Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

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Radian6 Launches Real-Time Monitoring And Engagement Console

10.03.10

Radian6 has announced a new tool that has the potential to be a paradigm shift in how companies manage their social media monitoring programs.

The Radian6 Engagement Console combines two of the best tools out there – Tweetdeck and Radian6 – in an Adobe Air-based desktop tool. In doing so, the console makes radical improvements to the workflow process for Radian6 users. We’ve been test-driving the console in our office for a little while now, and I’ve been very impressed by the utility – and future potential – of this new tool.

The Low-Down

Some of the key features of the console:

  • Supports multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook, so you can combine your personal and professional engagement – posting and replying on both of these services
  • Allows you to set up “stacks” (as they call columns) from multiple Radian6 profiles, based on numerous criteria
  • Incorporates Radian6’s search functionality, pulling from searches covering blogs, Twitter, Google Buzz, forums, Flickr, YouTube and more
  • Far, far faster than the Radian6 web interface – both in terms of interaction but also refresh frequency, which can be as frequent as every 30 seconds
  • Supports conversation threading – a feature missing from Radian6 previously
  • Built-in URL shortener
  • Allows team-wide collaboration on engagement, as you can see updates from colleagues in near-real time and can view previous conversations with people
  • Resizeable columns (hear that, Tweetdeck??)
  • Incorporates all of Radian6’s workflow features within the tool
  • Allows you to create custom macros for bulk management of posts.

Check out Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun discussing the console in this video:

Workflow At Your FingerTips

These last two features are central to the console’s value. One of the biggest barriers to using the full potential of the Radian6 workflow has, in the past, been the slow speed of the web interface and the 15-minute refresh cycle within that interface. This, combined with the preference people for tools such as Tweetdeck for their own personal posts, makes it hard to ensure that messages all flow through one system from a workflow perspective. This all changes with the Engagement Console.

The Engagement Console is intended for use as a front-line tool. In contrast, the Radian6 web interface is built much more around its reporting functionality. By taking the popular layout of Tweetdeck, building-in Radian6 data and workflow, and also essentially co-opting many of the features that have made tools like Hootsuite and CoTweet popular for team-based approaches recently, Radian6 is releasing a tool that has the potential to dramatically ease the monitoring and engagement process for companies.

Of course, the web interface remains for report generation purposes – this tool is intended as an addition, not a replacement.

Macros are your friend

The macro feature is another very cool addition. Macros aim to streamline your interactions by letting you automate recurring tasks. So, if you have a type of post that frequently comes up, you can set a standard way of dealing with them, save it as a macro and then click one button to handle all of that post’s workflow actions.

Confusing? Imagine a macro for product complaints, for example. You could create a macro that sets sentiment to ‘negative’, sets the post classification to ‘product complaint’, adds a post tag of “support” and assigns posts to a particular team member. Then, when future complaints arise, you can click the macro and all of that is taken care of in one click.

Bottom line

The Radian6 Engagement Console really could be a game-changer in their market. It combines the powerful search, workflow and team functionality of Radian6 with an easy-to-use interface which is a front-line person’s dream come true. Given all of the relatively similar social media monitoring services out there, this tips the balance. Once this tool rolls out fully (it’s in private beta until April), I see no reason why companies looking for both social media analytics and real-time engagement wouldn’t choose Radian6.

Now, where’s that mobile app…?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

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Review: Sysomos Social Media Monitoring Tool

09.11.30

I’ve explored many social media monitoring tools over the last few years. This week I added to the list when I received a demo of Sysomos – a Toronto-based company launched in 2007. Along with Radian6 and the Alterian-acquired Techrigy, Sysomos is one of the well-known players in the monitoring landscape right now.

Sysomos’ offerings are split into two products (see a detailed breakdown on the Sysomos website):

  • Maps – Sysomos’ core tool – offering unlimited search queries and analysis on its database of conversations.
  • Heartbeat – Sysomos’ enterprise-level tool, incorporating search, analysis and workflow management around specific topics.

I’ve structured this review to around the major features I look for in a monitoring tool:

  • Search
  • Analysis features
  • Workflow
  • Price

Search

Historical search

Both Sysomos tools query the same database of conversations, which stretches back to 2006. All users can run queries on this entire database (historical data in the Heartbeat tool comes with an additional cost), which solves a problem I’ve frequently encountered in the past – being able to look back in time to run baseline and historical searches for new clients.

Boolean

Sysomos also allows the creation of boolean searches – a feature I welcome as it allows the creation of complex queries very easily.

Social networks

To my surprise, Sysomos didn’t seem to search the full breadth of social networks we’ve come to expect. When we asked about searching MySpace, for example, we were told that we could find MySpace if we searched for “specific users.”

With that said, Sysomos does include public Facebook pages and groups in its search results. Other tools (Techrigy, for example) do this too, but it’s a useful feature that’s becoming more important as Facebook continues to dominate other social networks (in North America, at least).

Organization

One area in which Sysomos does fall slightly short of its competitors is in the organization of queries. Whereas Radian6 allows hierarchies of queries, so you can separate searches for your competitors from those for your brand, for example.

Analysis features

Interface

The interface on Sysomos products was one of the big eye-openers for me. Long frustrated with interfaces that limit your options, I was pleased to see a very user-friendly dashboard which allows easy on-the-fly customization. Need to narrow your search duration? Just click and drag over a time period on a chart and it adjusts.

Sentiment

Sysomos comes with automated sentiment analysis. I’m a long-time cynic when it comes to this kind of feature. Companies seem to view it as almost a must-have nowadays but I’m not sure why when no-one is able to produce an accurate tool. Sysomos claims its sentiment analysis is 80 per cent accurate, but I’m afraid a 20% error margin is not good enough for me.

With that said, you can manually edit the sentiment assigned to results, and even a mere 80 per cent accuracy does mean less work for the person analyzing the data, so while I don’t consider the sentiment analysis a differentiator, it’s still handy.

Filtering

The filtering system in Sysomos is very simple and flexible. You can layer new filters on top of your search at any time, and it’s easy to add those filters onto your main search permanently if you want to.

Segmentation

While the deep mining doesn’t seem to be quite as powerful as in some other tools, the breadth of options is wider – allowing deeper analysis on geography and a limited demographic breakdown (based on user-disclosed information).

Text analysis

While word clouds are run-of-the-mill nowadays, Sysomos goes one step further through what it calls its “BuzzGraph”, which shows the associations between common words in a search. I found the context provided by BuzzGraph to be a welcome addition to the rudimentary text analysis provided by most services.

Workflow

Maps, as a search/analysis focused offering, doesn’t include a workflow system. Heartbeat, however, does. It incorporates the standard features we’ve come to expect, including task assignments. However, from the brief look I got, it doesn’t seem to go as far as Radian6’s workflow tool, which incorporates deeper categorization of posts, tagging and real-time email alerts.

Price

Sysomos doesn’t come cheap. However, it’s roughly comparable with its competitors.

The Heartbeat tool starts at $500 per month, plus a $500 setup fee. For that you get a limited number of searches and access by up to five people. For double that fee, you can double the number of queries  and get access by an unlimited number of people.

The Maps tool, meanwhile, comes at a flat rate of $2,500 per month. That allows unlimited searches on all data going back to 2006, and unlimited access, making it a potentially cost-effective tool for agencies servicing multiple clients.

Conclusion

I was very impressed with Sysomos. In particular:

  • The flexibility of the user interface is a big plus;
  • Filtering and segmentation tools combine to be a powerful analysis tool;
  • Different products for both corporate and agency needs.

If this has piqued your interest, check out the Sysomos website or their blog, and check out the video earlier in the post for an overview.

Posted in: monitoring, social media, social media monitoring

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Brands In Public: A New Reputation Management Tool

09.09.23

If your company matters to people, they are talking about you.

There’s nothing particularly new about this; this has been the pattern for hundreds of years. However, one difference with the advent of social media tools is that people are now able to talk to dozens, hundreds or thousands of other people instead of the few they used to.

There are plenty of tools to help companies listen to what people are saying. While I often talk about Radian6, there are plenty of other tools out there, both free and professional.

Today Seth Godin’s Squidoo launched a new service named Brands In Public.

As Seth says:

“You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.”

Brands In Public provides an online dashboard that pulls together the latest news and conversation about a brand from sources such as Google Blogsearch, Google News, Yahoo! News, Twitter, BackType, Google Search Trends and Quantcast.

Where Brands In Public gets more interesting is that if a company decides it wants to sponsor its company page (for $400 a month) it gets control of about 2/3 of the screen real-estate on the page. It can highlight blog posts, run contests, post videos or whatever it likes. In case of an issue, the company can quickly respond without needing any technical skills, the ongoing maintenance requirements of a blog, or IT’s go-ahead to create a new page on your website.

All the time, the regular searches continue in the right-hand column, uncensored and unfiltered.

So, while the Molson page features a Twitter search, the Molson blog and a quick poll on how people feel about the brand, the Allstate page includes YouTube videos from various channels along with content from multiple blogs (disclosure: Molson Coors Canada is a recent client; Allstate Canada is a current client).

There’s nothing complicated about Brands In Public; in fact Seth takes pain in his post announcing the service to note that it’s deliberately simple. “It’s simply a place for your brand to see and be seen, to organize and to respond.”

A few thoughts from me:

  • The interface is clean, friendly and easy to use.
  • Right now there’s no search function – the pages seem to be limited to a scrolling list. Presumably this will change as the service is built out and the volume of pages increases.
  • The FAQs indicate that the service will remove a company’s page if they request it. However, as they note, “Your fans might be disappointed though.” What’s more, the lack of a comprehensive list of companies may inhibit the growth of the service.
  • If brands haven’t yet invested in a social media presence, they’re unlikely to make this their first step due to the lack of control of the searches. To those who have already invested, they don’t need this presence as they’re already out there.
  • Brands In Public provides an easy way for companies to be part of the conversation – an entry level solution – but at a premium price. As TechCrunch noted, $400 per month is a pretty hefty price point for a series of automated searches and a few dashboard modules.

What do you think? Is this a useful tool for brands?

Posted in: monitoring, social media, tools

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Build Your Social Media Strategy With Rocks and Sand

09.09.18

Social media is taking off right now. It’s all over the traditional media; there are books on it being released in every direction, and everyone seems to be on at least one of the various social networks, be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or any other.

Meanwhile, from a business perspective it feels like every company we talk to is at least including social media in its plans; in many cases it’s front and centre.

Some of those companies immediately look for the “quick wins” – campaigns that will get them immediate bang for their buck. In those cases. it can be difficult to explain what I believe to be the truth:

Quick wins are difficult in social media and it’s often ill-advised to seek them. Social media works best as a long-term initiative.

Can of stonesWe occasionally use (and wreck) a ‘rocks and sand’ metaphor when thinking about social media. You can have a jar full of rocks in it, but there are lots of gaps. To truly full it, you need sand to fill them. Social media is similar – you can have lots of big campaigns, but for your efforts to truly pay off you need the ’sand’ – the long-term foundation that keeps everything in place.

What is that foundation? It’s the infrastructure you build – the policies, training and workflow that keeps things running smoothly. It’s the executive support that lets you move beyond a publicity-based approach. It’s the listening program that lets you identify issues early and learn from ongoing conversation. It’s the ongoing presence that gives you the credibility to maximize those short-term pushes.

Bottom line: it’s the fundamentals.

Try to push ahead with your ‘big rocks’ without the ’sand’ and you’ll come up short, with holes in your plans.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Posted in: best practices, social media

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Scaling Issues In Social Media Monitoring

09.09.09

Radian6 recently introduced a few new features to its social media monitoring platform. The company  explained them well on the Radian6 blog so I won’t go into details, but in a nutshell:

  • You can change font sizes on widgets
  • You can segment trend charts by media type, language and region
  • You can now copy and move reporting widgets between dashboards and users

These are minor changes for a product that is constantly evolving. The first change is very minor and the second is a step in the right direction. The third, however,  signals a continued trend of Radian6 offering features designed to improve collaboration among teams.

Volume and coordination are big challenges for large companies. As more and more large companies adopt social media, workflow features are becoming increasingly crucial to this kind of tool.  For social media monitoring to make it at an enterprise level, tools like Radian6 need to continue to add features that deal with scale.

In the meantime, here are five tips for scaling your listening:

  1. Sampling – when large volumes of discussion mean that reviewing every search result is completely unfeasible, consider sampling a percentage of posts. If there are 500 a day, perhaps you look at 50 or 100 of them. Statistically, you should get an accurate sample.
  2. Rank by influence – most of the major social media monitoring tools offer ways to rank or sort posts by various measures of influence. You may consider ’skimming’ the most influential posts from the top of the pile, and dealing with those that have traction before moving through the list.
  3. Automation – I’m resistant to automated analysis, especially around sentiment (the English language is so complex), but in cases of massive scale, there may be no alternative but to allow some level of automation.
  4. Workflow - processes are helpful within organizations of any size, but within large organizations they are critical. Lay out who is responsible on given days or at given times; what the process is for monitoring and (if necessary) responding; a triage process to help determine what requires action; all of the decision points that arise through the process. It can drastically cut the time needed to deal with individual online discussions.
  5. Pull Together a Team - at a certain point, you can no longer do it all yourself. Check out Amber Naslund’s excellent ebook on building a social media team for a fantastic resource on how to pull together the resources you need to scale up.

How have you dealt with scaling issues in social media monitoring? What other features would you like to see in monitoring tools to make that scaling easier?

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A Quick Social Media Analysis Of The Toronto Storm

09.08.21

If you lived anywhere in Southern Ontario or were paying attention online last night, you’ll likely know that the Toronto area experienced a brief but violent storm early yesterday evening. What made Torontonians sit up and notice was the dozen or so tornado warnings issued for the area as the storm rolled in.

For a while, the words “Toronto” and “Tornado” trended on Twitter as people relayed news and their tales of the storms.

Here’s a video of the storm rolling-in across Toronto (you may want to turn your speakers down):

Jim Parsons also has several fantastic photos.

I pulled together a brief analysis of events as they unfolded during last night’s episode, using Radian6 and a couple of other tools. It’s quick and dirty but, well, that’s what you get for free :)

Timing

As weather stations forecast the storm earlier in the day, there was a brief spike in conversation in the morning. Conversation related to the tornadoes themselves began to erupt around 6pm – the first time that, had you been paying attention to conversation trends, you would have noticed a trend evolving.

Another noticeable feature is the second spike in conversation later in the evening. The storm was well away from Toronto by this point; this spike represented people discussing their experiences and posting photos and videos they had collected during the episode.

Volume trend for 'Tornado' and 'Storm'

Volume and velocity

Once the storm began, the velocity of the spike in conversations was significant. We saw an immediate 66% increase in the volume of conversations about Toronto; at the height of the conversation (once the storm had passed, funnily enough), the volume represented more than a 125% increase in the converastion about Toronto.

Meanwhile, from one or two posts an hour about Toronto and storms or tornadoes, we saw an increase to roughly one post per minute during the storm, and two posts per minute in the aftermath.

Trend of Toronto and storm-topic keywords

Media Types

Not surprisingly, with Twitter being the golden child of the moment, especially for time-sensitive updates, micromedia comprised almost three-quarters of the conversation relating to tornadoes. Blogs made up 13 per cent, while images captured by people comprised 10 per cent of the conversation.

This is a substantial departure from the day as a while, during which nearly 40 per cent of the conversation about Toronto occured on blogs and a similar amount occurred on Twitter. A useful reminder that while Twitter is high-profile, on a day-to-day basis much conversation happens elsewhere.

Putting the storm into perspective over the course of the day gives an interesting slant to things. While it’s headline news today and was during the night, mentions of the storm and of tornadoes comprise a small segment of the conversations regarding Toronto yesterday. Despite the storm, discussion around the Jays/Sox game garnered almost as much overall discussion.

What are your memories of the storm?

Posted in: monitoring, social media

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25 Questions To Make Your Social Media Workflow Work For You

09.06.15

You’ve pulled together a social media team, you’ve set your objectives, you’ve developed an integrated communications strategy that combines online and offline communications, and you’ve won the buy-in you need to start to engage online.

The first part of your system should ideally be listening, after which you can begin engaging in online conversations and launching your own properties. Sounds simple, but there are plenty of questions that can trip you up along the way. You should answer as many of these as you can before you start your social media outreach.

Here are a few, to get you started.

Team Coordination

  1. Do you need a schedule to coordinate who is responding to online conversations?
  2. How will you ensure that different team members don’t send duplicate responses?
  3. Will you disclose who is engaging on behalf of your brand? Where?
  4. How will you ensure consistency within your team in recording the various facets of conversations that you are tracking?
  5. Will your team be active on weekends?
  6. Will your weekend workflow differ from your weekday process?
  7. Will you assign specific people to engage with specific individuals?

Tracking and Reporting

  1. How will you record conversations for future reference?
  2. How will you keep a record of conversations so you can see how you’ve corresponded with people in the past?
  3. How will you report on the conversations about your brand/industry?
  4. How will you report on your engagement, against your objectives?

Responding to Conversations

  1. How will you triage conversations for different types of response?
  2. Where are the limits – which conversations will you, and will you not, respond to?
  3. Do you need a set of standard Q&As to frame your responses to common issues?
  4. Is there a common "voice" that you want associated with your brand?
  5. Will you set guidelines for your response time to conversations?
  6. What process will your team follow when they encounter an issue for which they don’t currently have an answer?

Publishing Content

  1. If you are working with other agencies, have you worked their content into your content timelines?
  2. How often will you aim to publish content?
  3. Do you have an editorial calendar for your blog?
  4. How will you divide-up content creation?

General Outreach

  1. Will your team use individual accounts on social media sites that require registration, or will they work from one corporate account?
  2. Will you permit/encourage your team to use their own personal accounts in the outreach?
  3. Do you have a policy on who you will subscribe to on the various social media platforms?
  4. How will you approach the influencers in your market?

What other questions would you add to the list?

Posted in: social media, strategy

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Five Levels Of Social Media Responses

09.06.08

How well are you listening?You’ve leapt onto the social media bandwagon. You’ve dived headfirst into the murky waters of Twitter. You’ve used a few other cliched sayings along the way, too. Suffice it to say, you’re monitoring what people are saying about you and you’re starting to respond to them.

Maybe you’re using free tools like Google Alerts, Twitter Search and BackType. Maybe you’re using a paid tool like Radian6, Ripple6 or Techrigy. 

Either way, you’re starting to put together what Marcel Lebrun would call a listening program.

But are you listening? I mean really listening?

I’ve come up with five levels of approach to online listening and responding (not including the option of not engaging at all). In order of growing effectiveness:

Level One: Ostriching

(Yes, I’m using “ostrich” as a verb. My high-school teachers must hate me.)

This approach, a slight evolution from that which completely ignores online conversations in general, involves monitoring for key words and responding only when people say nice things about you. While this keeps your Twitter stream clear of debate and arguments, it does nothing to engage the people who are hurting or whose needs are not met by your company.

Tip: If you ignore critics, the only place that they go away is in your head. Everywhere else, they get louder.

Level Two: Laughing Gas

“Hey, thanks for your feedback!”

If you’ve just said something nice about a company, or offered something constructive, it might be nice to read a reply like that.

I’ve you’ve just complained publicly about a problem, that’s not the response you want.

Companies taking the laughing gas approach respond as though every mention is a compliment.

They’re not. It just shows that you’re not really listening, and implies that this is just superficial sugar coating.

Don’t do it. No-one will be fooled.

Level Three: “We’re Always Right”

Companies adopting the “we’re always right” approach appear to listen, but when someone disagrees with them that person is always wrong.

This kind of approach is distinctive due to the large number of arguments the company representatives have with other people – arguments that rarely end in agreement, as the representative never accepts that the other point of view may be valid.

Level Four: Superficial Debate

This approach is the best approach that many companies, where communications may not have a significant voice at the management table, can hope to take.

Companies taking this approach engage with people talking about them online, both postitively and critically. They may even engage in debates with those who disagree with them. Many disagreements end in an appeasing message from the representative – something like “thanks – we’ll have a think about how we can improve that” or similar.

If your company is at this stage, you’re in fairly good shape. You’re engaging with your fans and you’re debating with your critics without getting drawn into descructive exchanges.

From what I know, relatively few companies do more than this right now.

Level Five: Fully Engaged

Companies adopting a fully-engaged approach follow most of the same practices as those at level four, but with one important distinction: their social media listening and engagement team feeds back into the rest of the organization.

So, when you voice your concerns about a problem, that company is more likely than others to fix it.

Does this mean that every time a customer complains you have to bend over? No. Obviously companies can’t address every single concern that people raise or they’d (a) spend all of their time on tactical changes rather than strategic direction and (b) would go out of business due to ridiculously high costs. However, they can address issues where it is cost effective to do so.

Very few companies adopt this approach. It takes time, a suitable culture and a genuine integration of social media into core functions like R&D and customer service.

Companies that do this include Dell (see IdeaStorm), Seesmic and any of the social media monitoring companies worth their salt.

In Summary…

True listening – active listening – involves more than just nodding your head at the right time. It means absorbing what people are saying, acting where appropriate, and letting people know when you’ve acted.

If your company falls into levels 1-4, then you have room to grow. That’s ok, I would estimate that 99 per cent of companies are in the same situation. In fact, if you hit level one then you’re still ahead of most companies.

Where do you fall?

Posted in: monitoring, social media

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Does Your Organization Have Multiple Personalities?

09.05.21

Whether you like it or not, your customer service is now part of your company’s public relations. In reality it has always been that way but now, with the variety of online tools that let individuals have a louder voice, many more people can hear about your customer service successes and failures.

Customer service is one of the many ways you can put social media tools to use – identifying customer issues early and resolving them to create happy, satisfied customers. Whether it’s through focused tools like Get Satisfaction or through a coordinated listening and engagement program, there are plenty of ways to go about it. On a daily basis we’re blown away by the power of tools like Radian6 for coordinating this kind of effort.

Respond to customers online and they can be blown away that you’re listening. Frankly, most people don’t yet expect it. We’ve seen from our own clients that the response you can get from effective online service is powerful.

What happens, though, when your offline customer service function doesn’t live up to the expectation for service standards you’ve set online? 

You end up with an organization with multiple personalities.

Online, your company is friendly, responsive, and goes beyond the minimum to set a gold-level standard. Offline, your call centre staff are assessed on turnaround time on calls, and are focused on getting you off the line as quickly as possible.

The person who gets prompt, friendly, personal service online one day and then the next day gets put on hold to a call centre in India for 90 minutes will have an even more negative perception of that phone experience due to that contrast. What’s more, they’re likely to continue to rely on your online service in future, by-passing the other options.

Is that the kind of consistency you aim for with your brand? I hope not.

What about the customers who experience this disconnect? As Todd Defren notes, the response is likely to be something along the lines of:

“Treat me like a STAR one day, and give me a nightmarish experience the next day, just because I’ve reached out via a different channel?  F* you!  I’m gonna tweet about this — you are a fraud!!”

If you’re starting to tune-in and listen to conversations about your company online, pay close attention to what people are saying. Are they consistently complaining about your offline customer service? If they are, while you stand to benefit from outreach through social media tools, you need to take a long, hard look at the rest of your customer service operation.

Posted in: monitoring, pr, public relations

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Social Media Needs Shades Of Grey

09.04.30

Shades of greySocial media operates in shades of grey.

The more I think about our application of these new tools to communications and marketing, the more I realize that things aren’t black and white. Ghost blogging is grey. Online personas are grey. The rules are grey.

Why should you care? Because your approach should be no different.

Your approach to social media will probably differ from most others.

Different situations, different approaches

I just finished co-chairing the Social Media Summit Canada Conference, where I watched Aaron Wrixon deliver a presentation on the Workplace Safety and Insurance Bureau’s (WSIB) approach to monitoring online conversations.

The WSIB, an Ontario government agency, is at the beginning of its use of social media tools. Right now it uses a variety of free tools to monitor online conversations, and is in the early days of responding to them.

The WSIB’s approach to responding to conversations is based around the U.S. Air Force’s own decision tree. However, it is a little more tentative, ignoring any posts meeting the following criteria (emphasis is mine):

  • Obviously angry posts
  • Taunting/baiting
  • “Not of sound mind”
  • Wrong/misguided posts

The last point in this list stands out to me. The WSIB won’t correct misinformation about it online. What’s more, their protocol for responding to conversations is firmly centred around protecting itself, rather than communicating with the public. Legal, IT and Security departments are also heavily involved in the response process.

Remember the context

My immediate reaction, as yours may have been was that this was a poor approach to engaging online. Frankly, the specific and deliberate decision to not respond to misinformation means that (as David Alston mentioned earlier in the day) this information can propagate and in the absence of anything to the contrary, people may simply assume it is correct.

Before you judge, though, consider the environment in which WSIB and its staff operate. Fear 2.0 is rampant – to an organization that, for years, has had the illusion of being in control of its brand, the idea that it might need to engage with individuals is scary. It’s a huge jump for organizations that put layers and layers of approvals between communications staff and the public.

Culture check

One of the first steps on the road to social media adoption is a culture check. Does your organization really want a conversation with people? Is it really ready to accept that, contrary to the rose-coloured glasses people inside might wear, people do disagree with them? Are you willing and able to respond to conversations in real time?

Many organizations simply aren’t ready to engage with people. They need to adjust the way they and their processes work to effectively engage in a timely way (comment on a blog post 48 hours later and (a) most people have already been and gone, and (b) your comment may be buried at the bottom of a long list).

In this context, WSIB has adopted an approach that fits its situation. One might advise them that, at this stage, they’re just not ready to engage with people. They may be better-off monitoring and assessing discussions, and learning within their organization while they get to a point where they can have a positive effect by reaching-out online.

The important point here, though, is that the WSIB has adopted the “rules” of social media to its organization. Its staff listen and, within the context of their environment, they act accordingly.

Is it “textbook”? No. Is it ideal? No. Is it better than ignoring the online space? Yes.

Shades of grey. It’s not just black and white.

What do you think?

Posted in: best practices, social media monitoring

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