If you’re not in Marketing, you might have missed this stat. But according to researchers, a staggering 80 percent of adults are at least somewhat more likely to consider buying products and services recommended by friends, family, and authentic online consumers.
So why does that matter to the critical issues and crisis function? Well, if anonymous posters can influence the purchase decision, social media is creating an altogether new threat environment for your company. That’s not just idle opinion. Research, in fact, shows that persistent online negativity is one of the most damaging issues businesses face today. Left unattended on your Yelp or Glassdoor, those posts can easily spiral into major reputational crises, which have the potential to wreak havoc on your recruiting ability, customer acquisition costs, even your bottom line. What are companies doing about the social threat?
Well, the marketers within businesses fundamentally understand the existential threat social poses to their brands. That’s one of the reasons those teams procure social media monitoring technologies.
So what are those tools exactly? They’re powerful, often AI- or Natural Language Processing-powered software solutions that help businesses measure things like social media sentiment, or the perceived mood (either positive or negative) being portrayed in a social media post or engagement.
Like the name suggests, social media monitoring tools monitor conversations on a company’s social channels, determining the deeper context behind each outreach. The result: businesses get a data-driven picture of what their publics really feel about them. Those analytics can help companies craft messaging during a crisis, and that functionality also allows companies to monitor the temperature of a crisis while it’s unfolding.
Social media monitoring tools also do a couple of other things. They give audience insight, which can be helpful in producing market intelligence reports and crafting corporate messaging during a crisis. Additionally, they support customer service aims, especially if a lot of social activity is happening in reaction to a specific product or experience.
Seems like social media sentiment analysis can pretty effectively predict and monitor crisis, what can go wrong? Well, nothing is going wrong; it’s more that by the time the relevant crisis actors within the organization get clued in to escalating critical issues, those issues have already boiled over into crisis. To learn why crisis teams are often the last to know about reputational crisis, download our white paper on the role of social media monitoring in crisis.
For more information like the blog you just read, follow us on Twitter @TeamNoggin.
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