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

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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.

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