Empower my brand
Empower my brand

Competitor Analysis using Social Listening

Enterprises, like people, try to be recognized for being the best at what they do. Are your competitors allowing your company to achieve this dream? Social listening for competitive intelligence can help you achieve your goals. Competitor analysis offers a sense of how well your company is faring when compared to others in the marketplace.

Competitor analysis holds the answer key to questions like:

Why is my company not the market leader?

What marketing strategies are my competitors using?

What are their weaknesses and strengths?

The idea, of course, is not to mimic your competitors. It is but a part of the game to learn and borrow from or improvise upon their winning strategies. Social listening enables you to do so.

What is Competitor Analysis and Why is it Important?

Planning a good marketing strategy starts with knowing your opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses. Identifying these gets easier when you closely monitor the significant players in your industry and analyze their actions.

Business competitor analysis

By definition, competitor analysis helps you gather information about your competitors to analyze it and derive insights on where your business stands in comparison to them. The actionable insights derived from such competitive intelligence could help you to rise above your competition.

Let’s consider a good example of gaining competitive intelligence through competitor analysis – athletes. Sportspersons and teams must follow an opponent’s game, directly or from recordings to understand their strengths and weaknesses, style and strategy. This knowledge helps them decide their own defensive or offensive strategy easily. This search for an Achilles’ heel is mimicked by businesses. A company’s strategy is backed by competitor intelligence, sound logic, careful judgment.

There must be a reason why 55% of Fortune 500 companies engage extensively in competitor analysis and competitive intelligence for decision making.

How does Social Listening help Conduct Competitor Analysis?

Tech-savvy managers today can get ahead of their competition using social listening powered by artificial intelligence makes it very easy for tech-savvy managers. However, before we discuss that, let’s briefly look at how competitor analysis benefits you:

It helps you understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

Finds gaps and opportunities within the marketplace

Helps you plan effective marketing and other functional strategies

Aids in planning and strategizing your company’s future course of action

In addition to the usual annual reports, newspaper articles, and press releases, social media is where one looks for data. By social media data, we do not mean skimming through the online content put out by your competitors. Social media listening helps you listen to the positive as well as negative sentiments of their customers and delve deeper into analyzing it.

Wondering what all you can learn through social listening?

Your primary competitors

Say you plan to open a pizzeria in your town, thinking you have no other competitor. Social media mentions can tell you a different story. Maybe people have been tweeting a lot about the recent arrival of Papa John’s or Pizza Hut in town, and you had no idea of their presence at all.

 Share of Voice

Your brand’s exposure as well as a comparison of how much more everyone is talking about your competitors.

Sentiment Analysis

Having a good share of voice is not always a positive thing if many of the mentions denote negative sentiment. Such analysis helps you understand the weaknesses of your competitors and vice versa.

Customer Perceptions - sentiment analysis-min

Public Interests

Say you are planning to revamp your pizzeria. You can tune into social media chats, to see which places are liked by your target audience for their ambience and interiors. Take inspiration from there, and turn your pizzeria into their favorite spot.

SWOT Analysis

Social listening analyzes the data collected to show the weaknesses of your competitors and the opportunities this holds for you.

How to Conduct Competitor Analysis?

Social media listening is a tool for competitor analysis, using which you can derive optimum results with minimal effort. Planning for useful competitive intelligence will include:

Choosing the Right Tool:

With the right tool, monitoring social media data across all channels and analyzing it becomes simple and quick.

Comprehensive Research Template:

You could gain greater clarity on the kind of social listening tool you want, by preparing a detailed template, mentioning the factors which need to be measured, like:

  • Target Market: This helps you understand the demographic and geographical details of your target market. The target market your competitors are focusing on can help you decide your target audience.
  • Differentiation factor: What is unique about your brand which sets you apart from your competitors? Learning about their social media activities, about their products, etc will help you analyze this.
  • Marketing Strategy: How well are your competitors planning their brand presence online and offline, what campaigns are resonating the most among your audience and why? The answers to these questions too lie in the analysis of the data available to help you decide your own marketing strategy.

There can be many attributes to your research. Modeling your research template according to your needs and analyzing the data for each of your competitors in detail will help you prepare a comprehensive business model for your brand.

The Most Popular Social Listening Tools

Business intelligence holds the key to a company’s progress, and the simplest way to gain crucial business insights is to interact directly with the most valuable stakeholder – your customer. Listening to what your customer has to say helps build your brand in today’s wired world. Once you realize the importance of this, you will want to know all about the best and most popular social listening tools.

Social listening helps you track the direct mentions or discussions which refer to your brand, by name. There’s a huge advantage in this knowledge, as you can effectively deal with any customer issues and inquiries. Moreover, you can also respond to negative comments about you on social media, stopping them from presenting a unilateral viewpoint which could turn away any potential future customers.

Social listening tools are available in plenty, but it’s important to ensure that the tool meets your specific needs. The complexity or simplicity of the tool you use depends on the size of your company and your requirements.

How to Choose the Right Social Listening Tool?

Small businesses would need a simple CRM system to be able to reply, engage and manage the company’s interaction with the customer. Basic social listening tools like Tweetdeck and Boardreader, are efficient and help achieve these root objectives.

Larger companies would need a suite complete tool with real-time listening, competitive insights, ability to engage with consumers, which can monitor their advocacy programs and draw up their future strategies. The list includes names like Hootsuite, Keyhole, TweetReach, and Mention.

A factor to consider is the volume of data and sources. For example, if most of your brand’s chatter is on one channel, say Twitter, a free tool such as TweetDeck should suffice.

A great tool caters to your present and possible future needs. One good way of picking a suitable tool is to go for trial versions before making an informed decision.

We list some of the popular social listening tools here:

1.  Hootsuite

This tool tops the list because this free platform offers its services across almost all possible social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, WordPress. Hootsuite is well known for the array of services they offer which include social monitoring, help with the organic and promoted ads, and analytics among others.

The platform has a very thoughtful approach to the needs of a business. Some of the features worth mentioning include their weekly reports, options for task delegation and team management with a real-time search facility.

Hootsuite - social listening tools

2. Keyhole

Keyhole is a tool that can be used for social listening and management on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Their analytical reports are a complete package with not just real-time data but also historical data. Heat maps, one of their reputed features, shows the activity levels at specific geographical locations.

Moreover, the layout of their reports, decked with neatly laid out charts and graphs, is very easy to go through.

Keyhole - social listening tools

3. TweetReach

TweetReach’s snapshot reports make it a great free social listening tool. This can be your go-to tool if you are interested to know the reach and actual impact of your posts and that of your competitors’. Influencer marketing will prove a cakewalk since you can figure out who are the most influential followers you have.

TweetReach

4. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free, simple and user-friendly social listening tool. The simplicity of this app makes it one of the best-fitted options for beginners. The app helps you listen to and follow all chatter related to any hashtag or keyword, retweet, reply, engage and maintain your overall twitter account. The tool has three versions – the web platform, an app for mac and one for chrome.

TweetDeck

5. Mention

Mention’s most noteworthy feature is that it allows you to monitor millions of sources in 42 different languages. You have access to all the possible chatter out there and not just in English, making you stay on the top of all the information flow. This tool also lets you keep track of your team members, to delegate tasks and to generate and download reports by exporting mentions.

Mention - social listening tools

6. Boardreader

Boardreader helps you follow chatter from regular pages, handles, and message groups as well. Most social media sites have message groups, and this is where major discussions and conversations take place. Boardreader helps you monitor such chatter from messaging boards and newsrooms.

Simply fill in a term and a list returns with all the mentions from over the past two years. Graphs and charts can also be generated from the options given. This tool has options for other languages as well.

By this time, you must already be feeling overwhelmed by the number of these tools. Yet these are only a select few from a large pool of social listening tools. The market is brimming with such tools ready to help you take your brand a step further, all you need to do is select the right one to get started.

Social Listening – A Reality Check For Your Brand

Managers are actively engaging themselves in social media marketing. Most of them would agree that social listening is key to social media marketing and online reputation management. Social listening is an effective tool to gauge the truth about customer experiences, product and brand perceptions. The essence of social listening lies in the analysis of the unstructured data available across various social media platforms and review boards. Listening to the right chatter and the right audience makes all the difference when we respond to them in real time.

Growing brand awareness and reputation is a vision that can be realized when we know the present truth about our brand. Our actions speak volumes about our brand. And with the correct actions/interventions, we can hit a home run.

How does Social Listening help?

With social listening, managing brand reputation is in your control. Social listening helps you figure out the sentiment around your brand, service or product. Social media listening paves the way for data collection and a deeper understanding of the customer’s perception. The feedback, comments/reviews help drill down to the exact fault lines, easily and cost-effectively.

Audience from across the World Wide Web

It brings you a large pool of opinions rather than limited feedback from a small focus group.

A 360-degree approach

A detailed analysis of the data available measures more than just the reach and sentiment. It allows managers to look at the larger picture. Social listening can help you model a comprehensive research plan for your future campaigns, marketing strategy and the overall development of the brand.

Online Brand Reputation - Social Listening

Core Use Cases For Social Listening

Social listening is a powerful tool when you need to analyze scattered data. Some core areas, where social listening can help, include the following:

Sentiment Analysis

You get to learn how followers or potential followers feel about your product/service/brand.

Brand Image/Health

Social media reviews can drive your sales as positive reviews help build a stronger brand image, and a sound brand name gets you more leads.

Customer Engagement

Social listening and monitoring can aid customer engagement. The more you engage with your customers, the more positively it affects your company’s reputation.

Competitor Analysis

Social media listening can help you track your competitors and to learn about their best services and strategies.

Social Listening – The Truth, Reflected!

How do you expect your customers to listen, when you don’t? By connecting with them, listening to them and appropriately responding to them, you can establish your company’s digital presence.

Social listening helps you to know:

  • Whether the overall sentiment among your consumers is positive or negative.
  • If your customers are happy or unhappy with your products/services/brand.
  • If your customers are recommending your product to others or advising them to avoid you

This is how the truth gets revealed! When you listen to your customers, you get the accurate picture of where you stand in their perception and sentiments. If the chatter is negative, you still learn where the problem lies and what exactly do you need to fix about your products or services, to ensure customer satisfaction.

By carefully listening to the chatter, you benefit from the inputs research and gathering consumer insights as well.

Say your company wants to enter the fizzy drinks industry. Analyzing the social media chatter around fizzy drinks could give you a clear idea about the target market you are planning to serve. Armed with this knowledge, investing or divesting is an easy decision to make.

Where Does Social Listening Lead Us?

As you obtain all the insights and analyze them, you may start wondering – now what? Well, it’s time to formulate corrective strategies and see if we can modify or reinforce customer perception.

Each of the issues may call for a tailored approach, But there’s a philosophy which needs to underlie all your corrective measures to be effective:

Note the most common problems faced by your customers

Once you have figured this out, you have the key pain points. You can start strategizing to fix these issues right away.

Find out more about your strengths

If your customers love you for something, make them love you more. Strengthen your value proposition to make your brand irresistible.

Take note of the queries

Cater to your customers and engage with them. Do not keep them waiting for information. Note the questions asked, create an FAQ or engage with them via social media sites, chatbots, etc.

Figure out your loyal followers/customers

Your supporters are valuable. If they stay happy, they influence others to try out your products. Identify your key customers, engage with them and make sure they spread the positive sentiment around.

Keep an eye on your competitors

Social listening helps you strategize by letting you know not just your truth, but the reality about your competitors as well. You can make a comparative estimate of your social media presence versus theirs, the sentiment level of their customers, the product benefits they are offering to emulate the effective strategies.

Do's for Social Listening

With all the social listening, the data and research at your disposal you should be able to choose some effective strategies to work with. Keep listening to the chatter and tracking your brand on social media to achieve a positive online reputation – far superior marketing strategy to any other.

Managing perceptions is critical to enhancing brand equity

In 1954, a 52-year-old milkshake mixer salesman entered a restaurant kitchen for a tour. Having seen (and been in) thousands of kitchens, he was convinced that this was the best-run operation he had ever seen.

In 1955, he opened his own restaurant under the same franchise.

In 1971, he bought the company.

This brings us to a simple question…

If he knew how it all worked, then why didn’t he just start his own operation?

Because he knew it wouldn’t work.

He knew he needed more than just staff, system and strategy.

That salesman’s name was Ray Croc. The restaurant was McDonald’s.

Ray Croc knew he couldn’t start his own restaurant because he needed the name. To him, it felt honest, homely, and truly American.

He was right. Today, McDonald’s feeds over 1% of the world’s population, every single day. That’s the power of a brand.

What Is A Brand?

A brand is more than your products and services.

It’s more than your logo and colours.

A brand is what consumers feel when they see your logo or use your products.

It’s what your company is identified by, and it’s what separates you from all the others.

A brand is a reflection of your mission, vision and values, and yet, it is much more.

A brand is the end result of every emotional investment made in your company, products and/ or services.

If your company was a person, then that person’s personality would be your brand.

It is this personality that consumers perceive, which brings us to…

Brand Perception

Unlike your brand, brand perception is owned by consumers.

Brand perception is the result of people’s experiences with your brand. It’s what they feel when they see you. With the right experiences, it translates into a lifetime of brand loyalty and brand equity.

Brand perception is brand image. It is the impression you leave on your consumers’ minds after repeated personal encounters and sensory interactions.

These interactions can take various forms: a Google search, an Amazon purchase, a Facebook ad, a Yelp review, a suggestion to a friend on WhatsApp, a Twitter mention, a billboard, a word of mouth, a bad experience, and so on.

The good news is that these interactions can be measured. Gathering all this sensory information allows you to understand consumer sentiment, and subsequently, your brand’s perception, which could be one of three types:

  • Positive: Good experiences which have improved perception and moved consumers to develop positive feelings about the brand. Consistent positive sentiment will make the brand a favorite or preferred choice for consumers.
  • Negative: Bad, unpleasant experiences create general dislike, distaste or avoidance of a brand. Over time the brand loses trust and market share with consistent bad sentiment.
  • Neutral: Lack of emotion due to bland, ordinary and expected experiences that have failed to emotionally connect with consumers. This can be just as bad as a negative sentiment.

Why Does Perception Matter?

Because perception drives purchases.

Perception takes consumer choices into account, and with digital media, sentiment is everything.

Take Pepsi’s recent campaign with Kendall Jenner. Negative brand perception took over, and the campaign’s performance took a massive hit in the crossfire. However, effective sentiment analysis allowed Pepsi to take swift damage control, allowing them to enforce prompt counter-measures to put out the fire.

Perception is not set in stone, and changes over time. This change can be studied, navigated and incorporated into your marketing strategy. This also gives you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and grow: by listening to what consumers say through their online interactions, and what they feel through their sentiment.

Domino’s Pizza is a great example of perception done right. The brand actively works towards creating positive change in consumer perception through honest, timely marketing campaigns that address their mistakes and errors. Customers appreciate such candidness and reciprocate with engagement, adoption and loyalty. It is this positive sentiment that has allowed Domino’s to lead its market.

The same approach can (and will) work for any brand. Understand your customer’s perception, create positive sentiment, and address negative/neutral sentiment. A key aspect of this is reporting, measurement and analysis. But you won’t know how consumers perceive you without the right tools and data.

Companies need to understand that they cannot control perception, only consumers can. They can, however, leverage perception to their advantage by:

  • Setting up a framework of metrics to measure brand perception among their consumers
  • Identifying internal brand perceptions within their organizations and understanding how they’re translating externally
  • Using custom research and analytics to get deeper insights about consumers and their experiences
  • Adapt proactively to changes in brand perception quickly and effectively through constant measurement, monitoring and assessment of brand performance and effective allocation of marketing spends
  • Comparing and contrasting their own brand performance and brand perceptions against their competition

Moving Forward

The digital age is moving faster than ever. At this rate, The Internet of Things might soon become the Internet of Everything. Laptops are now tablets, and tablets that once doubled as phones now double as laptops. Voice and AI are bigger than ever, and touch screens have stepped aside for folding phones.

The future is moving faster than ever. Tomorrow is already here, today…

Online Reputation Management in Healthcare: Some Case Studies

In healthcare, “Trust” is paramount. This was something the founder of Johnson & Johnson recognized and remarked upon nearly 84 years ago, when he said that businesses had a responsibility toward society and could only build real trust by engaging all stakeholders. In the increasingly interconnected world, building and maintaining brand reputation of healthcare brands is a steeper challenge.

Why is online reputation management important for the healthcare industry?

Managing brand reputation is important for every brand. In healthcare, the need is more acute as distrust of any nature would imply a complete annihilation of the brand. Why is that the case?

  • 60% of adults depend on online reputation/ratings to make a provider choice.
  • Positive reviews are important for at least 33% of them.
  • 37% never meet a doctor or hospital with negative reviews.
  • 72% of patients who post a negative feedback do so because they were unhappy with a billing mistake, incorrect deductible payment, impolite/rude front office staff or improper paper work. Only 28% do so because they are unhappy with the physician.

As a healthcare brand manager, certain assumptions need to be made. One must assume that mistakes and oversights will happen. Also, an assumption which is valid is that disgruntled customers are more likely to vent out their feedback than customers who are happy. As a Harvard Business Review puts it, there’s a systematic problem with many online reviews — they tend to over-represent the most extreme views and what we usually get is a diatribe! A third assumption is also important – in this interconnected world, complaints and concerns are more likely to appear on social before they make it to mainstream media.

Can we learn from these cases where healthcare players managed their reputation, over the years?

  1. The case of poison in pills: J&J

Ask anyone. Pride of place for facing reputation crises goes to J&J for the way it masterfully managed its Tylenol crisis (which spawned multiple business school case studies) in 1982 and of course, the 2018 asbestos-in-baby-talc crisis which is also a full-blown crisis, but we can see that the stock price is showing signs of recovery, already.

J&J healthcare brand reputation case study

Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol commanded a 35% share of OTC analgesics in the USA, pulling in 15% of the company’s profits in ‘82. Saboteurs laced the tablets with cyanide, causing 7 deaths, and $1bn drop in share price for J&J, drop in market share to 8%, lost production and destroyed goods. The company recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol, worked hard to make the packaging tamper-proof (using features which became industry-standard since) winning the trust of old consumers again and actually onboarding new ones. Their quick and decisive action, willingness to incur $100 m. more in costs and how they communicated ironclad pledges to protect customers were the stuff of legend. Cut to the recent allegations of knowingly ignoring the presence of asbestos in baby talc. Since the matter stands subjudice, we shall await further developments on how, when (and if) they recoup and return to business as usual. 

  1. Salford Royal Hospital’s violation of Privacy

When the medical records of former Manchester United manager Six Alex Ferguson were illegally accessed by some of the staff without a clinical requirement to do so, at the Salford Royal Hospital, the hospital initiated investigations against three staff members for an information governance breach and issued an unreserved apology to the patient and their family with promises to keep them updated as the investigations progress. The manager actually thanked the staff at Salford Royal publicly.

  1. The case of Victoria General Hospitals’ capacity issues

Imagine a 77-year-old war veteran with significant medical issues being left on a gurney in the hallway of a hospital for 5 days because the hospital was unable to cope with high patient volumes. This happened at Victoria General Hospital and gained a lot of publicity thanks to the tweets of the patient’s son Darren Laur, a retired staff sergeant with the Victoria City Police Department, saying ‘My dad is a symptom of a broken medical system.” The hospital apologized, moved him to a room, and promised to set up a procedure to ensure that such hallways stay are limited in future.

  1. When Cambridge Health Alliance failed to serve

Laura Levis died of an asthma attack, feet away from a locked emergency room outside Somerville Hospital, trying to get help. The Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance and the emergency medical response infrastructure were called out on a number of failures like unnecessary communication errors, overburdened staff with training issues, a lack of fail-safes, adequate lighting, proper signage, locked doors along with transparency and accountability. As 911 and the fire department struggled to locate her, the police called a nurse, who opened the locked door – with an unconscious Laura on the other side- but failed to locate Laura in the low lighting. Others found her three minutes later but she couldn’t be revived.

Finally, the hospital and the Cambridge Health Alliance met the husband and apologized and promised not only to improve their processes but also communicate the insights they derived from this, to the other hospitals in the country. The family waited for this apology for over two years and accepted it as sincere enough, but the world can see that it came only after the Boston Globe ran her husband’s account of the events.

  1. The case of a fatal dose at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Radonda Vaught, a (former) nurse for Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, administered a fatal dose of paralyzing anesthetic in the place of a routine sedative to a 75-year-old woman in late 2017, after overriding system safeguards. The Center tried to cover up this incident, probably looking upon it as an inadvertent error but it jeopardized its Medicare status. The hospital’s reputation doesn’t appear to have suffered any serious consequences, as people seem to recognize that the fault was an individual’s mistake rather than the institution’s fault in anyway as the nurse at fault actually overrode the safeguards when she made the mistake, which was almost immediately caught by an alert colleague.

  1. When the lack of oversight cost Hacienda Healthcare its reputation.

Sometimes a situation may prove beyond redemption, as with Hacienda Healthcare, Arizona which just closed down its 60-bed intermediate care facility. It was unwilling to continue operations after a 29-year old patient – in a vegetative state – gave birth to a child on account of sexual abuse from a licensed practical nurse at the center. After two doctors and the CEO quit, the non-profit company decided that patient safety is best served by closing down operations but drew criticism for not opting to increase oversight and set better checks and balances.

  1. Countering fake reviews with pro–activeness

A gynecologist found an anonymous negative review posted online by someone claiming that a procedure he did caused harm to them. Knowing that he never performed such a procedure, the doctor replied, challenging the person to talk to the hospital directly. Then, the posting just vanished. The site reached out to the doctor and offered a reputation management tool which would allow him to hide up to three comments from public view for a higher fee and to get his name to pop up on a competing doctor’s page! Which, shockingly, translates to mean that a doctor with a real misdemeanor, like sexual misdemeanor, against him would be able to have a sterling online reputation as long as he pays the rating site to keep it concealed.

  1. Angel of death, not life

Mount Carmel Health System, Columbus, Ohio attracted 19 lawsuits over wrongful deaths which resulted from the actions of its Dr. William Husel who ordered potentially fatal medication for about 34 patients.  Mt. Carmel apologized publicly for not putting the right processes in place to prevent such events of involuntary euthanasia, fired the doctor and fired or suspended about 20 other employees for not exercising their right to question the doctor’s actions.

  1. The case of ethnic discrimination

Some American scientists as well as the Massachusetts-based biotechnology giant Thermo Fisher were involved in the Chinese government’s plan to persecute the Muslim population of Uighurs in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. While the scientists provided the knowledge and additional genetic material needed for China to collect biometric and genetic data pertaining to all these people, Thermo Fisher supplied the DNA sequencers needed for this project. The company’s initial response to human rights groups who question this was that “it is not possible for us to monitor the use or application of all products we manufactured.” But the issue snowballed with the Senator for Florida calling for action against the use of American technology in human rights violations by the Chinese authorities. Thermo Fisher has just changed its stand to say that it had taken account of “fact-specific assessments,” and that it recognizes “the importance of considering how our products and services are used—or may be used—by our customers.” Further developments are awaited.

Anyone can be rated or reviewed online, and the reviewer may or may not reveal their identity when doing so. These reviews and comments will stay on the Internet forever and will only need a little digging to be revealed. There are agencies which provide services which promise to improve one’s rating. Ultimately, all that matters is how one accepts the feedback and modifies one’s actions suitably to convince the world that they didn’t deserve such a review or that they have learned their lesson from it.

Top Free Tools to Monitor your Online Reputation

Online reviews are a boon and a bane at the same time! They work better than any word-of-mouth publicity with positive reviews. That’s because 84% of people who access them, also believe everything that is said and readily base their decisions on them. But what if these reviews are negative? They can be the bane of existence for a business, especially one which does not offer the quality needed to survive against its competition.  As Darwin said a long time ago, it is the nature of things to have the fit only survive. The rest have to improve or perish.

Reviews come in very useful for growth and businesses bent on surviving and succeeding in a competitive atmosphere must pay due attention to them to learn about their own areas of improvement. Unless the reviews are malicious and fraudulent, no one can question the right of a reviewer to voice any opinion, however defamatory nor can the comments be expunged. This makes managing our online reputation with due attention an important component of our competitive strategy. Potential customers watch every comment we make in response to such reviews and make their own assessment of us.

Our online reputation is spread over a number of platforms, some of which maybe unknown to us we find a review of our products or services posted on it. Let’s try and list some of them.

  • Google
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • Your own blog/website
  • Twitter
  • Mouthshut
  • Online Retailers (ex. Amazon)
  • Instagram
  • Quora
  • Trip Advisor
  • Yelp
  • Yellow Pages
  • Angie’s List
  • Manta
  • Foursquare

These are only representative of the number of places where someone can go and vent their frustration with us (or appreciation of us). There are many more forums, support groups, specialized websites etc. which invite people to share their thoughts too, all of which just help to expand the scope of our anxiety, if not night terrors. The increasing adoption of mobile devices makes it even more easy to spread the reviews, given how prominently they are displayed on a mobile.

Online reputation management today is a science and an art, combined. It requires you to establish a set of techniques and strategies to monitor and resolve negative reviews/feedback, get the fraudulent ones removed or promote yourself positively. How do you keep track of all the reviews and ratings which mention you by name, across online directories, search engines and social media channels? You can use some of these free tools which can help you to track and manage your online reputation.

Let’s see what some of the more popular ones have on offer.

  1. BuzzSumo

    This tool offers a simple dashboard which brings content sharing analytics and influencer identification together. You can search for the most popular and shared content on a given topic and even identify the influencers who shared it. Another helpful feature lets you find influencers based on keywords and hashtags. Using this tool, content marketers can identify the content that is working well and know the individuals whose endorsement can help them to market their own content better. The influencers can be filtered by type as bloggers, journalists and companies, allowing a content marketer to engage with the group most relevant to their needs.

  2. Followerwonk

    This tool allows you to search through Twitter users and their bios using certain keywords. You can find the individuals with the greatest reach and followers as their word will carry the most authority. Then you can try and get them to review your product or services. The tool also offers some free analytics features which enable you to compare the followers of two or three different Twitter accounts, to enable you to see which of the social media influencers are following your competitors but not following you.

  3. GoFish

    This is a search tool which shows you the negative reviews for your keywords from over 40 websites to help you respond to them, flag them or have them removed. Offers some paid services too.

  4. IFTTT

    This free tool helps you automate simple online tasks like sending text messages or turn on or off the lights in your smart home. People can also set this up to respond with a direct message when an RSS feed alerts them of a new mention of your name.

  5. Klear

    This tool helps you target influencers by filtering them using a number of qualifiers and to identify power users against novices to broaden your reach by choosing right. The tool’s demographic features allow you to see the types of followers the influencers are attracting to choose the right group to target. The tool provides you with detailed reports on each of your campaigns, ensuring a high ROI.

  6. Kred:

    This is a basic tool which helps users to measure the metrics around influence like mentions, retweets, replies and followers on Twitter. It offers an outreach score which is based on mentions, retweets and replies. Both together help us to measure how active and influential an individual is with a given community.

  7. TweetReach

    Using this tool, you can get an analysis of the latest 100 tweets on a specific subject, using keywords and hashtags, to identify the top 100 contributors and the most retweeted tweets to find the influencers on a given topic. You can also get an estimate on the reach and exposure of the search term you are researching.

  8. PeerIndex

    This tool identifies influencers based on their ability to drive conversations and actions, instead of just the volume of content shared by them or even their follower count. Start finding the real influencer voices on a range of niche topics.

  9. TweetDeck

    Their search function is excellent and they let you save your searches, and see them get updated in real time. Build lists of accounts and create updating columns, create segments to get a collection of curated timelines as you track the tweets of all the influencers on your list.

  10. Smart Moderation

    This is an AI tool which allows you to hide or delete comments you do not want on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. It helps you monitor the buzz around your name for $199/month.

  11. Social Mention

    This free tool lets you monitor specific brand keywords and lets you see the top keywords, top users, sentiments, hashtags and networks. It searches blogs, microblogs, social networks, images and videos.

  12. SocialReport

    This tool enables social media management by tracking brand mention on any part of the web, to get analytics, social scheduling, a smart inbox with task management, keyword monitoring, automated responses, custom reports, and API integrations. You can have a free trial, after which it’s $49 plus per month.

  13. Traackr

    This tool offers a range of solutions which help businesses manage their influencer marketing campaigns, communicate with influencers easily, track and validate your campaigns, compares your social influence with that of your competition and measure your growth over time.

  14. Yotpo

    This tool proactively helps you improve your reputation by encouraging customers to provide positive reviews by sending review requests immediately after a purchase. Its paid version provides superior results in customizing reviews and deriving more feedback from customers.

You can also check out other tools like AgoraPulse, BirdEye, Broadly, Customer Lobby, Future Solutions, ImageRaider, Podium, Reputation911, ReviewBuzz, Rocket Referrals or ReviewTrackers.

It’s important to note here that although these tools are all really helpful in many ways, the free models are never robust enough for you to be assured of a full control over your reputation as the features are provide only basic support. Of course, it’s up to you to decide if you want to upgrade or somehow manage with an inefficient version.

Setting up an online reputation system and team?

When visiting a new city, most people request Google to recommend the ‘best restaurants near me’. The numbered list they get back in nanoseconds clearly ranks the restaurants near them by popularity. Ever wondered how the owners of the restaurants at number 2, 3 or 10 must feel, if they browsed the same information, out of curiosity? What can one do to get to the top of the list? It’s not that easy!

The impeccable quality of one’s products or services doesn’t decide the issue anymore. Websites have user generated content and allow anyone and everyone to talk about anything under the sun and that would include your services and products. You can’t avoid any of these voices, opinions and reviews. One negative review or nasty comment online could mar one’s reputation and business prospects. This has made it imperative for businesses to stay ahead of the chatter and manage their online reputation with the attention and care it deserves.

Online Reputation Management best practices to consider

Your online reputation is what people think of you as a business. It is a fragile entity controlled by the public, requiring your active intervention as you keep receiving both negative and positive feedback. There are some best practices you can follow when managing your digital reputation.

  1. Establish processes to follow all the chatter online which mentions you, not forgetting that some of these could be business inquiries.
  2. Correct any inaccurate listing if you come to know of it, and address all reviews and defamatory postings online which refer to you, irrespective of the date on which it was posted. Use legal means to fight false reviews and have them removed. Untraceable and hidden attacks will need to be investigated by online analysts using email traces, data cross-indexing and other techniques.
  3. Put out positive content and ensure it is search optimized to get it ranked higher than the negative content, if you can’t get it removed.
  4. Deal with all reviews in a respectful and professional manner, clearly demonstrating your willingness to address their grievance and resolve issues. Offer a coherent explanation when disputing any inaccurate review. Remember, it’s hard to gain trust but very easy to lose it. Never hesitate to apologize when needed. You could take the conversation offline, and build rapport and trust with the reviewer.
  5. Request for a ‘second chance’ – Request really unhappy customers to give you a second chance, and make sure that you deliver on your promise. Be quick to respond, in a matter of minutes. People have lost millions for not responding promptly as it looks like they are rejecting/ignoring the review. Know when to give up on a conversation which refuses to pick up, but make sure that disinterested observers can clearly see that you tried.
  6. Do a quick hashtag search at regular intervals to catch the chatter about your business. Better still, assign a dedicated employee/team to ensure that no comment goes unattended. 

How to thing about your own Online Reputation Management team?

Among the things one needs to consider before putting together a team for managing their online reputation would be:

  1. The volume of reputational issues which need to be handled or responded to. Establish a baseline value for reputational issues by number and frequency.
  2. The general nature of these issues and the typical process followed in resolving them.
  3. Coverage of time & other SLAs: 24/7, Weekdays, any other

How about using an Online Reputation Management platform?

But, first, what about a Reputation Management Tool? These tools constantly monitor all the online chatter using a keyword-based search to zone in any mention of a specific name to see what is being said about them and by whom. If you already have a reputation management tool, carefully track its capabilities and measure what it can accomplish. To illustrate, here are some questions you can ask:

  1. What sources are covered by the tool? Can it follow all the chatter happening anywhere on the World Wide Web or just some platforms?
  2. Does it analyse the data collected and provide you with insights which are actionable?
  3. Does it provide you with user analytics, like influence score for a particular commenter, or provide insight into demographics and further segregate it by geography? After all, like filter coffee in South India, reviews change by location too.
  4. Do you get alerts when your brand is mentioned? Are they received in real time?
  5. How many seats do you have and what is your expenditure on deploying this product? How about planning the future, when you may need more seats?

All these considerations should help to clarify your thoughts as you put a team together to monitor or manage your online reputation. Broadly speaking, we can say:

  • A small to mid-sized business can live with a one-person team reporting to a CMO.
  • A public limited company needs to have at least a couple of seats as following news coverage is very important. Unfavorable news coverage can immediately have a negative impact on its stock prices.
  • A company which is consumer facing and deals with essential products and services needs a large team of customer service representatives dedicated to ORM. They should also have analysts to crunch the data and reports and figure out a corrective action after each incident. A well planned hierarchy should be put in place. Key metrics such as complaints handled/hour, TAT on issues, escalation measures should all be put in place. A support desk integration with the ORM platform helps with such high-volume incidents.

To quote Publilius Syrus, “A good reputation is more valuable than money”. Do guard it well.

Reportedly, about 84% of people are supposed to rely on online reviews over personal recommendations as unbiased opinions fit to base their decisions upon. This makes it extremely important for companies to monitor and manage their reputation at all times. See that you put yours in place and empower them by providing them with access to a reliable social listening tool, like Auris.

 

Online Reputation Management – Words of Wisdom

Reputation is extremely fragile, like a mirror, requiring you to nurture it and care for it with devotion. However, it can be damaged in a matter of minutes and much like a broken mirror, may never allow you to put it back together. This makes it necessary for you to see that you watch over it and manage it with the utmost attention. Online reputation is essentially the same, except that you will never know where the attack is coming from, requiring you to stay alert for the slightest whiff of trouble at all times. Let’s quote Warren Buffet here, “It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”, to drive this thought home better than any of the myriad real life examples which prove this point.

The Internet hears and sees everything and forgets nothing. This makes the task of online reputation management very difficult. Let’s look at some opinions expressed by business leaders, politicians and intelligentsia in the matter of online management, which help to throw light on its importance and its fragility and guide us on how to protect it. Let’s look at some of them and see what their message is conveying to us.

‘Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is’

– Chris Anderson, journalist and writer. This would include all the things that you have put out there, along with the comments and opinions posted by literally anyone online about you, with or without identifying themselves! We really must hope for competitors with some scruples.

‘The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results!’

–Dharmesh Shah, Founder & CTO, Hubspot. Most people do not look beyond page 1 and if we fail to be among the top hits on a Google search, we may expect no real results from our online marketing efforts. Turn this thought around, and try hiding any negative information about your brand through sending them to the second page to successfully manage your reputation.

‘Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room’

– Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.He also said ‘A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.’Both are pertinent for online as well as offline reputations, for individuals and corporates alike.

‘Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars’

– Rupert Murdoch states the financial side of reputation damage without mincing any words.

‘MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard and LinkedIn is the office’.

– Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. As LinkedIn keeps experimenting with its format and services, these equations could change and may even vanish one day soon. However, it’s true that social networks an essential part of online presence management for a brand or its products, as they offer a company an opportunity to share its culture or values like superior customer service

‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’

– Eric Schmidt, Ex-CEO, Google. Voicing one of the most truthful statements ever for reputation, both online or offline. All your blogs, photos, videos, tweets, statements, posts, forums, press commentaries etc. have the potential to work for you and also against you, unless you are careful.

‘For a business leader somewhat in the spotlight, it is impossible to hide’

– Cédric Manara, renowned Internet Lawyer, putting in perspective, the impossibility of enjoying a private life, when one is in the spotlight. Be it a spouse’s death or a divorce, it becomes impossible for most of them to grieve in private and stay away from prying eyes. If the event threatens one’s reputation, containment becomes even harder, if not impossible. It makes prevention a priority, as with the other nasty things in life.

‘As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement’,

– Joseph Conrad, renowned author in his book Secret Agent. This holds equally true for the behaviour of human beings as it does to their online interactions.

‘Unfortunately, your reputation often rests not on your ability to do what you say, but rather on your ability to do what people expect’,

– Bryant H. McGill, renowned author. We can see the truth of this when we witness the brutal trolling faced by well-meaning statements and assurances, especially from political leaders.

‘Reputation is an outcome; but it is also a valuable, strategic asset’,

– Andrew Griffin, a well known technology editor. Anyone whose reputation took a beating online would readily agree with him.

‘In a digitally connected world a byte of data can boost or bite your brand’,

– Bernard Kelvin Clive, renowned author and thinker. This is one of his mantra for online brand building.

‘A good reputation is more valuable than money’,

– Publilius Syrus, a renowned Latin writer. We agree with him.

‘If people like you they will listen to you, but if they trust you, they will do business with you’,

– Zig Ziglar, a renowned author. The same holds true for one’s online reputation management.

‘The reputation of a thousand years may be undermined by the conduct of one hour’,

– a Japanese Proverb, which has obviously stood the test of time to stay relevant to this day.

‘Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing’,

– Paul Therouxin, a renowned writer. An insightful quote which should put us on guard.

‘Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be’

– John Wooden in another great quote. He has also said to ‘Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.’

Publicity is absolutely crucial. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad’,

– Sir Richard Branson, Founder of the Virgin Group.

‘The secret of crisis management is not good vs. bad, it’s preventing the bad from getting worse’,

– Andy Gilman, Founder of CommCore. 

‘Don’t worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition’,

– Abraham Lincoln, former President of the United States, in this highly inspirational quote.

‘There is no professional or personal anymore. There’s simply your brand, and it’s up to you to determine whether your brand is affected positively or negatively. That’s it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong’,

– Peter Shankman, renowned entrepreneur and editor – summing up the entire wisdom available on online reputation management.

To avoid situations which can damage your reputation, set up a monitoring system that will anticipate the risks to your reputation and help you to control the damage in time. Monitoring is an essential and unavoidable aspect of online reputation management these days.

Listen to the demands on your brand, so that you can react to contain the damage, before it can spread like wild fire and go completely out of control! Talk to us today, to learn how Auris can help you achieve your goals.

 

Real time Net Promoter Score – your ultimate brand health measure

Reichheld introduced the concept of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in his article titled “The One Number You Need to Grow” published in the Harvard Business Review’s December 2003 edition as a simple and profound measure of brand health. A top notch and experienced expert in the domain of loyalty, Reichheld used his research and experience at Bain & Company to devise NPS and propose why it is important to track.

Ever since, net promoter score measures have become a de-facto standard to measure brand health. There have been criticisms (Grisaffe, 2007) about the approach and whether NPS is the one and only metric to rely on. However, the consensus view is that NPS is an important measure if not the only one. In this blog post we discuss in detail about the net promoter score and explain how to measure and interpret NPS. We take the argument a step further and explain why a real time NPS measurement can be powerful.

What is the Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score is a summary measure of a brand’s health. The score encapsulates the growth prospect of a brand. The NPS measure is premised on an assumption – that the growth of a brand is driven by enthusiastic advocates who actively ‘promote’ the brand. Also, it assumes that the growth of the brand is de-accelerated by its detractors. The net percentage, i.e., the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors is what gives us the net promoter score.

Net promoter score

Figure: Net Promoter Score (Courtesy: http://fivestarstorereviews.com)

The definition is of course more precise. Responses are collected from consumers post consumption of service to determine whether a consumer would recommend the product/service on a scale of 0 to 10. Those who respond with an 9-10 are considered promoters while those who respond with any score equal to or below 6 are considered detractors. The remaining are categorized as “passive” – the silent audience. Typically, passives would constitute the majority and the difference between those actively advocating or discouraging use of the product or service becomes the “net” favorable voice. A positive measure of NPS signifies that there are more advocates than detractors and therefore the brand would grow. Studies have shown that NPS correlates well with customer retention. 

What does the Net Promoter Score signify?

By definition, the NPS can range from -100% to +100%. Let us understand this better. Think about iconic brands such as Apple (in the 2000s) or Disney, where almost all consumers of the brands were advocates and there were hardly any detractors, the NPS measure would be near 100%. Near 100% scores imply that the brand has almost a cult-like following.

Consider the case of a movie which bombed at the box office. If the audience of such a movie vociferously advice others against going for the show, the resultant NPS could be near -100%. With a high negative score, the viewership of such a movie would decline exponentially over the next few days resulting in poor returns. A positive NPS score is considered good.

How is information gathered to compute the NPS?

The NPS scores are collected by prompting the consumers to fill out a questionnaire. Typically, the question can be part of a larger set of questions and is administered through physical forms, or digitally through online surveys or IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Apps have an in-app feedback survey which can also have NPS related questions.

The best practice is to get the feedback right after the customer has engaged or experienced the brand. For example, you get asked a few questions by airlines right after your air travel. The recency helps consumers provide relevant responses since the experience is still fresh in their minds. The best practice on implementing NPS measurement is through use of automation, which ensures that the questionnaire is administered at the right time and considers the context of the consumer.

NPS score distributions or central tendency measures such as mean and median NPS scores can give an idea of how the NPS is distributed amongst the sample who responded to the questions. This aggregate measure helps estimate the growth and customer retention metrics.

What are NPS scores for some of the popular brands?

Amongst the popular brands the ones with high NPS scores are Tesla (96), Apple (72), BMW (72), Netflix (68), Amazon.com (62). The over 90 NPS depicts the cult like following that Tesla enjoys today.

Well-known brands with a low NPS score include McDonalds (-8), Comcast (-5) and Baidu (0). More comprehensive reports available online provide NPS scores for popular brands across industries.

What are industry NPS benchmarks?

CustomerGauge published its 2018 NPS & CX (customer experience) benchmark report, a study based on responses from over 400 respondents across several countries. A snapshot of the industry benchmarks is shown in the figure below.

Industry NPS benchmark scores 2018

Online, real time NPS – the ultimate brand health metric.

Even the most comprehensive NPS studies are marred by limited sample size. It is difficult to get responses to questionnaires through intrusive email/SMS based NPS administration. Getting survey responses in physical paper forms is tedious, especially when collected from different regions and cities.

Auris advocates making use of the opinions shared by detractors, passive customers as well advocates online – on social, review boards and blogs. The sample size is much larger, the responses are what consumers have expressed of their own volition and all of this in real time. Not to mention the fact that such NPS measurements cost a fraction of what the conventional methodology costs.

Two ways in which a real time NPS measure helps

There are several benefits of implementing a real time NPS measurement versus the conventional methodology. Two obvious benefits include:

  1. True representation of brand health as on date: NPS measurements over a year or two prior might not be representative of the true voice of the customer. For example, the NPS for the iPhone is very different in 2019 versus 2016. Real time helps the brand teams understand the changing preference of the customers.
  2. Responsiveness: More frequent the measures, more responsive the brand. Real time implies a continuous measure, which is the holy grail. This helps the brand understand dips, get to the root cause and address the issues immediately. It is a well-known fact that improved responsiveness in fact helps improve NPS in the longer term.

Implementing a real time NPS can help brands make this feedback measure become more robust (through a large sample size), reduce bias (by using unprompted views) and significantly reduce the cost.

5 alerts which help safeguard your brand’s online reputation

There are umpteen examples which illustrate how not being on top of what is being said about your brand can render a jolt to its equity. In our previous blog post we discussed how an online reputation management platform can help avert brand reputation issues.

We elaborate on one aspect of such reputation management platforms which is an important component in your ORM tool kit – Alerts. As the name suggests, such alerts are great when you get the right information, as-it-happens, across to the right person or team within your organization.

What are the alerts which your system needs to enable? Here are 5 which are important.

  1. Negative mentions alert: The simplest one alerts you to any negative mention of your brand, as it happens. If you use a ticketing system, you should be able to choose whether you would have a ticket automatically created for every negative mention or do it manually. A robust reputation management system allows for both use cases.
  2. Influencer mention alerts: There are two scenarios in which such influencer alerts help:
    1. The first obvious scenario is one where any influencer’s mention needs to be dealt with extra sensitivity and caution and warrants an escalation to higher-ups. Depending on influencer scores, you may want to escalate the mentions right to the CMO/CEO.
    2. If you have a very high buzz volume (for example, if you are a utility provider such as in the case of mobile/internet services). You’d need a way to prioritize influencer mentions and keep a tab on such mentions yourself.
  3. News mention alerts: Mainstream media monitoring is essential and given the reach of print media as well as the relatively higher credibility consumers attach to print news, such mentions need to be part of the ‘as-it-happens’ alerts.
  4. Crisis alerts: A common feature of a crisis is that the volume of mentions spikes multiple times in a short time frame. An alert which gets triggered beyond a specific threshold when such a trend is breaking out is an important feature in your alert toolkit.
  5. Competitive intelligence: An alert which tells you stories about competitors or important handles which might provide you with competitive insights or great marketing opportunities. An example which shows the value in having such alerts is discussed in one of our previous blog posts.

The value of alerts improves as they use data enrichment done using AI. For example, location specific mentions being directed to the location head. Alerts can be based on the root cause of a consumer issue and can be sent out to the right team within the company or organization.

Alerts form an important weapon to defend your brand’s reputation. While evaluating online reputation management platforms, be sure to ask about such alerts.