Responding to Social Media Buzz - Step #5 ==> Craft meaningful responses

What is a meaningful response? A meaningful response:

• Lets the person know they’ve been heard
• Let’s the person know who you are and that you represent the company
• Thanks the person for their feedback
• May ask for additional information (perhaps in a phone call)
• May attempt to offer an explanation and an apology

(The rest of this section refers to “blogs”, but that applies equally to vlogs, tweets, reviews, and so on. Whatever the Social Media is, you should respond to the Social Media using that Social Media. If the original contributor creates a video about you, then you should respond with a video.)

Here’s how you do it:

1. REALLY read the blog … Seek first to understand what is being written about you.
2. Keep your emotions out of your response ... Count to 10. Personal criticism – or in this case, criticism of the business you are standing in front of - is too easy to take to heart, and difficult to really listen to and understand. Put down your shields and defenses. Stay objective. Focus on the content, and get prepared to listen and enter into a productive conversation.
3. Seek first to really understand ... Perhaps your first response should include a variety of non-confrontational questions like: "Can you give me more details …”. Additionally, it should make use of appropriate Active Listening techniques such as restating key points, and asking permission to resolve the situation. Through asking and listening you should attain concrete and constructive details.
4. Accept the criticism ... No matter what, the criticism is somone's feelings - right or wrong - of your company’s performance. No matter whether you agree or disagree with the criticism, it is time to accept it, and get ready to respond. By letting go of your own resistance and resentment and becoming at ease with criticism and disapproval it is easier to learn lessons and comfortably assert your own perceptions.
5. Thank the person for the feedback ... This has a triple impact with your critic: (1) the critic hears that you heard them, (2) the critic's perspective of you is raised, and (3) it gives you an opportunity to "count to 10" again, and set up your questions.
6. Have a discussion about the issues ... Check your "Lecturer" hat at the door, and engage your critic in a conversation. Ask, listen, chat, discuss, with a focus on open-ended questions. Listen carefully to see if you can understand the problem, and then seek a solution together.

Responding to Social Media Buzz - Step #4 ==> Determine if you should engage

Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

You’re out there watching for Social Media Buzz about your company now, and you start to find content. Now it’s time to determine if you should engage with Twits, Bloggers, Vloggers, and so forth.

On average, each blog post is looked at something like 25 times. Now, that makes for a pretty big cross-section as most blogs are looked at once or twice (and one of those may be the person who wrote it), and some are looked at hundreds of thousands or even millions of times.

One of your first questions might be, “Is this guy important?” There are few ways to really determine if any one Social Media activist is important in the overall scheme of things. One proxy to determine if a person’s blog is important is Technorati.com’s “Authority” ranking. Technorati calculates authority by looking at all links from unique blogs from the past 6 months. That means a blog’s rank will change daily based upon the blog's activity from 180 days ago up to today. As older links fall off the count and new links are added, the blog’s link count may increase, decrease, or stay the same.

Perhaps a good rule-of-thumb is to not spend your time trying to determine a given post’s or poster’s importance, but simply to spend your time engaging with them.

What about Social Media that is filled with profanity or cursing? When customers are unhappy they may tend to write with words that would make your mother blush. The challenge is to figure out if it is worth paying attention to this type of feedback. One way to do this is to take some time to engrain yourself in the other content from the contributor. Do the words that were used spill from bad habit (and consequently reduce the credibility of the contributor), or do they come from the passion or pain of the experience with your company? In the latter case, you really should respond. However, you need to tread cautiously.

Another good rule-of-thumb when experiencing Social Media is to pretend you’re experiencing a customer walking up to you and complaining about their experience with your company. If the person is using the F-bomb as an adjective, adverb, and a figure of speech, then you probably don’t want to engage with that person. On the other hand, if they are using it out of frustration, then you may quickly recognize the need to grit your teeth and engage in the conversation with them.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To Successfully Track Your Way To Blog Success (beatschindler.com)
• Technorati on the Authority Changes (blogherald.com)

Responding to Social Media Buzz - Step #3 ==> Build out your Tactics

Now’s the time to get into the nitty-gritty of how you’re going to respond to Social Media Buzz. There are several points to consider.

• Brand your blog responses ... Your blog responses must reflect your brand, and must be from your brand. You must never masquerade as a third-party trying to shout the praises of your company. You must always be up front about who you are, and that you represent your company. But, you may not be the person who is actually responding to the Social Media. So, before you even write your first Social Media post, write up a description of the "persona" - the person and his or her personality and "voice" - that you want to respond to Social Media. For instance, if you are responding for a stodgy old bank, then your perona should use a greeting like "Good Afternoon", and always use full and proper grammar. On the other hand, if you are a mountain bike company, your persona should use all the right slang: "Hey dude", "shred", and so on. Everyone that is going to respond to Social Media Buzz must present this branded persona.
• Set a standard and branded greeting ... like “Hi There – It’s from ”. In addition, you might hyperlink your company’s website into the name each time.
• Define the name of your responder ... You have a choice to make here: for the sake of consistency, you may want to use the same "virtual responder" so that all of your responses have the same pen-name on them. The advantage of this is twofold – first off it is easy to search for and find your Social Media responses. Secondly, if over the years you end up with 3-4 people responding to Social Media, they can all respond under the persona's name like "Thanks, Ivy". On the other hand, you may want to use the names of the actual responder. The upside of this is that it is more personal.
• Find the Social Media Buzz … Blogs, Vlogs, comments, reviews, and so on - using Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and other suitable searches and feeds. Set yourself up searches and RSS feeds so that it is easy to find Social Media Buzz in the future.
  
• Set up accounts … Each social media service typically has a defined account. By using an account, rather than an anonymous response you build a history on each social media service and also build credibility with people who follow Social Media.
• Staff and train your team … Assuming you get a team. Otherwise, perhaps you are training yourself.
• Join the conversation … Now you’re ready to get involved with social media. Search out good and bad feedback about your company, and get ready to interact with it.

Responding to Social Media Buzz - Step #2 ==> Set out your Strategy

Setting your strategy is an iterative process, which goes something like this:

• Listen to the conversation ... Before you jump in with both feet, find and read Social Media about your company and get an understanding of what those conversations are all about. Determine what the buzz is, and how much you need to be involved with it.
• Set some goals ... This is a tough thing to do, given that the metrics on Social Media are few and far between and it is even harder to see an immediate positive benefit to any responses. This is also the time and place to start doing one of the toughest things … drafting your business case. Take a look at the benefits and consider how you’re going to make or save money by responding to Social Media Buzz. Be cognizant that benefits will not magically happen overnight. They will take time to be realized, and consequently you should stage your benefit calculations over several months or years. Also, be careful not to overstate the potential benefits and costs savings. If you state that you will be able to cut your advertising budget by 50% as a result of improved Social Media Buzz, then your CFO will come calling in short order. In reality your benefits have to outweigh your costs only by a reasonable amount. Potential benefits might include:
• increasing positive buzz about your company (thereby driving up the value of your brand, allowing you to reduce advertising costs, and at the same time driving sales up),
• reducing negative buzz about your company (reducing the amount of time you need to spend defending yourself in the media, and the amount of cash you have to spend on PR),
• increasing your Organic Search Ranking by propagating relevant links to your own website (and thereby both driving more traffic to your site (hopefully leading to more sales), and saving advertising dollars), and
• operational improvements driven by keeping your ear to the ground (improving the engagement and brand loyalty of your customers, reducing advertising costs, and improving the utility of your product or service (which likely has a self-fulfilling effect of bringing more customers to your door)).
• Plan for success ... You will need to give Social Media care and feeding - Social Media isn't something you should step into once and back away from. You have to get into and stay in it. That means that once you determine how you will respond to good and bad social media and you will need to set aside time on a regular basis to participate in Social Media. You may even need to have staff in place to keep up with it. Even more, you may need to involve professionals to help you engage in social media. This is the time to draft up the second part of your business case. Now you will start to develop an eye for how much meeting your goals will cost. How many people will need to be involved in listening and responding to buzz? How often will you do it? How often will you need third parties? Be careful not to dig too far into too many details at this point. Focus on the “why” and not the “how”. You probably want to keep your plan to a few PowerPoint slides featuring big concepts, a couple of examples, and your high-level business case. Also, you might want a short-term and a long-term plan. Your short-term plan will look at the immediate future of Responding to Social Media Buzz. This may be a 6-month plan to staff up a team, create a library of responses, and so on. The outcome will be that you are in the game of Social Media. The longer-term plans may include how you may become involved in other types of social media, in creating your own company blog, or in creating your own customer forum. Put your short-term plan on the table. Keep your long-term plan in your back pocket.

Now for the final - and perhaps most complicated step, because it forms your "make or break moment" ...

• Sell the idea ... responding to Social Media as a representative of your company and brand can test your company's culture and its leadership. Before you do the “big sell”, you will need work the slow and soft sell to a variety of individual executives and your peers to ensure that you understand and are cautious of their concerns, and that they understand what you are setting out to do. To do this well means that you must not be married to your plan. You need to listen to the executives and adjust your goals and plan accordingly.

The Definitive Guide to Responding to Buzz in Social Media - #1 Commit Yourself

I've taken a few weeks away from blogging, but now I'm back into it and ready to write "The Definitive Guide to Responding to Buzz in Social Media". This guide comes from several pieces of research that I was doing back in the summer which looked at the best ways to respond to criticism in other fields. Taking that, and some of my own experience in responding to social media, I will be posting an 11-part guide which will give you the tools you need to respond to both good and bad buzz in social media. Join me now as we begin the journey...

#1 == Commit Yourself
As a BIG first step you must commit to responding to social media. To do that is a process in and of itself. But, first off you have to really decide that responding to social media is an important thing to do. You need to believe it deep down in your gut, and you need to be able to make others believe it as well.

To commit yourself means that you have to plan and execute actions that are really the next 10 steps in the responding process, which are ...

• #2 ==> Set out your Strategy
• #3 ==> Build out your Tactics
• #4 ==> Determine if you should engage
• #5 ==> Craft meaningful responses
• #6 ==> Reply based on the context
• #7 ==> Follow some basic etiquette
• #8 ==> Enlist your critic's help
• #9 ==> Create a response template library
• #10 ==> Bring in a professional when you need it
• #11 ==> Get metrics

Join me on the journey to Social Media Response happiness over the next couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to it.