for companies' to produce and manage their own networks.
