Product Camp Atlanta, August 21, 2010 Using Social Media to Gain Customer Insight - Panel

Host/Facilitator: Brandy Nagel, Marketing Catalyst, nagliTech http://www.linkedin.com/in/brandynagel

Panel:

David Cohen, Marketing Coach and Brand Therapist, Equation Arts, LLC http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidscohen, twitter: davidscohen

Erik Wolf, President ZeroGCreative, http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikwolf, twitter: erikwolf Jenny-Rebecca Schmitt, President and Senior Spark, Cloudspark,

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyrebeccaschmitt, http://www.cloudspark.com/blog/

Nagel: Shelle Hale has coined the phrase “strategic snooping”. Our panelists today will address your questions and help you to use social medial to gain customer insight.

Nagel: At what point to do you start to listen to social media?

Cohen: At every point. Social media is about relationship development. It reflects on your brand. You need to create a sustainable base.

Wolf: With social media, the earlier you engage in it, the better. You need to build and nurture a community. It’s helpful to listen to what people are saying. Is this idea a winner? If you listen to social media it gives you a leg up.

Schmitt: There are many ways to begin listening and see what your audience is looking for. As a first step, you can Google the name of your main competitor with the word “hate”. This will give you an indication of competitor challenges and areas where you might create advantages for your product.

Nagel: What is the difference between monitoring, listening and conversation?

Schmitt:

Monitoring allows you to take a heartbeat for information that you are seeking. Setting up Google alerts is a method to establish ongoing monitoring for topics of interest.

Listening goes deeper. Listening allows you to look for common threads for future action. Conversation is interactive and includes asking questions and engaging your audience.

How many of you have had a bad date? How many were the bad date? Don’t be a bad date.

Cohen: You need to listen with a plan. There’s lots of noise and you can easily go down a wrong path. You need to segment your market and identify target niches. For example, you want to identify your progressive users and listen to what they are saying.

Nagel: What are some key tools that you use to monitor and track audiences?

Cohen:

http://www.pageflakes.com/ http://www.netvibes.com/en http://www.googleig.com/ RSS feeds Searches, such as http://search.twitter.com/

Schmitt:

Competitors via www.linkedin.com http://www.google.com/alerts RSS Feeds Forrester Influence Searches: Any keyword, date and geotarget

Wolf: These are all great sources. I also really like http://search.twitter.com/ It’s great for real-time intelligence as events are happening. You can immediately join-in on conversations.

Nagel: How do you engage quiet voices?

Wolf: There is always the traditional approach to of using a focus group with a moderator, but you can engage quiet voices using social media as well. Here are two ways: 1) Ask questions via LinkedIn Answers. For example, “What don’t you like about your office telephone service?” 2) Use your FaceBook community to engage in conversation.

Schmitt: Social media is a great way to engage quiet voices since there is less pressure for quiet listeners. You can do some outreach and personally ask them to get Linkedin to a small group or channel that you create.

Cohen: It’s important when you are communicating to identify and use insider language versus vendor speak. To reach the quiet listener, you need to know how they face and frame the problem and use their language and dialogue.

Wolf: Speed is also very important. You need to be ready with follow-up and respond immediately to get engagement. For example, when someone uses social media to voice their dissatisfaction, you want to respond immediately. If you wait two days, they have already moved on and may not be willing to talk with you.

Nagel: What do you do differently when using social media with B to B versus B to C?

Schmitt: B to B is similar to B to C in that both prospects start life with a search for product reviews. With B to B social media is about priming your pipeline and getting people interested. LinkedIn is a key social media environment for your B to B initiatives. Depending on your industry and target audience participation, Twitter may be below the radar.

Cohen: You need to develop a listening plan for social media. If your industry and audience does not do a lot with social media, you may still need to deploy conventional methods.

Wolf: Check out what industry contacts are saying from http://gist.com/. Also http://tweetreports.com/

Note from site: Gist helps you build stronger professional relationships by bringing together information from across the web for all your contacts and their companies giving you the right information at the right moment to get a first meeting, deliver an amazing pitch, or just find a better way to make a connection. Gist does all the work for you, assembling a dynamic collection of all your contacts and their companies from your email inbox, your social networks, or even your CRM system automatically building and updating their profiles as new content is published – by them or about them.

Nagel: How do you incent people to participate in social media to help with your product development process?

Wolf: I’ve seen many free incentives, such as a free scoop of ice cream, but most people will respond without any incentive. The best way is to engage them in a conversation. Ask them good questions about their passions and they will talk.

Schmitt: So you have 10,000 fans as a result of an iPad™ incentive, are these fans relevant? If you are going to offer an incentive, you must tie it to your product. For example, provide access to advanced content, allow them to experience your beta or extend access to your experts to build your relationship.

Wolf: Exclusivity and celebrity can be a great incentive. For example, you can provide a personal connection with your CEO.

Cohen: What is your objective? Are you doing a quick hit survey or long term relationship building? You need to develop a plan so you reach the right audience and ensure that you are listening and responding appropriately.

Audience: How do you get meaning out of all the social chatter?

Cohen: You need to filter information based on your brand principals. For example Gantt charts were frequently mentioned as desired functionality for Basecamp. The company chose not to incorporate Gantt charts because their core business was targeted to non-product managers. Adding Gantt charts would have taken them away from their targeted audience.

Schmitt: I like to take a statistical approach and rank channels by audience from happy to least happy. This will help you sift through the chatter. You can monitor responses to your LinkedIn questions and pages of twitter chat using this approach. Another way is to deploy paid search to help you with the process. Here are two companies that provide this service: http://www.scoutlabs.com/ and http://www.radian6.com/

Wolf: Paid tools can help you to aggregate and rank results on a scale, say from -1 to +1. These tools read, rank and aggregate data and sentiment. Another company in this space is http://www.sentimetrix.com/newsite/sentimetrix/.