Nathan Gilliatt followed up on a recent posting of his, Reputation monitoring - macro and micro, with a great case study of Hasbro's discovery that one of its products, the Playskool Team Talkin' Tool Bench, had been the cause of two children's deaths. Hasbro did the right thing, pulling the product from the market.
The discovery of the hazard happened when individual Hasbro employees read Amazon.com reviews of the product that linked the Team Talkin' Tool Bench to the deaths. As Nathan puts it: "This is micro monitoring. It didn't matter how many people wrote about it, or whether they influenced others," which makes a critical distinction between what is influential and what is important to know.
A responsible business keeps track of its products' performance, as this is a key feedback mechanism every marketer should be tracking. The change from the days when customers called a "customer support" line or sent in feedback cards is in the proliferation of channels through which people can communicate, and the incidental
broadcasting of that feedback to the entire market. What may not be influential can lead to a firestorm of opinion because it is painfully relevant to everyone. For instance, if a child chokes on a piece of a toy, people will be concerned for their own children or grandchildren.
We agree that micro-monitoring is critical and BuzzLogic's tools are set up so that you can create a monitor that catches any combination of your product's name(s) and certain keywords, regardless of their influence. For example, a customer could set up a BuzzLogic workspace that looked for any combination of [product name] and "kill, killed, death, choke, etc." on the bad side of events and "baby, happy, thrilled, delightful, etc." on the good side.
If something bad happens, don't wait for it to happen to an influential, make the individual customer the priority. Only an idiot would wait for a dead child to be rated "influential" before acting to fix or recall the product.
So, alongside the influence monitoring you are doing--the macro-level monitoring in Nathan's taxonomy--you can and should do micro-monitoring in BuzzLogic or any other tool. Our system can, like the Cymfony system Nathan mentions in his posting, monitor Amazon.com reviews, though we have not yet begun to do this (though we will if a customer asked us to today), because we're aiming to add value to the simple monitoring of keywords. There are reviewers of great influence in the Amazon community, both across many topics and very specialized ones; BuzzLogic wants you to know those authors and their reputations.
Yet is it not just crises that start at the grassroots. Many small movements, such as customers banding together to demand a green or sustainable version of a product, rise out of venues like reviews sites, bulletin boards and blogs. These movements must be tracked over time to show marketers that what they may have thought was a passing whim is in reality an emerging product requirement. The same goes for Wikipedia and other community settings where reputation and influence are constantly changing.
We want to provide the micro-level tracking of events way down at the five-foot-six-inch level of the market where lots of chatter is going on and influential trends, as well as crisis events, can emerge. But we also want to be able to show the progress of a meme as it gains traction at the grassroots, surface it for attention and measure the customer's ability to engage the market.
Micro- and macro-level monitoring can be combined in a dashboard for easy review, response and measurement. That's a key BuzzLogic goal, a user interface that puts everything in perspective and alerts you to crises or creeping change.
Comments (2)
Thanks for the links, Mitch! I think this sets a record, three in one post.
The big lesson I'm seeing here is that the need to track multiple items in multiple online venues really cries out for the intelligent use of tools. Otherwise, companies are going to end up paying too much to track it manually.
Posted by Nathan Gilliatt | October 17, 2006 2:06 PM
Posted on October 17, 2006 14:06
Thanks for your comments, Nathan. I think you are right on the money with your comment about the need for tools to track multiple items across multiple venues. Having tried this manually, I can attest that the limitations of manual processes become very evident very quickly --- and that some of the key insights (such as influence) that fuel informed decision making may be at best elusive and more likely, impossible without tools, irrespective of cost.
bob
Posted by bob schettino | October 17, 2006 2:50 PM
Posted on October 17, 2006 14:50