PhilGo20

Parce que parfois nos tweets passent tout droit, mais qu’ils valent la peine d’être lus

Ma première utilisation de FixMystreet.ca, une excellente initiative de VisibleGovernment.ca

VisibleGovernment, qui se dévoue à rendre à rendre les l’accès aux informations gouvernemental plus simples et plus transparents, a récemment lancé FixMyStreet.ca, une application web permettant de soumettre un problème dans notre voisinage (rue endommagé, graffiti, etc.)

RescueTime

Suite à la lecture d’un billet de Martin Heewig, fondateur de WordPress, où il explique en autres choses sa façon d’organiser son agenda et jongler avec les meetings, le développement et la business, j’ai commencé à utiliser RescueTime. Je ne peux pas dire que cela à pour l’instant augmenter ma productivité, mais après 4 semaines à observer les résultats, je viens d’y entrer des objectifs (less than 1 hour on X website/application), on verra bien s’ils seront atteints et si le travail accélérera.

Démo vidéo de Lithium, un Social CRM

Les CRM devient sociaux. C’est probablement le produit CRM le plus intéressant que j’ai vu depuis que j’entends l’expression social CRM. Excellent démo qui promet, permettant de mettre à profit les médias sociaux pour le support, la promotion et l’innovation entourant un produit/marque.

Great WhitePaper by @sysomos On Identifying, Engaging and Monitoring Social Network Users for Wow Marketing

Sysomos, qui lançait récemment sa plateforme de Social Media Monitoring, a publié un excellent papier sur l’identification, l’engagement et la veille des usagers sur les médias sociaux.

Outils gratuits de veille des médiax sociaux

Il y a de plus en plus d’utilisateurs mécontents des plateformes de ORM (analyse de réputation en ligne) actuelles, des paterformes pour le moins coûteuses.
Il existe plusieurs façon de s’en sortir gratuitement et cet article présente une bonne analyse de 4 outils gratuits. À lire si vous êtes à la recherche d’une solution ‘correcte’ et surtout gratuite.

I am taking for granted that you know about the Broken Guitars video and for those who doesn’t, read here and watch here.

I was reading yesterday about “United Breaks Guitar Part 2” and I got interested in United Airlines reaction to the whole chain of event.

My first reaction when I heard about the video lat month was that they should have (assuming it wasn’t fixed before the videos) offered him 2 open tickets to any destination valid for 1 year. And a replacement guitar. Why ? Well simply because an open ticket is the kind of stuff that most of the population dream about and public opinion would have gone : “Wow, that’s cool ! They did a mistake but they’ve fixed it properly !”Just a replacement wouldn’t cut it at this point obviously.

Chances are he might have had accepted while some critics would have scream he’s a social media sellout. In the end the story would have died down but would be refered as “Customer Complaint Through Social Media 101″ course. The video would have lived forever and be the standout element of the story.

Well, United Airlines offered a replacement guitar to Dave Carroll which understandably he did not want and gave to charity. Too little, too late … With all the fame he got from his first video, it would take much more than a replacement guitar to close the story. To make matter worse, United added that …

“‘While we mutually agree this should have been fixed much sooner, Dave’s excellent video provides us with something we can use for training purposes to ensure that all customers receive better service for us,’ spokeswoman Robin Urbanski told the (Chicago Sun Times).”

Really ?

So today when I read about the video sequel, I thought that there might have been a better way for United Airlines to do damage control (in fact there’s many…).

My idea ? Fight fire with Fire. Answer with another viral video. United should have hired a hip young music video producer to shoot a cool and funny ‘We are sorry, we make a mistake and will try to avoid suck miss-up in the future’ excuse video with a little tongue-in-cheek humour for good measure. A couple United Execs and VPs singing bad choirs or trying the guitar would have done the trick.

Such a video, if well done and there is a high number of people who could have done something amazing, could have become nearly as popular as the original one. Great PR coup. And most of all, this would have greatly close the gap between the customer (Dave Carroll) and the brand (United Airlines).

Customer way of expressing complaints is evolving, so should Brand answers and tactics to keep customer happy. Obviously, it should be fixed way before, but in reality, we all know many more episodes of that kind will happen in the next months and I will be curious to see which brand will be the first to take it to the next level.

Now producing a video to cover up the Domino Incident would have had been way more challenging They probably took the right decision by going “corpo” with their excuses…

The Online Reputation Monitoring tools market is growing at a fast pace as more and more company understand and express the need to listen to what’s being said about their market, products and competitors online, evaluate the influence of these conversations and analyze the sentiment expressed.

There’s now a gazillion way to do it, from free mash-up techniques like the one described in my previous post to uber-expensive solutions from media company.

Before evaluating the solutions, one would need some parameters to do so. Here’s a short list half-mine, half-borrowed

• Efficient filtering of queries based on language, country, source, date, topic
• Depth of coverage
• Real-time monitoring
• Duplicate elimination
• Smart Sentiment analysis (learning with time)
• Ability to modify sentiment analysis
• Sentiment plus (point in time, trend over time, compared with competitor, overlay with another issue etc.)
• Ability to associate timeline with events
• Identification, ranking and monitoring of influencers on multiple networks
• Ranking based on “social popularity” or social engagement (PostRank)
• Comparison to competitive information
• Identification of entity and events within the conversation
• Easy, dynamic ability to chart and graph analysis of queries
• Self-service set up of queries
• Multiple User Management
• Backward trending (and not just for 30 days!)
• Real-time threshold monitoring
• Integration with CRM system
• Analysis services by experts

I tend to put an heavy emphasis on the last point as so far from my experience, monitoring tools are only used as a first step to decipher the whole conversation and identify influencers while the real value lies in the results of the analysis services offered afterward. Despite great progress in technology, we still need a human with social science skills to make some sense out of all this.

I have evaluated a few software in this field and was preparing some kind of report for a client when I stumbled on a coveted Forester Report : The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms Q1 2009. With my limited resources, I could hardly do better than their evaluation and I was lucky enough to get it for free. And you can get it too, courtesy of Visible Technologies, evaluated in the report.

Only top-tier applications with a minimum of 75% of entreprise-level clients are evaluated in the report. Although they see listening platforms has being in their infancy, I was surprised to see the much-talked about Radian6 platform at the bottom of the ladder. According to Forester’s report, this is due to a lack of

sentiment analysis, NLP, insight generation, and integration and consulting services.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Cymfony are given as industry leaders based on

sophisticated sentiment analysis capabilities, strong international coverage, and
multilingual support

for the former and on

comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities [...] well complemented by
a strategic and consulting services organization that offers advanced support for understanding
sentiment and influence

for the second.

A slightly older but well-done and complimentary report (with pricing info) on 10 leading online conversation monitoring tool can be found on Ryan MacMillan blog.

What do the actual users/customers of these tools have to say about them ? The best place to look for this might be on … a blog. Read the comments following ReadWriteWeb : The Future of Social Media Monitoring post for some great insights.

The conclusion seems to be that no tool yet offers a complete solution and I would be tempted to think that the greatest tool would be a giant mash-up of many smaller tools and technologies out there. More to come…

Have a good read !

DISCLAIMER : Many of the evaluation points mentionned above come from Anna B. at Organic.