3 Easy Steps to Build a Brand’s Online Reputation

In my previous post on online reputation, I mentioned why building and maintaining a healthy online reputation is crucial for BFSI and other organizations is in the age of social. Here, I’ll tell you how you can add credibility to your online reputation in three easy steps, and how social media analytics can help you boost your online reputation.

Step 1 – Develop and Post Great Content:

If you want your audience to say good things about your brand, then you must start a ‘good’ conversation. Say nice things (read interesting, useful and likeable social media content) and your audience will surely appreciate it and share it with their social network.

Step 2 – Engage Well With Your Audience:

Customer engagement is vital for your brand’s online reputation.  Therefore, ensure that the methods of brand engagement are ingenious too. Having posted creative, resourceful content, ask your audience to comment on it. Urge them to participate in contests, games, polls and quizzes and when they do, thank them generously for their interest and enthusiasm. Also, reward them with discount coupons and vouchers, special mentions and surprise gifts et al.

The bottom line is – go that extra mile to truly make customer engagement a pleasurable experience for both you and your audience. When your audience notices that you are making an honest effort to reach out to them, they will respect you, regard you highly, remember you and reciprocate the goodwill.

Step 3 – Take Bouquets and Brickbats Equally:

Let’s face it – in spite of your best efforts at building a good customer relationship, not all of them are going to be your loyalists or fans. For every satisfied and happy customer you would have an equal number or perhaps more unsatisfied customers. However, don’t sideline then. Instead, welcome and accept their criticism too.

When you see a complaint posted on the social media against your product/service/brand, acknowledge it and work to solve the issue at the earliest. If you are unable to resolve it, apologize.  Honesty and transparency on the social does wonders for your brand’s online reputation.

Having said that, a question still persists – how to effectively implement the above steps? The answer lies in social media analytics tools.

SMA tools like Shout Analytics effectively enhance your brand’s online reputation. Using these tools you can monitor, measure and analyze your customers’ conversations on the social and gather rich, actionable insights about your brand’s online reputation.

To learn how, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

How To Increase A Brand’s Share Of Voice?

Ever wondered how high or low is your brand’s Share of Voice on the social?
 

Share of Voice refers to the total amount of social mentions that a brand or product garners over that of its competitors. 

Here are some simple but very effective ways to increase a brand’s Share of Voice:

1. Measure and Monitor Your Share of Voice:

If you want to see an increase in your brand’s social mentions, then you must first monitor and measure your brand’s Share of Voice. You can do this successfully and most effectively by using a Social Media Analytics tool. 

To give you a very recent example, Using Shout Analytics, when we studied how the film Chennai Express was going to fare at the box office, we found that the film’s Share of Voice was this –

2. Get People Talking:

Getting people (your audience, fans and followers) to take notice of your brand is crucial to the brand’s Share of Voice. Hence, there is no better way to get people talking about your brand other than through awesome, engaging and shareable content. 

For Chennai Express, it was Deepika’s Tamil accented dialogue delivery and the film’s stereotypical South Indian look and feel that initially got people talking. On YouTube, there were videos of the film’s trailers, songs, scenes with popular dialogues and even behind-the-scenes snippets. These were interesting, engaging enough topics for the film’s fans to get talking on the social. Needless to say, the film’s Share of Voice simply catapulted to glory.

3. Now, Talk To Your Audience:

So, now that there is sufficient ‘talk’ about your brand on the social, the next step is engaging with your audience. Do they appreciate your social content – like it, share it, retweet or repin it? Then, go ahead, thank them. Tell them you appreciate their efforts. Similarly, are there dissatisfied or disgruntled customers complaining about poor service? Then, get in touch with those customers immediately, assure them that you’ll resolve the issue and keep your word. 

Good and effective customer service never goes unnoticed or unappreciated on the social.

Thus, the key to increasing a brand’s SoV lies in giving engaging content to your audience, then building an honest engagement with your audience and finally, to measure and monitor your SoV to identify the highs and lows of your social media engagement efforts.

What were your strategies for increasing your brand’s Share of Voice? Tell us in the comments below.

Brand on Social Media – Are You Leveraging Your Social Intelligence?

Till recently, conducting extensive, in-depth market surveys using lengthy questionnaires was considered as the only reliable method to gather market information and customer data. Customers had to be asked what they felt about the brand. They needed to be urged to share their experiences with the brand.

However, with the advent of social networking and active usage of social media by both brands and its customers alike, gathering customer perception has become a child’s play. Today, customer conversations on the social channels are information mines providing critical, valuable information from customers’ wants and demographics to brand reputation.

Yet, the big question still remains – with social media changing the way business is conducted around the world, is it enough for brands and organizations to merely gather social data?The answer is definitely NO.

Collecting social data is one part of any social media strategy. Gleaning insights from the collected data and using it effectively for intelligent business decision making must be the primary goal of any organization that has an active social presence. What is crucial in this exercise is the critical ability to turn data into actionable insights.

Zacharia Hofer Shall, a researcher with Forrester defines this ability as Social Intelligence in his research, Defining Social Intelligence. According to him, Social Intelligence is, “the management and analysis of customer data from social sources, used to activate and recalibrate marketing or business programs”. Hofer Shall says that Social Intelligence involves monitoring social media, analyzing the content, and using the insights to inform your strategy.

Who needs Social Intelligence?

I believe that Social Intelligence is the need of the hour for any organization that has a social presence and is serious about its social media strategy. That said, Social Intelligence will especially benefit those organizations that deal with large streams of social data on a daily basis; making it necessary to separate valuable conversations from plain noise.

How to Achieve Social Intelligence?

Social Media Analytics tools are the source of Social Intelligence. Using text (Natural Language Processing) analytics and statistical modelling techniques, social media analytics tools monitor social data and convert it into simple but rich intelligent information to aid CxOs in better and informed business decision making.

How important is Social Intelligence for your business? Share your views in the comments below. To learn how Shout Analytics can help you garner Social Intelligence, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

In spite of Starting Troubles Chennai Express Is Speeding Away To Glory on the Social Media: Sentiment Analysis of the Latest SRK-Deepika Film

When Rohit Shetty’s latest directorial venture, Chennai Express’ trailers made its first presence felt on our television screens last month, it was greeted with more flak than praise.  People, especially South Indians, took offense to the female lead, Deepika Padukone’s fake Tamil accent. The film’s styling – women dancing in lungi, men with ash smeared forehead and the general stereotyping of South Indians was hugely criticized on the social media channels.

The Hindu, Kollywood Today and Telugu Times carried reports on how the first look of the film didn’t go well with most film buffs down south. Emirates247 under the headline, Bollywood Cliches: Shah Rukh draws public fury for Chennai Express, explained in detail how the film (the first trailers) is being bombarded with heavy negative reactions on the social channels, especially Twitter.

This prompted us to dig deep and analyze the social conversations surrounding Chennai Express, especially looking at the sentiment it generated in the social. Using our Social Media Analysis software, Shout Analytics we conducted an Automated Sentiment Analysis of Chennai Express.

What was done?

We studied Chennai Express for  the social conversations it generated, number of social mentions it received, its overall social activity volume and the social sentiment that it generated, its performance on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as the topics that it started trending.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from the written language though Natural Language Processing.

Here are our findings –

Current Activity:

Chennai Express got people talking the most on Twitter with the number touching over 2000 on 23 July, 2013. Similarly, the Share Of Voice was also highest on Twitter (73.07%) followed by YouTube (23.84%), Blogger (1.93%) and Facebook (1.16%).

In terms of Sentiment, there were a lot of neutral sentiments (49.02%). Positive sentiments accounted for 43.51% and negative sentiment comprised of 7.47%

Social Mentions:

There were 566055 likes, 37553 shares and 427 comments (need a little clarification here) on Facebook. On Twitter, Shah Rukh Khan himself was the lead influencer with a Klout score of 88, closely followed by India Today and Sunidhi Chauhan.

With an average video rating of 4.85 and 8898435 views, YouTube was the most sought after social channel. The official theatrical trailer starring SRK and Deepika Padukone had 41,57,921 views.

Facebook:

Analyzing sentiment that it generated on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we found that on Facebook, Chennai Express received 4.68% of positive sentiment while the negative sentiment was only 8.06%. The word ‘SRK’ generated the most positive buzz while the word ‘Flop’ generated the most negative buzz. 

Twitter:

The scenario was no different on Twitter with 54.89% of neutral sentiments, 39.49% of positive sentiments and only 5.62% of the Twitter conversations generating negative sentiments. Is it interesting to note that while both Shah Rukh Kahn (@iamsrk) and Deepika Padukone (@deepikapadukone) were targets of the highest positive and neutral sentiments, negative sentiments were more towards SRK than Deepika. 

                                      

What was more interesting was that words from the film’s dialogues like ‘Dictionary’, ‘Mein’ and ‘Nahi’ were some of the top five words that created the most buzz for Chennai Express.

The top three hastags were #ChennaiExpress, #CEVideobook and #K2K (Kashmir Mein Tu Kanyakumari) track. However, the tweet reach plunged from 2449 on July 23 to 105 on July 29.

YouTube:

YouTube is undoubtedly the preferred social media platform to watch promotional video clips including songs and dialogues from the movie. Our analysis found that there was more positive sentiment (55.05%) as  opposed to neutral (36.35%) or negative sentiment (8.6%) on YouTube. The top three videos that recorded the highest views were the official trailer of the film, the song, 1,2,3,4, Get On The Dance Floor and video of Deepika Padukone’s last day  on the sets of the film.

Conclusion:

Chennai Express might have started off on the wrong note, but it has been successful in creating a hugely positive buzz around it. One of the primary reasons for this we believe is that the film has Shah Rukh Khan as its lead actor. Chennai Express is cashing in on the immense popularity of Shah Rukh. Plus, we have been seeing the lead pair, Shah Rukh and Deepika aggressively promoting their films as a run up to its 9^th August,  Eid release. This too has helped the film nullify the negative sentiments that it faced earlier into extremely favorable and positive sentiments