One of the things we like to track with Scoutlabs is the gain in Share of Voice a brand has over the course of a campaign. Social media monitoring is one thing, but when put in the context of your competitive set, you can quickly see how a brand is dominated by its competitors online. The following graphic shows the % of blog mentions for each brand over the past month: Converse, Adidas, New Balance, Nike and Under Armour.
Personally, I’m surprised that Under Armour has such a small share of voice considering how much it is loved by its customer base. Next, let’s look at the sentiment associated with these brand. Here are the positive blog posts about them over the past month:
Now let’s look at the volume of negative posts:
To turn buzz into action, we take a look at these positive and negative posts to see what people are are loving or hating about the brand (we look at more than this BTW). We’ve found that 80% of the time we can easily turn a brand terrorist into a brand evangelist just by letting them know that they’ve been heard, or by directing them to a resource they’re looking for (you could call this customer service) – the other 15% of the time we need to talk internally with our team to see what can be done with more complex issues and the last 5% ends up being something client side teams need to handle directly (i.e. reaching out from senior leadership, or product features need to be changed etc.).
There’s always a group of people in that 5% that will never love your brand…that’s the way it is.
Comments
I was also surprised to see such a high SOV for Converse. Could it be that the word has other uses, such as “to talk” or “the opposite”? (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/converse)
A quick Twitter search reveals that while most of the conversations are about shoes, some are not. (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=converse)
Do you have any best practices for measuring social media share of voice and sentiment for more general brands or topics?
That’s a good point, Eric and I had anticipated that challenge with this one. What I did was to make the primary search term “converse” and then using a secondary search term “shoes” as a related term that let me cut down on the noise. Still, there are probably a few results in there that aren’t about shoes, but that’s the best week can do in this day and age to monitor a brand name like that.
Peter, love your graphics on positive/negatives. Regarding turning the terrorists into loyalists, letting people know that they’ve been heard is like a “magic key.” At Marriott, we did alot of work on this and found that acknowledging a customer complaint and saying “I’m very sorry that happened to you” was effective. However, if we fixed the problem, that was like magic to customers. They turned out to be almost as loyal in the form of repeat business as customer who had never experienced a problem. In the end, however, it was always best to get it right the first time.
I wonder if in the Social Media world, acknowledging a problem turns many discontented into evangelists because: a. They feel that they have been heard or, b: The real positive is that the brand becomes a real and personal entity to them…….it reached out to them……..and a personal relationship ensues.
I think that’s a really good insight, Mary Beth. Perhaps I should clarify – we don’t “just say we’ve listened to someone”…we certainly act and make sure they get what they need. Otherwise, we’re just paying lip service to them which will end up amplifying a problem rather than helping spread positive word of mouth.