Scaling Social Media

Justin & Amber – I look forward to the follow up post.

I work at a company that employs a lot of call center employees. I’m intrigued about the idea and am thinking of ways to implement. (gears slowly grinding…)

Thank you, Amber. When I was saying I’ll see if I can work with someone at Radian6 on a follow up post, I was thinking of you. So that’s cool that you picked up on that. Very human of you

It would be cool to connect and discuss a follow up post to this one. I like what you said about social media being an evolution of what we’re doing, not adding to the current mix. Looking at details of how that looks in terms of daily activities, org chart, systems, processes, etc. This could get to be a crazy huge post that may need to be a series, but we can talk through all of those messy details.

Cory, I’m thinking social media call centers would have trained staff armed with scripts. Call centers use these FAQ style databases to help them search for answers while working with callers. They keep notes on the knowledge base and edit on the fly. There are tiers of folks to handle different levels of questions. It is a big investment, but it’s cheaper than having everyone in the company answer the questions while trying to do the rest of their jobs.

Joseph, there are two issues at play here. One is about machine vs. human scoring. What you said about human and machine processing is great stuff. The combo of machine, then human will be one of the primary ways to achieve greater efficiency in scaling conversation that will translate to competitive advantage.

The other point, and more important one, is about using positive, negative, and neutral as the categories. It was that categorization that I wanted to warn Asi against. Those three labels are just too limiting to provide good analysis of social media. I would be interested in a more complex description of sentiment that covered the full range of emotions used in our languages; such as love, like, hate, protest, etc. Otherwise we get a narrowed view of what’s going on that can mislead our decision making.

Call centers could implement social media response – but you’d have to have a well trained group of people. Would it be worth the expense that it would take to properly train? Depends on your hiring & training practices, I suppose.

When I was thinking call centers, I was thinking more about structure than location inside or outside of the firewall. That said, it’s a very interesting discussion to look at methodologies for handling high volume. Comparing hub and spoke to outsourced social media centers would be a great study!

@cory

the whole point of silos is scalable efficiency: specialization, etc. but to your point, hub and spoke is definitely compelling from a institutional design perspective. and it matches with type of info out in SM. but my (and i think justin’s to some degree) point is that a “small team” can’t deal with the sheer volume of information being created in social media.

there is a huge gap between the [valuable] information being created about a given company/product and that company’s ability to ingest, make sense, and act on it.

justin has written in the past about “context engines” and it’s an interesting idea re: how to automate some of these processes.

just some thoughts. great convo here.

Doh! Fringe blogger was a little emotional, wasn’t it? Sorry about that Glad to see your comments here, Asi.

Of course SM monitoring should have released their beta version but they should have also been more honest about their capabilities and quality of service. You could almost argue that their marketing messages are misleading and my post was indeed a classic consumer’s rant: semi-structured and leaning on the emotional due to frustration from the service rather than a full comprehensive rational expert’s review.

Spot on here. I think this is what Ethan means when he says, “Whatever vendor Asi is using oversold him on the capabilities of the system, and he is venting about getting snowed…”

I do feel like this is where the social media monitoring industry has let you down. As you said, “Unfortunately these limitations are not presented to consumers of these tools nor is an explanation of the historical context in which these tools operate.” Not only are we failing you there, but also in training, which you point out, “I did not elaborate on how shallow and superficial these vendors training of their clients- none of them has done enough to help me use their services in the best possible way. Half hour webinar and few video tutorials are an industry standard and the result is inevitably frustration.”

If you would have had the context and training, I don’t think you would have been frustrated. I’m going to do a follow up post to this because I think we have an opportunity here. Your experience echos many others in your same position. They are struggling with detailed tech capabilities and because of something else you pointed out, “The reality of human and business behaviours is that change is slow, takes a lot of time and brands naturally tip-toe before committing to real change (and investment). Perhaps the truth is that unless you get burnt like Dell (hell) you don’t really get the importance of the social web as a channel for dialouge.”

That slow moving human/business behaviors are exactly why companies are under investing in the space (if only I had a dollar for every time someone said, “I guess I’m just old school”). Under supporting social media is why people are having bad experiences, which is leading people to think it’s a technology failure. Watching social media programs fail due to lack of resources is frustrating me. So, rather than all us living frustrated, let’s use this moment to help ourselves and others.

I’m going to do a post on the strengths and limitations of Webtrends Social Measurement, which is powered by Radian6. I’ll see if I can get some of the Radian6 folks to participate with me. I’ll then provide some reference for what kind of resources should be allocated to use the technology correctly, which will include time, money, and staffing. We can use that post to encourage others to do the same. Benchmarks will help businesses understand how many resources are required for success and can decide how to invest accordingly.

We also have a training program coming, but I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about it much yet…shhhh!

Justin

Thanks very much for taking this debate further

I cannot agree with you more yet can argue with you forever so let me try to recap some of my points.

Of course SM monitoring should have released their beta version but they should have also been more honest about their capabilities and quality of service. You could almost argue that their marketing messages are misleading and my post was indeed a classic consumer’s rant: semi-structured and leaning on the emotional due to frustration from the service rather than a full comprehensive rational expert’s review.

As i stated in my comment to the unexpected stir my post has caused, it’s the promise of self-service analysis tool that is very problematic. The reality of the technology is that it is simply an aggregator and with some brands/keywords in my experience, not such a good one. I’m not expecting these tools to replace my analysis but I didn’t expect also the amount of hours i had to spend cleaning and correcting the data from spam and irrelevant items. Specifically, I found sentiment analysis and regional filtering to be so unreliable that it practically prevented me from using it quantitatively.

Unfortunately these limitations are not presented to consumers of these tools nor is an explanation of the historical context in which these tools operate.

To your point on scale I cannot agree with you more. I usually tell my clients when it comes to the social web that they must not do it half-heartedly. “Do the Dell or best buy or don’t do it at all” I want to say but that would be plain naive. The reality of human and business behaviours is that change is slow, takes a lot of time and brands naturally tip-toe before committing to real change (and investment). Perhaps the truth is that unless you get burnt like Dell (hell) you don’t really get the importance of the social web as a channel for dialouge.

Finally your observation that my post was a classic example of negative sentiment is absolutely spot on. I did not elaborate on how shallow and superficial these vendors training of their clients- none of them has done enough to help me use their services in the best possible way. Half hour webinar and few video tutorials are an industry standard and the result is inevitably frustration.

Thanks again for your insightful comments

Truly yours,

Fringe blogger

Joseph, I think it was a matter of fact account too. And, you’re right that it should have been taken as customer feedback, which is nothing to have disdain for. Not only is raw feedback valuable for companies, but more importantly we have to be able to talk about life from the perspective we are experiencing it. But, once numerous vendors and high-profile social media practitioners commented, it became more than just a post with customer feedback, it became a conversation with numerous stakeholders. Many people have seen that post and many more will see it still. If what they see are brands apologizing to a guy who said they all suck and that their technologies are stupid, that’s not demonstrating good customer service. Do we want to send a message to all those that read his post that it’s ok to be in the middle of learning how to use two services, get demos on a few more then lump them all together and call them stupid when you feel stressed from being behind on providing services you don’t fully understand yet? I don’t.

Having said that, it bears clarifying that Asi didn’t do anything inherently wrong by venting his frustrations, even if he was rude about it. It was the pandering that was the problem. Someone needed to step in and set the record straight. I’m of the opinion that vendors saying “Thank you sir. Can I have another?” condoned bad behavior. I’m confident that he isn’t pondering the words of those vendors who apologized. My bet is that was people like me who called him on it that lead to him apologizing. That was mature of Asi and clears him of all transgressions in my mind. We all make mistake and get caught up in moments, myself definitely included And, we all are better off from being able to read the conversation that flowed from him reporting on his experience because it is, unfortunately, an all too common one. So it was good that he posted what he did. As @kire said, “@justinkistner well something is obviously working if this fellow can garner so much attention.”

To continue forwarding the discussion, I wanted to touch more on sentiment. I subscribe to the belief that viewing sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral will get people into trouble. That false notion is spread by vendors who want to sell people on the idea that an algorithm can automagicly analyze all of the conversations about their brand and categorize them into three easy buckets. Buying into that lie is a big part of what fueled Asi’s frustration when he discovered it wasn’t true. It’s that same disillusionment on sentiment that lead the vendors who push sentiment to incorrectly apologize to him because his post registered as negative on their systems. Enabling a frustrated customer to continue to be confused because we can’t look at his experience any deeper than “negative” is the real disservice here. Asi didn’t need an apology, he needed help. Sometimes that help is correction.

Brands have a responsibility to their customers as a source of knowledge and experience for them. That is especially true in social media. There is a lot of noise out there and people need direction from knowledgeable people. Technology can help make conversing with the market more efficient, but at the end of the day it takes a person to see the real story of what happened with Asi. It takes a real person to respond to him as well. And, it takes a lot more people to talk with the rest of the market with the same level of nuanced care.