Synthesio, Global Social Media Monitoring

The 2012 Summer Olympics are fast-approaching and we’re excited to be a part of the action! With the projected millions of visitors that will set foot at the games at the Olympic Park – located in Stratford, Greater London – vendors and Olympic sponsors are focusing their efforts on providing their customers with a quality experience.

BT, a leading phone and digital TV provider for UK homes & businesses, has teamed up with Synthesio to keep a pulse on their consumers who will be attending the Olympic games. BT’s goal is to monitor online complaints in order to rapidly resolve issues and maintain top quality service for their customers.

Our partnership with BT was mentioned in the News section of the V3.co.uk website…

“We have been working with BT Retail [which already uses the Synthesio tool] to add more information to the platform so we will receive insights on any positive or negative feedback and look for people discussing issues they are having with our services,” Gary Symes, Service Director 2012 Olympics at BT Global Services, said during an event at the Technology Operations Centre (TOC), attended by V3.

“This will help us quickly dispatch staff to the areas where the problems are occurring and contact the person making the complaint directly and try and help them too.”

Symes mentioned that BT will incorporate learnings from their experiences of monitoring conversations during the Olympic games, to assist with ongoing engagement efforts between BT and their customers, even after the Olympic games have ended.

Although Synthesio is not participating in any of the Olympic sporting events, we’re geared up and ready to assist BT in maintaining satisfied customers, focused on what’s important- the gold medals!

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The Chinese social network

Weibo, the first Chinese microblogging site, was launched by Sina Corporation in August 2009. It is China’s leading alternative to Twitter – and soon to become much more of a household name in the marketing world. Available initially in China, Sina Weibo launched its English version in October 2011. With over 300 million users in early 2012 and a market share of 90% in China, Weibo is a close competitor to Twitter (500 million users worldwide).

Sina Corporation was chosen to create ‘a network more intuitive and complete than Twitter’, launched a month earlier. The messages contain up to 140 Chinese characters, the equivalent of 280 alphabet characters (twice as much as Twitter). All replies to a message are visible in the form of conversations, in the spirit of Facebook and the recent functionality added to Twitter.

Users are able to seamlessly integrate images and videos into messages and have access to a range of applications, games and a personalised URL address.

The benefits of a presence on Sina Weibo

The success of the social network is not so much technical as social. Weibo has become a place of public debate where the Chinese can express themselves freely and share their ideas. According to a study by UM entitled The Social Media Tracker Wave, Internet users in China are three times more connected to brand communities than in France, Germany or Japan. This highlights a real opportunity for brands to develop a strategy for effective engagement through the Chinese social network.

Information that was previously denied to the public with the block on Twitter, became shared at such a rate that the Chinese speak of a “snowball effect very difficult to interrupt.” Weibo could thus be an important platform to marketing teams, allowing brands to share news immediately in a similar manner to Twitter.

The launch of the English version has also facilitated access to the network for foreign companies: 130,000 companies, including major international brands (Maybelline, Dior, Lancome, Chanel, Coca-Cola) each have an account. A Sina Weibo representative explains: “It’s not for us to conquer the world but to allow foreign companies to enter the Chinese market.”

Integrating a social media strategy in Asia – through Sina Weibo

Upon opening a Weibo account, a brand can quickly implement their communications strategy and engage in conversations with other users. But like any social network, it soon becomes vital to collect, classify and qualify communications with consumers and identify key influencers.

At Synthesio, we chose to integrate Sina Weibo in our sources to offer our customers comprehensive coverage of social media in China.

All mentions of a brand and associated keywords are collected and integrated into a monitoring dashboard. Each user is identified and Sina Weibo qualified: stats collected include the number of followers, friends and updates published up to the previous day, per user. It therefore becomes possible to identify the key users and influencers for a brand and then engage in dialogue with them.

The Synthesio Rank score of each entry (calculated from our own algorithm based around a user’s reputation and visibility of the message) is also computed by our tool to help customers quickly locate conversations by the most visible and most influential users for their activity.

In addition, we collect information in real time on Sina Weibo to allow you to follow relevant conversations, answer customer questions and prevent negative buzz before it spreads.

To learn more about our tools and how you can monitor your brand in China, please contact us!

Open Door Day : Camille Alloing

http://www.demainlaveille.fr/2009/06/16/journee-porte-ouverte-camille-alloing/

Online reputation today has become one of the main « buzz words » of the blogosphere : it conjures up several ideas (including the management of your digital footprint, a concern for most individuals) but especially online monitoring for business intelligence purposes.

With this in mind, the site CaddE-Reputation was created. The result of a collaboration among three students specializing in online monitoring, CaddE-Reputation is an open space where you can find all of the current events regarding online monitoring tools or simply online monitoring, itself, in France.

Camille Alloing, one of the collaborators for CaddE-Reputation, has provided us with a clear and concise resumé of the process of online monitoring on Aref Jdey’s blog, Demain la veille, also well-known in the online monitoring sector.

The only missing part we saw was the Analysis of Search Returns that should follow any monitoring and precede any action. In fact, online monitoring (put simply) means:

1)      Identifying and Listening to what needs to be monitored

2)      Analyzing and Measuring

3)      Reacting judiciously

Sentiment analysis, as well as a ranking of the articles, are therefore key elements necessary for preparing the monitoring follow-up in function of the business’s short- and long-term strategies.

We will be blogging soon about how Synthesio ranks its sources, but in the meantime we’ll simply say that search returns make no sense without being able to determine their influence.

All in all, a good resumé that is worth taking a look at.

US Women use blogs and social media for information

We often receive questions about social media and the point of measuring them, and we would like to present you with some opinions from other experts on the subject. In this article you can see the results of a study carried out by BlogHer and iVillage, the two largest feminine Internet communities.

Although this study is only based on American participants, the analysis can surely be applied to a large number of countries, France for example, within a couple of years if not right away (the average delay with regards to the U.S.’s Internet use is 2 years).

Among the study’s conclusions is a poll of 3.000 women, 80% of whom read a blog 1 to 3 times a week, often searching for new products online.

Nevertheless, the fundamental point remains: these women buy brands that they are “familiar with”.

The Drapeau Blanc agency, created by the union of two public relation agencies specialized in consumer communication ( Passerelles and WebReport), have published their white paper that brings together various pieces of advice with regards to corporate-consumer relationships.The “Five Main Checks” are well written and clearly show the experience they have. The blogosphere doesn’t pardon negligent bloggers… once a blog post has been published, you can count on it being there for quite a while!

Once again it is interesting to see the remark that the Internet user is “in control”, an expression that seems to group all consumers into one category as having the same amount of influence. It’s crucial to see, however, that certain ones have definitively more influence than others in regards to a company’s online reputation.

To give an example, Sprint just recently sent a complimentary Blackberry to Loïc LeMeur following a post on his Twitter account that they were not offering the new version. His friend didn’t get quite the same response (if he got any) to similar posts on his own Twitter account: seems like a bit of a double standard…

Happy reading to those who haven’t yet downloaded the white paper

Online Reputation Management (ORM) – A Proactive, not Reactive Process (but SEO and SEM only go so far)

Taking care of your company’s online reputation is certainly not a task to be dealt with “post crisis”. Monitoring should be a constant activity, either with any number of the free tools that we are all familiar with or with professional tools like Synthesio.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) can respond to monitoring needs in their own way but they don’t go far enough. You also need to be able to identify which sites are the most important, who are your brand’s influencers, what are your community’s main activities, etc.

In order to avoid certain crises (by detecting Internet users that can damage a brand’s reputation – rightly or wrongly), being proactive is key, but also and perhaps above all, so is finding and promoting so-called “brand ambassadors”.

After that it’s up to the company to decide what to do with this information. Unfortunately there is no handbook that can tell you exactly how to interact with your community. We’re well aware that the agencies that we work with have their work cut out for them!

Poor Economy Heightens Brand Equity

According to a study published by Harris Interactive, brand equity does not decrease during an economic crisis. On the contrary, consumers see purchasing familiar products or services as a sound investment.

Doesn’t that mean, then, that you should be monitoring your brand more closely during any type of crisis? After all, brand equity is created largely via buzz (online) and word of mouth (everywhere else), and WOM doesn’t go away just because of economic troubles!

It’s clear, of course, that a “golden” reputation is constructed over the long-term, but the analysis of Internet users’ online conversations makes up an essential starting point for a brand’s strategy with regards to their presence in consumers’ lives, whatever the situation… our clients seem to have gotten it quite well .

…with regards to managing your online reputation

For those of you unfamiliar with Dilbert, check him out!