Good social media strategy: Lots of moving pieces moving quickly

The social media explosion is forcing companies to take a very different look at the suite of analytics tools that they're using to help them understand what’s happening – from monitoring what’s going on, to managing responses, to thinking about the broader picture about what those responses mean for decisions they need to make, and then think about the processes to react to all the interactions. Acting quickly requires processes to take all the insights wrung from the data and do something about it to increase the impact of your product or service.

For example, if you're launching a new product, one of the things that you want to understand is, first of all, whether there is any buzz about the product. Hopefully customers are saying positive things. Maybe there are certain attributes that they're talking about in relation to your product versus competitors. If there are positive attributes coming through, then you should consider amplifying those words in your marketing and buying them as search terms.

If you’re not picking up any buzz out there, you need to think about places to start fresh and give people a reason to talk (positively) about your product. You also need to look at the people who are buzzing or you want to be buzzing, for example influencers who seem to be powerful within certain communities – perhaps you can give them a sample and get them engaged with the brand.

If there's negative buzz, you better get out there fast and understand what people are saying. That requires a mitigation strategy to be in place before any negative buzz kicks in, or your response will be too late. That response has to be closely tailored to what’s being said. If people are complaining in the case of, for example, a shampoo product, saying that it's damaging color-treated hair, you then have to understand whether it’s an issue with the product itself or of people not reading the directions correctly.

Whatever the issue, you quickly find there are a lot of moving pieces that need to move quickly. It’s not just somebody looking at all this social media data in a way that’s divorced from the processes of the company. Whether it's analyzing that data and acting upon it or providing social services such as responding to Twitter feeds for customer service, you need to have an established infrastructure to handle all of this unstructured social media activity.

What we've seen in many cases is that setting up a good infrastructure can actually cost less than some other more established approaches.We've done some analyses on behalf of clients, for example, who have been interested in building Twitter or Facebook-oriented social support for their products. We've seen the infrastructure that’s been developed be dramatically less expensive than handling calls, or responding to email or chat. Often social service options on the web where the community is helping each other is one of the cheapest ways of actually handling it. And the great thing about this approach is that if you do it well and people see that, it creates positive buzz.

Which companies do you think are doing the best job building positive social buzz?

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