spreading jam

“Could social media ever offer up a rich seam of customer data, or is it just a mine of useless information?”

Marketing Week recently published an article sharing concerns expressed by businesses about monitoring social media for customer data. The first being the difficulty in pairing CRM databases with social media posts.

Everyone’s talking about social CRM these days. If you’re on the cutting edge of buzz technology, you’re trying to integrate buzz with internal data, but the apparent inability to achieve this right now isn’t a reason to stay away from buzz. There are so many things it has to offer, and social CRM is, no doubt, right around the corner.

Another concern is the privacy of people posting online. Most buzz monitoring tools will only look at posts on sites that allow it, so they’re not breaking any rules. Some people are concerned about brands monitoring what they say, but many are elated when the brand listens and responds with help.

Ian Cracknell from UIA commented that he is unsure about buzz because ‘people are effectively operating behind an avatar’. How is this any different from surveys and focus groups? Everyone says what they want others to hear, but that doesn’t mean that what they’re saying isn’t valuable.

Yet another concern is a lack of ‘hard data’. All data has faults, with buzz being no exception, but it’s not impossible to use quantitative measures. It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible to profile the audience that’s talking about you online either – and those are the people whose posts are likely to come up in search results.

What about all the things buzz is particularly useful for? Like measuring the impact you’re having by responding to customer queries online, catching a PR crisis before it happens, finding out about changes in opinion before it becomes a larger issue, etc.

Moreover, there’s a strong connection between social buzz and search that warrants close monitoring of what people are saying about your brand online, and there’s a strong case for improving customer service by responding in social media.

The point is – don’t be scared. What holds marketers back, is not the value of buzz, but the difficulty in knowing how to use it.