Open The Dialogue

What is it with social networking tools deciding to make changes without the consent or opinion of their user base? Facebook has done it a number of times, once when they introduced the news feed and then again with the most recent redesign.

Now, Twitter is the latest of the social media tools to fall prey to its users.

Earlier this week, #fixreplies became a top trending topic on Twitter, thanks to the latest “update” to the service where Twitter has stopped automatically displaying “@ replies “directed to people you don’t follow. Previously, Twitter users had the ability to choose one of two settings:

1) Turn on “@ replies” from members the user follows directed to members whom the user doesn’t follow

2) To turn those “tweets” off (since they may not be of relevance to them personally)

To Twitter, this was merely an update to its “settings,” but to its users it was removing a capability that some viewed as a way to find other “Twitterers” that they might be interested in following. By doing this, it stopped a method of communication between its users. This is something you never want to do as a communication tool so of course, there was a bit of backlash from users.

So, what did Twitter do? It listened to its users and took the feedback to heart. While at first its communication may have been a bit unclear, it has since made up for it.

Here’s the latest on the whole thing – a post from Twitter’s company blog apologizing and explaining it all from start to finish and how they reacted along the way. Twitter was transparent with their communication, stating where they may have made a mistake and what issues were resolved. A necessary and excellent move, in my opinion – and likely also the rest of the community’s.

And for those of you that don’t have time to read through the entire post, here’s a key take away from the post:

“We’re still listening, reading tweets, gathering feedback, and working on more efficient ways of doing so. Thanks to everyone for the feedback and for using Twitter.”

How can companies prevent this moving forward? Is it always going to be trial and error? Is this type of strategy to be expected? Mashable.com writes about preventative measures that can be taken to avoid user backlash here.

Companies need to be proactive BEFORE the changes occur. They should also be proactive about getting feedback ahead of time by utilizing testers or something like a focus group. Odds are, the responses you get ahead of time will give you insight into what you will be in store for once the changes take place. This also gives you the opportunity to stop a problem before it has a chance to bubble up into something much bigger.

Overall, there seems to be no permanent repercussion from the trial, error and apologize method, but will it stay that way forever? It’s likely. I know that if these companies continue to be transparent and let me know they are listening – I’ll keep coming back for more.

Let us know what you think.

Also, here are some additional thoughts on the issue from the community:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10239517-36.html?tag=mncol;txt
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10240163-36.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheSocial
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/twitter-screwed-up/

Jeff Jarvis recently did a great interview with Business Week’s Senior Editor Diane Brady on what executives need to know about social media. Take a look:

For more from Jeff, visit his website, BuzzMachine, or follow him on Twitter.

Some can’t-miss stuff from the past month (as always, we’re sharing these on our FriendFeed & Twitter):

• Mack gets serious about community building and lays out why no one is paying attention to yours.

• The FTC is reviewing the mommy-blogger & brand relationship this summer, trying to guidelines for endorsements & testimonials.

• CubeTree launched yesterday.  The internal comms. sector is heating up.  We’re keeping an eye out for early returns on how it stacks up against services like ClearSpace & SocialText.

• Geoff Livingston has a great post over on The Buzz Bin about what’s really valuable to a community.  He highlights a week where he didn’t have any great blog posts but the photos he put on Flickr for SOBcon ended up being super-popular.  Great lessons:  don’t always “follow the herd,” do what you do best and – most importantly – make sure other people find it useful.

• David Armano talks about developing trust & attention.  Information overload makes you dedicate more attention to people and sources that you trust.  As a marketer, it’s important to focus on this relationship.

• Journalists on Twitter (via Rex).

• Chris Brogan somehow opened up my head and did a post on social media and the sales cycle.  He argues that social media is most valuable during the awareness process.  I disagree.

• Facebook introduces “Post Quality Score” for Pages.  It measures “how engaging your content is to Facebook users.”  This is definitely a step in the right direction for analytics on Pages which have been notoriously weak.  Although, it also seems like a trend.  Tumblr is trying to leverage all the content in their community by providing their own version of analytics.  While pretty-looking, at this point in time, it’s a bit self-serving.

• PBS ups its video game and puts all of its shows on the web (note:  PBS is an MWW client).

• Like podcasts?  Like social media?  Here are a few to subscribe to.

When it comes to sentiment monitoring, you are left with only two options: “do-without” or “do with what’s available”.  But realistically, “doing without” is not an option for companies and organizations in the digital era, especially when the speed and volume of communication can be overwhelming and the risk of ignoring the conversation is enormous.   However, what is available is not that great either.  I have a lot of concerns with currently available services and the claims many of these services make.   I know from my own experience  in doing qualitative research, specifically framing analysis of text which is far beyond what is required for comparatively simple sentiment monitoring of an issue, organization or brand, that content analysis is a messy business.

I  tested Twitrratr, a website which promises that it “can distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.”  The results were mixed.

For example: a search of “Obama” returned this tweet as being negative towards him because of the word “problem”:

“obama does get it. he understands the basic problems tha americans have while mccain is very out of touch”.

The search also returned this tweet as being positive towards Obama simply because it contained the word “good”:

“palin asks a really good quesion: what do all these radicals and terrorists see in obama?”

Twitrratr is only matching up flagged keywords and categorizing the tweets accordingly but quite oblivious as to what those keywords are actually referring in the context of the conversation. Content analysis is extremely difficult and the methodology required can be different from project to project and even evolve within a given project based on the results being generated.  Sentiment/Attitude/Tonality, all virtually analogous, is just one of the dimensions that falls under the content analysis umbrella.  At least the service is free. Companies such as Scout Labs, Sysomos, and Wise Window all offer products that supposedly overcome this, but my experience of the first two has been less than satisfactory.

My main problem is that while these companies promise 80-90% accuracy when compared to human coders, there is no independent verification of these claims.  Add to that pressures to sign up to lengthy contracts, you end up getting the eerie feeling of being at a used car dealership.

Unfortunately, this problem will continue to plague sentiment monitoring for the foreseeable future whether for blogs, micromedia or otherwise. What is needed is advanced  algorithms that can gauge sentiment from a contextual basis. As it is, this nascent technology can be describe as the “best solution available”, but whether it meets any objective standards is another question all together.

As PR professionals, we spends countless hours, days, weeks and sometimes months working on a campaign for our clients that we hope will be a smash success, a break-through, a needle-pusher in their objectives. We never know for sure what’s going to be popular with the media, with bloggers and with consumers, but we do our best to make an engaging campaign with unique, creative elements, like microsites, blogs, podcasts, blogger campaigns and traditional events and media outreach.

In the month’s leading up to the biggest floral holiday of the year, Mother’s Day, MWW Group’s 1-800-FLOWERS.COM account team and Dialogue Media have worked together to create an integrated traditional and digital media campaign called Spot a Mom. We created a microsite featuring gift ideas for different kinds of moms, utilized our Facebook and Twitter page, and reached out to mommybloggers in the effort to raise awareness about Spot a Mom and 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as the go-to resource for flowers on Mother’s Day. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s Facebook fans quadrupled and the Twitter followers jumped from a little over 400 to more than 900 in just six weeks. Nearly 50% of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s online conversation actually happened via Twitter, showing the power of social networking in brand awareness. MWW Group’s blogger outreach has yielded more than 60 blog hits, in addition to the conversation through word-of-mouth.

Today, we were pleased to see AdAge publish an analysis of our campaign versus Teleflora, focusing on how each campaign readied each company in anticipation of Mother’s Day.

According to reporter Antony Young, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM rated high on most categories, including social media, online, website and mobile, winning 4 out of a total of 5 stars, compared to Teleflora’s 2.5 stars.

Young says, “1-800-Flower wins my bouquet for best media strategy. In almost all categories we evaluated, it delivered a comprehensive and creative solution. Clearly, they had a bigger budget, but they did more than just out-voice Teleflora, they outplayed them. Its communications came across as well integrated — every part of the plan seemed to build off all the other parts. It used digital not only to drive traffic to their site, but play a role in building the brand. Its social media strategy was well-executed and scalable. Teleflora had some high points — notably its TV creative, magazines and well targeted online programs. But as a challenger brand in the category, it needed to be much better than just solid to compete.”

Kudos to the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM team!