by Fronetics | Jan 2, 2020 | Blog, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Knowing how and when to respond to a social media crisis is crucial for reputation management and preventing future issues.
News travels at lightning speed thanks, in large part, to social media. With the ability to amplify news – both good and bad – you hear, almost daily, about brands battling a social media crisis. Look at Facebook, who is still managing the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal almost two years after the news broke.
When your company suffers from negative reviews on social media, it hurts. A single post can have a direct impact on your bottom line. That’s why it’s crucial for B2B brands to know how and when to respond to online reviews and comments. Here are four ways to help your company manage a social media crisis.
4 steps to managing a social media crisis
1. Establish policy
We recently wrote about the importance of a social media policy, and there’s never a better time to implement one than during a social media crisis (except for maybe before it happens). When you provide employees with guidelines on how to respond to negative feedback online, you minimize the risk of employees guessing the appropriate response. Because speed is critical in these situations, a social media policy allows your team to respond quickly and confidently.
2. Listen
You know customers are talking about your company, but is the tone a positive one? And if it’s not, how are you responding? Social listening gives you the opportunity to take a negative customer-service situation and not only correct the problem, but deescalate a situation from turning into a crisis.
Through consistent social listening, you’ll understand the difference between grumblings and a significant change in sentiment toward your brand. Though no company is perfect, a personalized response to negative comments on social media shows a genuine concern for your customers and an investment in customer satisfaction.
3. Engage
As we’ve said, time is of the essence. A short, initial response on social media is a must, but your brand needs to follow up with more in-depth messaging. Social media thrives on engagement, and responding to a crisis is no different.
Lauren Teague suggests, “Avoid getting pulled into a long discussion of what went wrong. Instead, try to move the conversation to a more personal channel, like private messaging. You could also offer a phone number, email address, or other means of communicating outside of social media.”
4. Learn
Deep breaths. Once you’ve survived a social media crisis, the experience isn’t over. Take the time to meet with your employees and examine what happened, what worked well, and what needs to change in the event another crisis occurs. Learning how to minimize the damage of a social media crisis will only benefit you when future issues arise.
Give your staff the opportunity to share their experience during the crisis. Insight from your different departments can help determine areas in your social media policy that need updating, including how to prevent similar crises in the future.
Has your company experienced a social media crisis? How did you put out the fire?
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by Fronetics | Sep 19, 2019 | Blog, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Supply Chain
In a highly competitive B2B landscape, AI can be the strategic advantage your brand needs. Here’s everything you need to know about AI for marketing.
Highlights:
- AI enables predictive analysis – the ability to look at a large set of data and predict what steps to take to reach a desired outcome.
- Social listening powered by AI gives marketers key insights into brand perception and audience reaction.
- When considering purchasing an AI technology for marketing, consider if it includes its own Big Data source.
When we think about artificial intelligence (AI), it’s often with a twinge of unease. Whether it’s pop culture telling us that robots will take over at their earliest opportunity, or fears of human labor being replaced with machines, AI is a complex, controversial, and even mysterious topic. But when it comes to the applications of AI for marketing, there’s actually a lot to celebrate.
It’s important for marketers not only to have a thorough understanding of the uses of AI for marketing, but to be aware of industry trends, and how to determine investment to maximize ROI.
What is AI for marketing?
While it’s not necessary for marketers to be artificial intelligence and robotics experts, it’s beneficial to have a functional understanding of the technology that enables AI for marketing. In a general sense, the term “AI” refers to the area of computer science that enables the creation of software and machines that possess what we think of as intelligence. That is, they are able to work, react, and learn without being specifically programmed for each task.
AI is enabled by data science, “the practice of organizing and analyzing massive amounts of data.” When it comes to marketing, AI can be thought of as an extension and development of marketing automation. Essentially, AI for marketing is software that collects, analyzes, and reacts to large amounts of data, with increasing levels of sophistication.
According to content intelligence expert Bart Frischknecht, of Vennli, AI for marketing can be categorized in one of two ways.
- Recommending: This type of marketing software “predicts which action will have the most positive outcome in order to recommend a next step in a series of events.” Frischknecht describes these recommendations as “stepping stones on the way to fully automating a given task.”
- Automating: Software that automates is a furtherance of software that recommends. For a task to be automated, it needs to be “routine and repeatable, the goal needs to be specific, and the steps to achieve that goal must follow an exact set of rules.”
Think of data as the fuel that powers AI for marketing. As we gather more and more data, and devise increasingly sophisticated analytical methods, the possibilities for intelligent automation in marketing will continue to expand.
5 examples of AI for marketing
1) Data filtering and analysis
At Fronetics, we’ve advocated for a data-driven approach to marketing since our founding. For marketers, data is the most powerful strategic weapon in your arsenal, and AI is sharpening it even further. AI software can consolidate large amounts of data, and analyze it to determine patterns and trends.
2) Social listening
Social listening, also known as social monitoring, is the process of observing and examining social media, to identify and access what is being said about your brand. Social listening gives marketers valuable market intelligence, prospect insight, tone awareness, and competitive advantage.
Current AI software lets marketers not only engage in sophisticated social monitoring, but it also enables “sentiment analysis,” automatically generating a report of the overall attitude of your audience and perception of your brand.
3) Predictive analysis
Beyond simply filtering and analyzing data, AI for marketing goes a crucial step further: predictive analysis, the practice of applying the information extracted from data sets to predict a future outcome or trend.
This revolutionary capability of AI can be used to analyze buyer purchase behavior, for example, and determine when and how to distribute certain types of content. Social media scheduling tools, for instance, use predictive analysis to suggest the optimal times to share content.
4) Audience targeting and segmentation
As B2B buyers increasingly come to expect personalization at all stages of the buyer’s journey, it can be a challenge for marketers to deliver. However, AI makes personalization possible at a large scale, drawing on data to segment and categorize audiences.
The limits of the specificity of this segmentation are determined only by the amount of data available. In other words, the more data, the more the AI software can instantly segment a contact list and deliver personalized correspondence.
5) Chatbots
One of the most ubiquitous examples of AI for marketing, chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversation using auditory or textual methods. Chatbots communicate with buyers within a messaging app, like Facebook messenger.
3 questions to ask when considering an investment in AI for marketing
While the possibilities of AI for marketing are virtually endless, the reality for most companies is that marketing budgets are not. When considering an investment in any technology, including AI, maximizing ROI should be top of mind. Frischknecht suggests that marketers ask the following three questions when considering an investment in AI for marketing:
- Which marketing task will this technology automate, and will doing so alleviate a significant burden for marketing staff?
- Does purchase of the tech include its own Big Data source, or do I need to provide all the data? If the latter, do I have adequate data, and can I connect my data source to the tech?
- What evidence exists of the tech making good recommendations or automating one of my tasks.
AI is revolutionizing marketing. Investing intelligently in these technologies can provide critical market insights, data processing capabilities, and predictive analysis.
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by Fronetics | Mar 7, 2017 | Blog, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Social listening can help your business gain valuable insight about prospects, monitor your competitors, turn around negative conversations about your company, and earn social influencers.
Every day, conversations are taking place about your company, your products and services, your industry, and your competitors. These conversations are not just happening over the water cooler: They are happening on social media.
These conversations not only provide invaluable (and often strategic) information, they also serve to shape and define your company and your brand. With the advent of social media, the reality is that is the customer who drives your company’s image and brand message. If your company isn’t on social media, you miss out.
Social listening — 4 key benefits
Social listening, or social monitoring, is the process of monitoring social media to identify and assess what is being said about a company, individual, brand, product, or service. Through social listening, your company can gain market intelligence. You learn how your company, products, and services are being perceived. Knowing this information in real time is invaluable.
Here are 4 ways social listening can benefit your business and help you grow revenue.
1. Gain valuable prospect insight
Social media can be an incredible tool for getting to know your leads. Think about it: Social networks possess massive amounts of self-qualified, real-time data about billions of people. Consider the astonishing number of monthly active users on each platform:
- Facebook: 1.86 billion
- LinkedIn: 467 million
- Twitter: 319 million
- Instagram: 600 million
That’s a lot of potential customers. Now think about all of the details users provide on their social profiles and the kinds of things they post about: their preferences, where they live and work, and how they feel about different companies and brands, to name a few. Social listening lets you mine this information to learn about your prospects and customers.
2. Stay ahead of the competition
Social listening allows you to access valuable information about your competitors. You can see what customers are saying about your industry peers and make strategic decisions based on this knowledge. Using programs like Hootsuite, you can monitor keywords and your competitors’ brands and products. Based on your findings, you can make critical changes or create content to increase your brand awareness.
3. Create tone awareness
You know customers are talking about your company, but is the tone a positive one? And if it’s not, how are you responding? Social listening gives you the opportunity to take a negative customer-service situation and not only correct the problem, but improve the customer relationship. By having a personal response to negative comments on social media, your company shows a genuine concern for its customers and an investment in customer satisfaction.
4. Earn key influencers
People value the reviews of their peers over claims from a corporation. In fact, 93% of millennials have made a purchase based on a recommendation from friends and family, and 89% of millennials trust these recommendations more than they do the claims of the brand itself. Hence the rise of the influencer marketing.
Social media influencers are people that encourage others to work with your business through social networking. According to Sprout Social, “Social media managers prize their social media influencers because they drive engagement, discussions and word of mouth for your brand.” Real people talking about their experiences with your products and services helps foster trust in new customers.
Using social intelligence
To reap the benefits of social listening, including increasing your revenue, you need to use the information and intelligence gathered. For example, if you learn via social media that your customers are experiencing issues with a specific product, take steps to determine what the issues are, and then make the appropriate changes.
The Aberdeen Group offers additional examples of how businesses have and can use social listening: “Companies can use the voice of the customer to make critical adjustments and find issues related to inventory allocation, order management, returns management, cost, overall service satisfaction and beyond.”
The opportunities the supply chain and logistics industries can realize through social listening are great. Not participating in social listening results in missed opportunities.
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by Fronetics | Oct 7, 2015 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
I wrote previously about the opportunities companies within the logistics and supply chain industries can realize through social listening. I cautioned that to reap the benefits and seize the opportunities afforded by social media, companies need to use the information and intelligence gathered.
Using the information and intelligence gathered is essential. There is; however, another critical element: engagement. Engagement is a differentiator. Without engagement you are a lurker. You don’t want to be a lurker.
What is a lurker?
A lurker is someone who observes, but does not participate. If your company does not engage via established social media accounts, your company is lurking. Stop lurking. To realize the benefits of social media and social listening you need to actively engage with customers and others via social media.
What is active engagement?
How can your company actively engage with customers and other via social media? Here are some ideas:
- Ask questions
- Answer questions
- Provide clarification
- Weigh in on a discussion/topic
- Thank followers for their ideas, suggestions, and feedback
- Highlight when/how you have used customer feedback to make changes to a product or service
- Simply let people know you are listening to their comments and feedback.
Action
The information and intelligence your company can gather via social listening is immense. If you do not use what you have gathered you miss out on opportunities and revenue. The same can be said about social lurking. By not actively engaging via social media your company misses out on opportunities.
Social media can be a strategic tool – if used correctly.
This was originally published on Electronics Purchasing Strategies.
by Fronetics | Oct 6, 2015 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Companies within the logistics and supply chain industries have been slower to participate in social media than other industries. The primary reason being because of a lack of understanding of what social media is and the role it can play for business. Unfortunately, companies who do not participate in social media miss out on opportunities – and revenue.
Every day conversations are taking place about your company, your products and services, your industry, and your competitors. These conversations are not just happening over the water cooler, they are happening on social media. These conversations not only provide invaluable (and often strategic) information, they also serve to shape and define your company and your brand. With the advent of social media, the reality is that is the customer who drives your company’s image and brand message. If your company isn’t on social media you miss out.
Social listening
Social listening is the process of monitoring social media to identify and assess what is being said about a company, individual, brand, product, or service. Through social listening your company can not only become an innovation engine, you can also gain market intelligence, and you gain intelligence about how your company, products, and services are being perceived. Knowing this information in real-time is invaluable.
Caterpillar is one company that has embraced social listening. Caterpillar engages in social listening with the objectives of gaining deeper insight into:
- Who is talking about the company;
- What is being said about the company;
- What competitors are doing;
- Key influencers;
- The tone of conversations that are taking place.
Kevin Espinosa, Caterpillar’s eBusiness Loyalty Manager, further discusses the company’s social listening strategy and the benefits of social listening:
“If you haven’t started already, you have to start with social listening. It’s like building a large campus without the sidewalks. Let your audience lay down the paths and sidewalks they want to take. They’ll tell you where they’re participating and what they need. Then you can backfill with a strategy that addresses their needs. This is the push aspect of social media. Eventually, you get to the pull aspect, where the customer is a big contributor to your social media strategy. This is where there is truly two-way dialogue and relationship building.”
Engagement and action
To reap the benefits of social listening, including increasing your revenue, you need to use the information and intelligence gathered. For example, if you learn via social media that your customers are experiencing issues with a specific product, take steps to determine what the issues are, and then make changes to the product. The Aberdeen Group offers additional examples of how social listening has been and can be used: “companies can use the voice of the customer to make critical adjustments and find issues related to inventory allocation, order management, returns management, cost, overall service satisfaction and beyond.”
The opportunities the supply chain and logistics industries can realize through social listening are great. Not participating in social listening results in missed opportunities.
This post originally appeared on Electronics Purchasing Strategies.
