Our Customers are Saying What???

A Guide to Social Media Audits for B-to-B Companies
 

Quick: Enter your CEO’s name into Google.  What comes up? 

How about when you put your company’s name into Twitter? (http://Search.Twitter.com) 

And your own?

Chances are your customers, employees and even investors are talking about you.  And since your job is managing the company’s reputation, your mind may be running in every direction regarding how you will handle all this.

But take a closer look. Many of those comments are positive.  A few are negative, but often the result of a lack of information and easily corrected ...  And wait—is that customer posting on a message board actually defending us?

Welcome to the “social sphere.” It’s a mirror image of the conversations and interactions your stakeholders have been having for years in the “real world,” but it’s now visible, searchable and measurable online.

Why Should a B-to-B Company Care about Social Media?
Two years ago, social media offered a whole new channel—separate from newspapers, trade journals and TV—that PR and marketing could use to communicate with stakeholders.  At the time, these new tools—unfiltered, perfectly targeted, searchable and measurable—were viewed by many as a great add-on to the traditional public relations toolkit.

Then in December 2008 history was made —for the first time, the Internet eclipsed newspapers as the preferred source of news.  Compounded by the recession, newspapers have since then cut their staffs by 30%, resulting in fewer pages for stories and fewer reporters to pitch. The journalists who remain have been left with less time to research in-depth pieces on a company’s news. Nearly seven in 10 people between the ages of 45-54 now regularly read, watch or listen to social media like blogs or YouTube.  And if Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world.  In short, the “nice to have” social media channel of two years ago has become a necessity  to reach stakeholders today.

But before you open the door to this new world and start speaking to the first group you find, a note of caution is in order.  Do you know the full lay of the land?  Do the comments you’re seeing represent the mainstream view or exceptions?  Is the person you’re about to engage really influential and worth your time?  Dozens of metrics are available to make these assessments, but two popular ones are a blog’s Technorati “Authority” score (see Technorati.com), which measures how many times in the past six months a blog has been referenced by other blogs, and the number of times a blog’s posts have been voted on in news sharing sites like Digg.com.  (A vote on Digg can be considered the equivalent of one colleague handing another a newspaper article and stating, “I think you should read this.”)

Clearly a methodical examination is needed. But how do you go about it?

The Social Media Audit
Just like a traditional media audit, the goal in a social media audit is to understand what stakeholders think about your company.  Familiar measurements, like volume (number of citations) and tone (positive/negative/neutral/mixed) form the core of the analysis.  But unlike a media audit, where the articles and TV appearances rarely go very deep in examining the company, the subtopics in social media can get very specific. 

For example, should you look at opinions on all products or services from your company, not just the ones that made news in the last year?  Have you checked what investors think about the executive team versus the opinions of employees and analysts?  Customer service?  Pricing? Diversity programs?  Charitable works in various communities? Employee benefits? Corporate culture and policies? 

In social media ranging from blogs to Facebook groups to Nings (social networks that have many of the capabilities of Facebook or LinkedIn, but are dedicated to a single topic or community; see Ning.com for more information), opinions are often found in great abundance. Online, everyone has a say, and some say it so often that they can distort the audit’s results.  Thankfully, the last two years have seen the rise of new measurement tools and techniques that can separate the wheat from the chaff.  Applied in the correct manner—which requires a detailed understanding of the company’s business, detective skills and a great deal of experience doing such audits —it becomes apparent who the most influential voices are. 

Top Three Benefits of a Social Media Audit

1. Drive sales: Knowing how your customers feel about your products is the first step towards filling in the gaps of their knowledge, correcting misinformation and amplifying messages that haven’t gotten through.

2. Support a full and fair share price: Even in the best of times, the mainstream media was hard-pressed to offer the space to fully explain a company’s strategy.  With newsroom staff cuts deepening, social media offers a channel to deliver the full story to current and potential investors, as well as analysts.

3. Improve customer service: Social media has often been described as the “canary in the coal mine,” alerting companies to lurking issues that could lead to more serious crises.  Ongoing monitoring can limit damage to reputations, and responding to complaints builds credibility and trust with consumers who may feel that no one is listening.

In order to achieve these benefits, you need to first know where you are.  So get back to that Google search bar.  Enter your company’s name into Twitter.  And if you need a guide, give us a call.

Sidebar:
What is social media?
“At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content.” – Wikipedia

How is a social media audit for a B-to-B company different than for a consumer brand?
Though the goals of a social media audit are the same whether you’re a consumer or B-to-B company, there are key differences.  The most important is the complexity of the information being examined.  Determining whether a single comment is positive, negative or neutral requires more experience and knowledge when the subject is fiber optics, instead of fiber cereal, servers, rather than socks, or equipment makers in place of entertainers.  The length and detail of the conversations being examined are typically longer with B-to-B companies, requiring a more nuanced approach.  Finally, B-to-B conversations typically happen in different places than consumer ones, with a special emphasis on professional networking websites and investor message boards.

Should I hire a computer or a human to do my audit?
While a number of vendors now offer promising real-time tonal analysis and conversation tracking, Makovsky has found that such tools are best to help auditors find data, while leaving the analysis to people.  B-to-B companies—even those in the Fortune 100—typically have just a few thousand citations that need to be analyzed, and once metrics are applied to determine the most important speakers, only a few hundred conversations need to be reviewed in-depth.