What to Listen for in Social Media: Part Three, Case Studies

As the third and final part in this series on Listening in Social Media (see earlier posts What to Listen for in Social Media Part One and What to Listen for in Social Media Part Two )
I wanted to look at how this is done in practice.

It’s really helpful to see what some good examples of what companies are doing with their listening skills: deflecting customer anger, researching new products, or correcting mis-information. I think the point is that they are reaching out, listening, and then acting. As Michael Brito put it, in his post: In social media, listening is only half the battle:

Listening and responding are only half the battle when engaging with consumers online. The other half of the formula is acting. It’s like being in a relationship. If my wife is upset that I leave my dirty socks on the living room floor every night; and I listen to what she is saying but continue to leave my socks there … well, you catch my drift. There will be hell to pay if I don’t “act” on her politely spoken "recommendations".

Comcast
Comcast, like other companies, has learned the power of the aggrieved individual firsthand. Two years ago, a YouTube video of a technician who fell asleep on a customer's couch while on hold with Comcast became a hit - the video has been viewed 1.2 million times and triggered more than 750 comments.

Now, amongst other improved to their customer service offering, Comcast has also set up teams of employees who are encouraged to click around social networks or online forums. The result?
When C.C. Chapman noticed a blemish in his high-definition television's reception during the NBA playoffs recently, he blasted a quick gripe about Comcast into the online ether, using the social network Twitter. Minutes later, a Twitter user named ComcastCares responded, and within 24 hours, a technician was at Chapman's house in Milford to fix the problem.

Chapman's experience is one example of the ways customer service is changing in an age when a single disgruntled consumer with a broadband connection can ignite a crisis. (It also shows the potential of the Internet to turn miffed customers into fans in a more organic way than an advertising campaign. Chapman, for example, made a podcast about his visit from Comcast.)

Bizzuka
Bizzuka.com (a company that specialises in web content management systems) had urgent need to respond to a blogger who had written some factually incorrect information about the company and its content management system. Even worse, that post was displayed prominently on Google search returns for the word "Bizzuka."

Two actions were taken. First, Bizzuka's CEO responded to the post with a comment which added much needed balance. Second, we engaged in a content marketing strategy using blogs, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, online press releases and a number of other online media.
While their primary intent was to provide consumers with useful content, a secondary benefit was that the critical post was driven off the front page, replaced instead by Bizzuka generated content.

Southwest Airlines
At Southwest Airlines, the social media team includes a chief Twitter officer who tracks Twitter comments and monitors a Facebook group, an online representative who fact checks and interacts with bloggers, and another who takes charge of the company's presence on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. So if someone posts a complaint in cyberspace, the company can respond in a personal way.

For example, when Travis Johnson, known by the Twitter handle, "pastortrav," complained recently about Southwest's check-in process, he received a quick, public response from an airline employee saying, "So sorry to hear it! What don't you like about the check-in process? Did your flight get off okay?"

"We monitor those channels because we know these conversations are taking place there, and we can either watch the conversations or take part in them," said Southwest spokeswoman Christi Day.

Embarq
Having made the split away from Sprint in 2006, phone and internet service provider Embarq had inherited a culture that was extremely conservative. Employees were under a “gag order” and weren’t permitted to interact with customers outside of the traditional communications/customer service channels. Symptomatic of these underlying cultural and legal issues was a high level of negative customer sentiment towards the company.

In order to build awareness and reduce the fear of engagement as well as build internal support for their social media strategy, the team started by listening to customer conversations for over 6 months. Going through this intensive listening process helped them to surface the issues and questions that their customers were asking. It also helped demonstrate the value of direct engagement as well as get buy in from the internal stakeholders including the executive management.

The outreach team made contact with customers who chose to vent on a public/social media forum such as Twitter or Face book where the traditional channel didn’t have a presence.
They followed up on a short-term viral campaign by rolling out series of short but highly effective “how-to” videos that addressed their top 10 customer service issues. This is where they demonstrated the value of listening to the customers by basing topics on information gathered from their online outreach and call center data. Not surprising, these videos became highly popular with their customer base and also demonstrated that the company was being responsive to their customer\’s needs.

They not only managed to meet their education objectives but also their branding objective of creating a presence in an online community where customer and prospects are already engaged. Over a one-year period, the team saw a 81% success rate (Dec 07 to Mar 09) on their social media outreach initiatives. They also found significant increase in the number of customers self-correcting their negative posts and subsequent increase in the number of customers likely to recommend their service.

Dell
Dell Inc. has been a leader in this sort of unconventional outreach. The company was burned by "Dell Hell," blogger Jeff Jarvis's 2005 account of his negative experience with the company. In the years since, Dell said, it has aggressively worked to improve customer service, including by listening online. The company's 40-member "communities and conversation team" includes employees that do outreach on Twitter and communicate with bloggers.

At DellIdeaStorm.com, a social website that the company launched in 2007, people are invited to make suggestions for products and services. Of more than 9,000 suggestions, 50 have been implemented, the company said.

The Society for New Communications Research recognized the Dell Outlet, which sells refurbished products, for using Twitter to offer special deals and products. The outlet has sold $500,000 worth of products through Twitter offers.

It's not just an early warning system, said Dell spokeswoman Caroline Dietz. "If you look at the more positive side, it's also about innovation - the closer you are to your customers via these social media tools, you can listen to what are their needs, what are their pain-points, and act on that feedback."

Starbucks is following the same model “share, vote, discuss and see” and inspire their community with the following message at My Starbucks Idea:

"You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started.”

Lego
The company got in touch with a group of Lego-philes and asked if they wanted to help with the development of a new product. The end result was Lego Mindstorm; a very cool line of Legos combining programmable bricks with electrical motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego Technic pieces (such as gears and axles) - oh, and a great community too.

Blackberry
I just came across this case study about Blackberry from eConsultancy, about how to make listening and responding more efficient. Briefly, Blackberry's problem was that tracking and responding to all the conversations about Blackberry across the various networks was proving too expensive. The company decided to help grow the conversation about Blackberry online by putting all of the comments in one place. They created MyBlackberry, which will go live in July 2009, and will syndicate questions asked on any social network to the MyBlackberry site. “For a marketer, it was a miracle,” says Wallace. They can now staff one site and track all the comments happening about their products in a central location. On individual networks, Blackberry might have been able to reach 60,000 fans. But when they launch MyBlackberry, they'll have access to a million with every post.

A question asked inside of Myspace will automatically be federated out to Facebook and iGoogle, and anyone in the MyBlackberry community can answer the question. The response will skew more positive, because users on MyBlackberry and on the social networking fan sites are likely to be supporters of BlackBerry products. But the company is clear that it does not want to edit out negative comments. "We're following terms of use. Very flagrant abuses and bad language won’t get posted, but we have to take our lumps."

The other benefit of the site is that RIM is able to keep all of that feedback forever. Wallace says: "If Friendster goes away, I don’t lose all of that content."



Thanks to Carolyn Y. Johnson for Hurry up the customer has a complaint, eConsultancy , Marketing Mystic and Paul Chaney in Social media Listening is the new marketing for these case studies.

Update 05 June 09: And finally, here's a good piece from Denise Zimmerman on how brands can prepare themselves for using Twitter to deal with unexpected crises: How to use Twitter to mitigate a crisis .
I hope these were useful. Got any more good 'listening and acting' case studies? Please add them below!