Which forms of UGC to leverage, why, where and how can be a challenge to even the most professional marketing team.  Please read more about UGC and SEO here.

VOC (voice of customer) is another part of the same puzzle. Traditionally:

• “…[VOC] is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives.” Wikipedia

Usability Study

I was recently provided detailed information as part of a team knowledge sharing initiative on a usability study that one of my colleagues spear-headed across Canada and the UK.

It’s interesting that no matter how objective you try to be, once you have been working on a specific account for any period of time, you will be myopic on certain points, complacent on others and oblivious of yet more.

Some feedback from these studies that I can freely share include the following three general points:

1. Don’t ever assume that your online market is nearly as tech savvy or internet experienced as you or your team are. Issues with misunderstood navigation, unseen buttons, confusion on how to even begin to find the site from the engines were not uncommon, even though most issues identified seemed like total no-brainers to the more internet experienced internal team – even those not on the accounts in question – we’re not (in most cases) selling to our technical/internet peers. I’m not saying that our target markets are less intelligent, I’m saying that they don’t spend all day working in html, refining Google advanced searches, using Google and Yahoo operators, visiting numerous completely diverse sites for research, competitive intelligence or pure interest reasons.
2. Don’t assume that features and functionalities you think will be of great interest and benefit to the customer, actually are. Mistrust, uncertainty and the pure search and swap instinct is very prevalent. If you are offering something fancy or informative, make sure you provide them with full information on what they are getting, whether it be in the form of information during a download, or an explanation to the effect that the retailer testimonials they are seeing are not purely self-promotion (link to the original – that simple, but so often overlooked – heck, we know it’s real… right?).
3. Many usability victims… err, test subjects actually think that they are only expected to provide negative feedback. Make sure you ask them to tell you what’s positive. In some cases, it might be the opposite (less common) so ensure that you tell them you want feedback on both their positive and negative experiences and feelings. Try to get them to quantify all feedback via a simple scoring system including positive and negative scoring throughout to keep that top of mind.

What about UGC?

Well, let’s backtrack a little. This usability study was regarding test subjects’ experiences with the web site itself. Admittedly unless a site is particularly awful or particularly blindingly awesome, not too many people comment on the actual site usability of their own free will, and usability is pretty darn important if you’re involved in ecommerce.

BUT… what about conducting a usability test for an online application. I guarantee some of the feedback would be ‘great, fast and easy’ as well as ‘so slow’. Well sometimes, UGC is as effective if not MORE so than usability studies for gaining real time interaction and feedback from real customers as they are using your app/product/service. So what can you do?

1. track the social networks (Google alerts; Radian6; Twitter Search and more)
2. aggregate the feedback and see which comments on which features are the most prevalent (more ‘this is slow’ or more ‘this rocks with speed’)
3. respond to every positive and negative comment and follow up with PR and feedback where possible/required and take it offline if it gets too long, or too confusing – you have other followers
4. feed learnings back to product development and marketing on a regularly scheduled basis (don’t ping them with every tweet, post or comment; they’ll hunt you down and disconnect you)
5. blog about interactions with the socnet including after-the-fact product/app/service fixes based on feedback with a big thank you to all followers/commenter’s etc
6. link out of comments and twitter posts where possible and relevant to followers/readers to specific pages within your site encouraging readers to go to the site with a snippet of highly relevant info followed by an ellipsis ‘…’.
7. Never comment or tweet/forum etc spam. Just don’t do it.
8. get back to initial pure voluntary commentators/tweet peeps when you have a usability study or other research factor on a feature or function as a potential add to your test target market – it’s predefined and you already have an in… awesome J

Why bother with UGC when we have VOC?

• It is likely that when you really impress someone on the socnets (social networks) with customer service, you may well turn them into a fan as opposed to a neutral or a potential/real detractor.
• It is possible that you will generate a ready made contributor base for future usability studies
• It is possible that your socnet folks are UGC addicts themselves with their own blogs, and if you engage them effectively, they may very well blog about your product, your site, or your twitter account/blog/forum etc. All exposure in the socnets that is positive is a good thing, weither indirectly or directly for SEO – both in terms of pure backlinks, but also in terms of SERP real estate and exposure… this is the minefield of the longtail, if you can harness it effectively. Referral traffic is very likely to spike if you make this work, so don’t keep your SEO analytics figures (if you use GA for example) limited to actual organic/non-paid traffic; after a socnet initiative go in and measure before and after referral traffic along with the long tail of referral sites… you may be very pleasantly surprised. I did that today for an SEO post mortem one of our sites – over a 200% increase in referral traffic over a specified period of time. (You can monitor Twitter backlinks currently with BackTweets – one of my faves).
• MOST importantly, if you have free VOC in the socnets, track it, harness it and use it as real time, real people studies of how your real customers feel about your offering (product/service/app etc) in real time. It’s the best kind of VOC out there from a purely qualitative point of view if you record and feed it back accurately and appropriately. It may not be quantitative, but you can assign values to comments (positive and negative) and thus determine a mean value as well as outliers and other statistically significant data to provide some form of non-qualitative data to your stakeholders. Make sure you explain your methodology, but don’t blind them with your process.

Conclusion

UGC and VOC are part of the same puzzle – they’re just on different sides of the board. Don’t lose one, or you may scupper the other.

Follow Laura on Twitter

Before I go off on a slightly different tangent, entirely prompted by my reading of Steven’s thought’s, I highly recommend reading the post that started me thinking, the comments alone are enormously interesting. The primary point here will deal with one element Steven commented back at me regarding corporations and their potentially inherent ‘fear’ of social media, and I’ll answer with what I believe they can do to embrace social media – effectively.

Of course my ideas are not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ll simply start with saying that a company, or brand, needs to be somewhat proactive, and somewhat non-anally retentive (there just is no nice way of saying that) in the legal and ‘messaging control’ department if they even hope to attempt a successful foray into the socnet space in the first place.

Biggest Fear #1

“You want to WHAT? Over my bloody dead body. Do you think for one moment legal or branding will let you message at random on the internet? Do you not know about our PR requirements regarding disclosure, our editorial requirements our….*sputter**hiccough**burp**wheeze*….”

Yeah I know, over-dramatization, but you get it… and come to think of it, I actually do know of a few folks in rather big brands who would – literally - nearly have a heart-attack at the thought of engaging openly, irregularly and in an non-brand-dictated fashion online - and dare I say - it in a live PUBLIC arena. Oh, the horror…

Solution, Its actually not at all hard…

The decision makers need to understand a few salient points:

1. Social networks are not subject to disclosure regulations.
2. If anyone in a social network sees you using the words ‘aptitude’, ‘due diligence’, ‘decree’ or sees you using poncy typically non-social terminology in your (all of 140 characters) tweets for example, they are likely to not follow you, unfollow you, take the piss, or ignore you.
3. It’s social; define ‘Social’: composed of sociable people or formed for the purpose of sociabilitymarked by friendly companionship with others [wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn]
4. it’s a ‘network’; define ‘Network‘: [to] communicate with and within a group [wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn]
5. Let’s take points 3 and 4 and define ‘Social Network’:

A web of interconnected people who directly or indirectly interact with or influence the student and family. May include but is not limited to family, teachers and other school staff, friends, neighbors, community contacts, and professional support. [http://rrtcpbs.fmhi.usf.edu/rrtcpbsweb/glossary.htm#Shttp://rrtcpbs.fmhi.usf.edu/rrtcpbsweb/glossary.htm#S]

    5.  It’s ’online’; define ‘Online Social Network’:
…actually, there was no definition according to my search on Google for “define:..”, and so I asked some folks on Twitter for their thoughts. A simple, insightful and unbiased answer was simply this from @cyandle:

• A community where you can engage with others online…

Actually, in a nutshell, that is exactly what it is; a means of getting and maintaining the attention of others online by:

• interacting with them, 
•  responding to them,
• answering them,
• collaborating with them

… engaging them; but within the boundaries of what is considered to be socially acceptable, if not in the real world, then in the very real online social world where the rules may be unwritten, but they are very clear, and woe to the faint-hearted or ignorant. Yes, I’m talking to you Mr. Company.

 Can you apply these points to interacting on the social networks as a brand or corporation? YES! In 6 clear ways:

1.  Be transparent. Transparency is good, but not overtly so. Posting comments about or sending people to disclaimers and terms and conditions or privacy policies is not what it’s about.

2.  Be open to negative comments and feedback, and deal with it in a friendly, open manner. If it carries on to the point where it is affecting your profile – just stop communicating with the individual and escalate it to PR or support. You can do that in the social networks. People don’t expect anyone to be online 24 hours a day, not even a big brand due to the inherent nature of ‘sociability’. The people being social on the part of your brand are not supposed to be legal experts, they’re supposed to be real people. They may even have an account that is their own, and not a pure brand profile like @TTaxChristine.

3.  It is possible to communicate with your client base or target market as a brand profile in an open way that does not detract from your brand, breeds humor and awareness, and integrates you into the community.

4.  Forget disclosure rules and editorial limitations and realize that this is a live environment. You don’t have time to check with legal, run to brand messaging, or wait for a deploy date to get an answer out to a confused socnet member, nor to anticipate that PR control will pick up on every negative mention of the brand, or be able to thank evangelists as they mention the brand. Social networks are a powerful tool that allow you to do just that, if you give your social team the flexibility to do so, in real time.

5.  The surprise and often frank thanks of socnet members when you do reply to them in a timely manner is in many cases exceptionally rewarding. Even if they had a negative comment, the fact that the brand took the time to check, apologize, rectify or promise a rectification or pass-on to a department who will get back to them is enormously empowering for the individual, and gives them a more favorable impression of the brand than they had when they made their comment in the first place. If your company is one that never admits failure online or in public, I need to warn you that if it is real, and you don’t admit it, especially to a detractor that has raised a point, and offer a solution or apology, they are likely to have a far more negative influence on your brand than if you do, especially if they have a large following, or are popular in their selected network.

• My 6th and final point on this topic is this; no individual, group or brand can control what is said of them online in the social networks. They cannot answer every detractor, nor build loyalty by answering every evangelist or supporter in a press release.

Thoughts for big brands to take-away…

 Give up some control corporates:

·     Hire social folks

·     Set some ground rules (no swearing, no personal brand detraction, no overt promotion of competition etc)

·     Develop some processes (which networks, when and where; where and who to escalate to for highs and lows) and let them do their thing.

·     Get a decent social network monitoring tool, just as I assume you have a reputation management tool already, even if it is just Google Alerts (check our Radian6, TruCast and TrackUR for starters).

If you let go a bit, you’ll find that the social networks will become a good place for you to interact, get feedback and most importantly collaborate with and gain trust from your core group of followers, and you will find that – if you play right – that group will grow, along with your profits.

Follow Laura on Twitter

Before I read the comments on Tom’s blog (which I have summarized and compiled below) I thought about it. These are my thoughts:  

User Generated Content

I am a huge proponent of user generated content (UGC), and its impact on search results, conversions, and online transparency which contributes to the accessibility and exposure of product or service related feedback and reviews. It has also resulted in a significant contribution to site usability, information accessibility and more where it has been effectively and applicable incorporated on official company sites and blogs.

While UGC is by no means a new concept (it entered mainstream use in 2005 according to Wikipedia), it might be considered to have gained enormous traction and exposure, and thus interest over the past 12-18 months due to new studies from big name research corporations including Rubicon, Forrester, Juniper, AdAge and others (see this great list of UGC stats and their compilers). The studies revealed, reiterated and supported each other entirely in their data to the (summary) effect that:

·         Users are actively seeking input from other ‘people’ online via reviews and feedback

·         Usability in the form of ‘satisfaction’ increased with the inclusion of reviews on a site

·         Sites with reviews had higher conversion rates

·         Sites with reviews had higher ‘recall’ rates

·         More than 60% of potential purchasers research online regardless of whether they purchase on or offline and look for both positive and negative reviews

·         Negative reviews are unlikely to detract from positive reviews as long as there are positive reviews, and the negative review is deemed ‘constructive’.

·         Brands appreciate the ability to include reviews as it enhances transparency, and enables the publication of information on the site that they would normally, due to brand legal or marketing constraints, be unable to publish.

The 1to1 Media Survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel in April of this year summarized overall trend based predications on the findings of the studies very concisely in my opinion:

·         By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing.

Reputation Management

The same type of scenario (not new, but ‘newly realized’) is true for the discipline of monitoring one’s, or one’s competitors, reputation online. Despite the fact that Google Alerts has been around for quite some time (2006 I think) reputation management really got a kick in the rear this year with the publication of Andy Beal’s book Radically Transparent, and the advent of TrackUR and numerous other reputation management tools.

I think the boost of interest in UGC and the need to implement it while watching for on-site spam intersected very nicely with the desire to monitor both positive and negative commentary around the web. Finding out what brand evangelists are saying can be a great way to build out a social media campaign, or any other form of online marketing initiative. Knowing who the brand evangelists are enables a company to ‘recruit’ them via empowering them with early news tid-bits, free stuff (like screen savers… no, I don’t mean a new Lamborghini – though that would be nice…), special offers for their readers and other similar free tools or offerings of gratuity and incentive. There is a fine line between empowering brand evangelists and bribing them. My heart-felt advice is;  ‘don’t cross the invisible line’.

Monitoring what is being said about you on the net and in the blogosphere also enables a business to find out what people don’t like about their company, a brand, a product line, a specific product, customer service, an affiliate, a brick and mortar store, and so on. It is a great way to be knowledgeable while at the same time proactive, assuming you develop a strategy to deal quickly, diplomatically, carefully, and positively with brand detractors. Answer them on their own site/blog or wherever they have posted the review or comment, and copy the issue raised along with your responding solution or answer onto your official site.

Not only can you answer your detractors quickly and effectively, you are also likely to gather some great insights for R&D (research and development) and I&P (insight and planning). 

In closing – my thoughts are that…

…the potential impact of effective integration and management of UGC via effective use of a well-thought strategy and a great reputation management tool  is what I think we have really come to see as a ‘significant advance’ in SMM this year.

Other comments from Tom’s readers:

Please do read his post and comment there first as I have unashamedly lifted this whole blog-post-idea-thingey from him via LinkedIn.

Tom’s readers feel that the following are the ‘significant advances in SMM during 2008’ – in no particular order:

·         Microblogging

·         Reconsidering the social dynamic

·         Adoption and consolidation

·         Mobile and iPhone use and effect

·         Leveraging online and offline more holistically

·         Personalized platforms (like Ning)

·         Mobile microblogging facilitation

·         Aggregation of multiple profiles and streamlining enabled

·         Simply the enormous boost in interest as the idea of social networking has grown, matured and solidified as ‘something to stay’ as opposed to a ‘fad’.

Have a wonderful festive season and a blessed New year if I don’t get around to stealing blogging again in the next 2 weeks J !!!