Archive for the 'Social Media Analytics' Category
April 14th, 2010 by dnomura
Sorry for the sporadic posts since we fired up the blog, but we assure you it’s because things have never been better and busier here at Buzzient! Currently I’m on my way back from the KANA Customer Summit (we were one of the partner sponsors) where we met great KANA customers.
A common theme I heard from companies was their desire to start leveraging the intersection of social media and support/service/contact center. Of course this isn’t a KANA-specific phenomenon. “Social CRM” is becoming a hot topic and in this context it points at customer service.
Not surprisingly, to this point much discussion around social media has been linked to the marketing/PR groups in an enterprise. Certainly these teams benefit greatly from analyzing and integrating social media content about their brands/products.
However more and more, many of your customers are becoming conditioned to using social media to voice problems or issues rather than picking up the phone or emailing customer support. Plus you can’t control this part of the process anymore. You might say users have to send an email or call when they have an issue, but that doesn’t mean they will.
Unlike traditional support channels, when using social media customers aren’t contacting you directly about their problem. Instead it’s like they’re walking into the town square at noon and yelling about it to anyone who’ll listen. Their online megaphones are vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, discussion boards. Now if they have a problem a lot of people will know about it, and that carries potential for negative effect on your support perception, brand, etc.
What’s also becoming apparent is that when they’re out there yelling, they’re starting to expect you to be listening. That’s great, but just throwing technology or a team of people at social media monitoring won’t cut it. As with many things in business, it comes down to a combination of processes + people + technology. You need to extend/adapt/modify your support process to include the social channel along with email, chat, phone, etc.
The good news is you don’t have to panic. This is simply a new channel. Unstructured, largely uncontrollable, with lots of sub-channels, but simply new. A way to increase service levels for your customers. Who doesn’t want to provide the best service they can?
Realistically it wasn’t that long ago when email was the new channel for customer service. You incorporated it into your support processes and perhaps moved from phone-only to multichannel support. Same thing when chat came along.
Social can seem intimidating because of all the “sub-channels” involved — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, communities, etc. There isn’t a single stream coming in like there is via email.
As mentioned, adjusting your business processes to address “social CRM” for support is critical and this should be step one. But as you assess your processes, you can feel confident that Buzzient can help you with the technology to support harvesting, consolidating, analyzing and integrating social media content as an additional channel into your support workflows/systems (such as KANA, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, etc.) The right technology can help you mitigate the human resource factor in your new processes.
You can leverage Buzzient to help get appropriate posts into an agent queue or create cases/service requests based on automated criteria or on an ad hoc basis. Buzzient can help with the customer engagement over the social channel as you resolve their issues. Importantly, your new processes might also leverage social media to build your knowledgebase with issue solutions users are posting. If you have self-help as a priority, this could become a very valuable way for you to harness social media to benefit customers.
December 7th, 2009 by tbj
I still remember the moment in “Soylent Green” where Charlton Heston realizes that his daily meal was, well, organically-grown. Behind all the mystery and the technological miracles, there was the sudden realization that things are sometimes simpler than they seem up front.
Even with the inexorable merging of CRM and social media analytics, I often get the question: “Why should we tie our CRM system to a social media analytics platform like Buzzient?”. This is a valid question; CRM rollouts have too often turned into multi-year affairs, with extensive customization and end user costs.
My response is pretty simple: regardless of all the hoopla and whiz-bang gadgetry that some are using to describe social media, it really comes down to the simple fact that social media is “made of people”. It’s not just about the content types, the ability to monitor MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s more important to acknowledge that behind every user handle there is a real person; a potential consumer, a purchase influencer, or maybe an existing customer. Listening and responding to these people isn’t a matter of being “cool”, it’s essential to the mission of CRM.
Therefore we at Buzzient will continue to drive innovation in how social media connects to CRM. We won’t stop until you pull the software from our cold, dead hands…(’props to Charlton Heston, RIP).
September 14th, 2009 by tbj
Ok, forgive me, but I did catch at least a bit of “Lord of the Rings” this weekend, purely by accident. Inherent to the plot of the trilogy is that one master Ring united all of the individual Rings of Power. Each individual Ring packed a wallop, but you really needed to pull them all together to make them coherent. In an obvious stretch of the analogy, what we’ve done at Buzzient is build that One Ring, to pull together all the myriad Rings into coherence(…I know, I’m bending things a bit, but stay with me here…;o)).
In the world of social media, we’re now seeing individual application companies build their own social media integration and analytics solutions. Companies such as Salesforce.com and RightNow have recently announced cloud-monitoring capabilities, designed to draw social media data into their applications. These solutions are fine for the one-app shop, but in reality complex enterprises have one of everything. So, you need One Ring..er…Application to unite them all. That’s what Buzzient Enterprise is all about. With one application, we can integrate social media data with Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and now….(drum-roll…) Oracle CRM OnDemand !!!!
We’re already getting lots of interest, and we look forward to opening a sales office in the Shire very soon…;o)
September 9th, 2009 by tbj
We’ve been predicting for quite a while now that mainstream business applications would eventually recognize the impact of social media. With the rate of user growth in social media exceeding that of any other aspect of the internet, any B2B(or B2B2C) applications vendor needs to have a strategy to reach out to users congregating in social media. Whether for customer support, lead generation, or product development, social media data MUST be incorporated in the workflow of business applications.
Today, with the release by Salesforce.com of their ServiceCloud V2, we’ve seen a formal embrace of integrating Twitter with Salesforce.com CRM.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-salesforces-service-cloud-2/
Nevermind the fact that we’ve been quietly doing this for months at Buzzient (;o)); this announcement should serve as as wakeup call to other vendors for the need to have a social media integration strategy.
What Salesforce (and RightNow for that matter) and other CRM companies building internal social media extensions don’t address however is the inherent heterogeneity of complex enterprises. Everywhere there’s Salesforce.com installed in a complex enterprise, I’m willing to bet one will also find evidence of Netsuite, Oracle(Siebel, Peoplesoft, Hyperion), SAP, and other applications. Any social media strategy should also include a way to provide access to that data for on-premise applications as well as products from multiple suppliers. In this fashion, a customer would be enabled to follow a social media post across not just CRM, but also ERP, BI and other business functions. We at Buzzient are committed to making THAT social media marriage come to pass!!!
July 10th, 2009 by tbj
We’ve been chuckling the last few days here at Buzzient about the “United Breaks Guitars” social media scandal. For those of you not aware, Dave Carroll of the band Sons of Maxwell released a video on YouTube skewering United Airlines for not only breaking his guitar as he watched from his seat, but also for United’s customer service (non)response. The video is slick, funny, and gets your toes tappin’ pretty quickly. At the same time, it’s a stroke of genius in how social media can be used to (belatedly) educate a company about the importance of customer service.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
After a generation or so of reduced customer service and amnesia re: the mantra “the customer is always right”, the customers are now biting back. When last I checked, the video had about 1.5M views in about 4 days. In an era where leisure and business travelers are scrutinizing every travel dime, and with new entrants such as Virgin America coming into the market, United Airlines can ill afford the bad publicity this is already causing.
Purely by chance, a Buzzient stakeholder asked us to start analyzing the electronics and musical instrument manufacturer category last year. As a result, we have a pretty significant database of social media postings and comments about various manufacturers, including Gibson and Taylor(the brand of the unfortunate “sacrificial guitar” in the song). In particular, Buzzient Enterprise keeps track of the key websites where enthusiasts are posting. These social media sites and niche forums are precisely the places United should look to advertise to repair their reputation.
Oh, and for my next fishing trip, I’m bringing my fly rods as carry on luggage!
July 9th, 2009 by dnomura
Years ago Walter Wriston, former Chairman and CEO of Citicorp, made a great observation:
“Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.”
Instead of money, the same could be said of social web content today. With a little adjustment to Mr. Wriston’s quotation:
“Information about social web conversations has become almost as important as the conversation itself.”
Information about where people are talking, who’s talking, how influential are they, what they’re talking about, how much they’re talking, their attitudes and opinions, etc. are all important data points. Also important is this information as it compares to the past. Are people changing where they’re talking, have their opinions changed, how much have they changed, why did they change, etc.
Unlike information about money, which isn’t necessarily available to you and me (other than our own dollars and cents to a certain level), information about the public social web is abundant. Monitoring can be a first step to see what people are saying, but deeper analysis is needed to really leverage this ocean of valuable information for business objectives.
Buzzient is dedicated to automated social media data harvesting and analytics. We provide enterprises with social media measurements that contribute to business strategy and tactics. We also recognize we don’t know your business like you do, and absolutely welcome working with customers to learn what additional metrics are important to you.
July 8th, 2009 by tbj
With the recent backtracking by Google on discontinuing the free version of Google Apps for Enterprise, we’ve had a collective reminder of how valuable our data in the cloud can be. I heard through the grapevine of a number of folks beginning to look at alternatives to Google Apps. What should also not be lost in all this is the importance of the DATA in the cloud and not just the Apps. Whether the data is comprised of documents, spreadsheets or social media conversations, it’s extremely valuable. It needs to be protected and maintained for end users. It’s also a valuable source of analytics for companies that are trying to build stronger customer relationships.
The emotional reactions to Google’s scare on Apps reminds me of why we started Buzzient in the first place: we realized that applications might be the first thing people think about when they hear of the cloud, but the real gems are in the data. Making the data useful for business applications and business users is what we’re all about, and can provide a valuable resource for both companies and the customers they serve.
Our original research on Google Apps, including our pricing recommendations which Google adopted can be found here:
15 567_Google Enterprise Installed Solution_GoeldiJonesLo
July 2nd, 2009 by dnomura
Analysis of social web content is more than just monitoring and counting. Some enterprises might feel that they’re not ready for social media analytics, or that it’s foreign territory.
A better way to look at it is to consider social media a new, important and growing dataset. Regardless of what you as an enterprise do in terms of participating in social media, this data represents incredible value. Now.
Socia media data is valuable to the entire enterprise, not just PR, marketing or product development. Groups such as risk management, HR, investor relations, customer support, sales, finance, manufacturing, operations and more can all benefit from deep social media analytics.
Social media analytics about your brands/products/company/industry augments what you’re already doing. It doesn’t replace anything. It adds to your traditional market research, customer satisfaction survey results and focus group findings.
The difference is that this is content where people are talking about you, but not directly to you. They aren’t answering a specific set of questions or checking boxes. They aren’t under any survey bias or group pressure.
The unstructured nature and potentially huge volume of social web content might make some enterprises reluctant to embrace its analysis. But there’re valuable insights in this roiling sea of data and you need to take advantage. And true, posts are from online users and not a random cross-section or “people on the street.” However their growing ranks and influence cannot be denied.
Analysis of this enterprise-applicable data provides you with an additional set of measurements that can contribute to your business strategies and tactics. Integrate it with your financial analysis, manufacturing analysis, customer support metrics, etc. to make more informed business decisions.
