Week 7: Reputation Management
A study from the London School of Economics last year revealed that a 2% reduction in negative word of mouth boosts sales growth by 1% and Dell has attributed a monetary value to this: their average customer is worth $210; their average online detractor costs them $57 and their average online promoter earns them $32. (http://oursocialtimes.com)
But this isn't just about word of mouth...
Back in 2009 two Dominos Pizza employees thought it would be fun to post a video of them preparing food for customers with a twist...in their video they were carrying out disgusting unsanitary acts that saw them pick their noses and then rub their fingers into the base of the pizza etc...
This video is a good example of the importance of reputation management. The Head office of Dominos was made aware of the video 2 days after it had been posted and although they reported the staff members to the police and dismissed them from work , they did not take the video down immediately, apparently they were expecting it to 'blow over'. By the time they had realised their error, created a Twitter account and posted their own response onto YouTube, the original video had been viewed over 1 million times and the damage to their brand was done!
What's the lesson here...viral marketing spreads vaster than a bad virus and is something that organisations need to take seriously, as it will not 'blow over, but rather, blow up!'
Lets look at Social Mention...this is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. Lets see what it says about LSBU and of course, our closest competitors, London Met.
Now lets look at London Met...
The results are quite similar for both and the top line findings show that:
LSBU has 7% strength compared to 4% at London Met.
LSBU has 13:1 sentiment compared to 32:1 for London Met.
LSBU has 31% passion and London met has 37%
LSBU has 30% reach and London Met has 23% reach
There are additional sites that organisations can sign up to that provide basic social media monitoring tools aka, 'buzz monitoring' such as:
Blog monitoring – BackType (www.backtype.com) Blogpulse (www.blogpulse.com)
Monitoring Twitter – Monitter (www.monitter.com) Tweetbeep (www.tweetbeep.com)
Tracking links – Wholinkstome (www.wholinkstome.com)
Monitoring forums – BoardTracker (www.boardtracker.com)
Mentions of senior staff – Naymz (www.naymz.com)
This weeks seminar exercise asked us to think about how we could develop a social activity to create positive comments and steer comments in a positive way by creating a social campaign or case study...LSBU's recent, 'Spot the LSBU Easter Bunny Campaign' that ran this Easter. The camapign was impemented to encourage students to complete the a National Student Survey (NSS) that helps the universities ranking and stats.
Since were asked to give our ideas on a campaign we would implement, my recommendation on how to improve this campaign would be for LSBU to have encouraged students who do spot the Easter bunny to take a picture of it and the post with #HappyEaster. This would have...HOLD UP, we've made mention of the power of the # a couple of times. And i hear you all say...
So its only fair we take a brief look at the # phenomenon.
Hashtags are now on every major social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Pinterest, and Instagram).
In tech-speak, it’s a meta-data tag. In English, that means that it is a way to group conversations. I love kitchen analogies so let’s use it to explain the hashtag. In your kitchen, you have cabinets to organize your tools, dishes, and food. On social media, the hashtag groups various conversations together to make them easier to find (and sorted by topic).
So here’s where they are so much fun. Lots of people use similar hashtags (i.e. #food, #blogging, #parenting, #wordpress, #photography, #humor, #TGIF, etc. etc.). With a common hashtag, you can search on any social media platform and find EVERYONE who is talking with that hashtag. This blows open your newsfeed/s so that you can interact and engage with people you aren’t yet following. (http://oursocialtimes.com/)
There also also many websites that can follow mentions and #'s. Hootsuite is one of them:
