You may soon be able to sip Twitter brand wine. This shows not only the power of people interacting through Social Networking Sites, but also its potential business development model. All these new projects involving people generating content can be very creative and fun. As we have already mentioned, companies are trying to use these sites to create buzz for their products and company images. They are currently working hard to make people talk about themselves. And some are really enjoying this effective tool. That, however, is not the entire story.
Making Buzz on your Brands
Some product managers and executives hear too many things at once and have a hard time keeping track of trends. People express different opinions and thoughts which are often contradictory. So what are they really saying in the end? What percentage of people say your product is “cool” while the rest of them say it’s terrible? A product manager can be easily misled by focusing on only a small portion of customer feedback. What conclusion can be drawn from aggregated tweets and conversations?
The monitoring of user-generated content has been focused on classifying keywords presence. According to Overtone, Inc., many companies are still hiring people to literally read and manually categorize content. This method creates confusion because nobody can go over everything and accurately classify the words within a certain amount of time.
Different colors, different tastes, like different opinions
Overtone does not only focus on social networking sites, but analyzes emails, phone calls, and other various customer communications. They are not hiring people to do them manually; instead they have automated listening text analytic algorithms. But there are companies like Radian6 which are focusing on SNS sites. The commonality between them is “listening”. When I studied conflict resolution in graduate school, we learned that “listening” is the basic tool to resolve conflicts. My advice to companies: listen after you sing!
Photos by Yuka O.
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