My previous post described how every company can benefit from using ChatterBox. Today’s post will focus on a specific type of company: the Public Relations (PR) firm.
Before we begin, let’s quickly review what ChatterBox is all about. A ChatterBox is a shared team workspace built around a Twitter search. The Twitter search itself can be a simple list of terms and users, or it can use advanced search operators. Once you have Tweets coming into your ChatterBox, you can:
- Categorize them
- Tag them
- Prioritize them
- Assign them to other users who have access to the ChatterBox
- Respond to them via the Twitter handle of your choosing
- Extract what’s happening in the ChatterBox via RSS
You can create as many ChatterBoxes as you want, and you can share them with whomever you want. The Tweets that get pulled into a ChatterBox are searchable and accessible for as long as you’d like them to be.
When we began sharing our ChatterBox concept with folks outside of the company, we noticed a consistent pattern of people predicting that PR firms would love the app. These predictions were based on a couple of key features:
- Each ChatterBox is its own universe that can be shared with a unique set of users. This fits perfectly with a PR firm that’s assigning a distinct set of users to listen and engage on behalf of clients.
- A ChatterBox can be shared with anyone. All you need to provide is an e-mail address. We don’t mandate that the person you’re sharing with must be part of your company or your e-mail domain. This is what makes sharing with clients, partners, and service providers possible.
Let’s get one thing settled before I continue- I am not a PR professional or an expert on what makes a good PR firm. Most of the information I know about the industry comes from blogs (PerkettPRsuasion.com is a favorite of mine) and Twitter. But part of the inspiration for ChatterBox came from this Jeremiah Owyang post in the fall of last year. While commenting on what PR firms can do to enhance existing functions, Jeremiah writes:
Be a filter for clients: There’s a tremendous amount of noise now being created, creating an opportunity for PR folks to filter, sort, and prioritize what matters. You’ll need both access and understanding of brand monitoring tools as well as the ability to see patterns in the noise.
ChatterBox certainly enables the filtering that Jeremiah mentions. As an added benefit PR professionals can manage multiple clients through a single interface, ensuring that the proper internal AND external users are able to participate.
Let’s use the example of Roger, a PR professional who is assigned to listen and engage on behalf of 3 companies:
- MufflerStop, an auto service center
- Ready2Wear, a women’s apparel designer
- WarningTrack, a sports bar chain
Roger works with a team of 3 other Account Managers to services these 3 clients. He’s able to easily listen, engage, and collaborate on behalf of these clients through ChatterBox. Here’s an example of how easy it is to set this up:
ChatterBox #1: MufflerStop
- Roger creates a ChatterBox focused on generic mentions of the word “muffler” and his client, MufflerStop. He configures Category values of ‘Positive’, ‘Neutral’, and ‘Negative’ for sentiment analysis, and ‘Opportunity’ for any chances to promote his client.
- He sets Respond From to ‘Users can only respond from a Twitter account of my choosing’ and enters the credentials for MufflerStop’s Twitter handle.
- He invites fellow Account Manager Sara to participate in the ChatterBox. He also invites Charles, who is MufflerStop’s Community Manager.
After the save, Roger has created a workspace that provides full visibility to his client.
ChatterBox #2: Ready2Wear
- Roger creates a ChatterBox focused on what’s happening in the women’s apparel space. His client is brand new, so their approach is to learn by listening and engage with people who show a passion for their space and their company. He enters search terms like ‘handbag’, ‘purse’, and of course their name ‘Ready2Wear’.
- He sets Respond From to ‘Users can respond from any Twitter account’ since Ready2Wear prefers to respond from multiple handles depending on the topic area.
- He invites his colleague Sam as well as two members of Ready2Wear’s customer care staff to participate.
After the save, Roger also sends an RSS feed for assigned items from the ChatterBox to Ready2Wear’s CEO Jennifer, who is an avid fan of Google Reader. This way Jennifer is able to keep track of interactions with the click of a button.
ChatterBox #3: WarningTrack
- WarningTrack is primarily interested in tracking the Twitter promotions they run. To start, Roger creates a ChatterBox with a single search term (’WarningTrack’). In the future they intend to take advantage of Twitter’s location-based search to engage with sports fans in the areas where they have restaurant locations.
- He sets Respond From so that all responses will originate from the WarningTrack Twitter handle.
- He invites his colleague Sherry to participate. WarningTrack’s community team prefers to monitor progress via RSS feed readers on their iPhones.
Using ChatterBox, Roger & Sherry will be able to tag and track the success of the promotions and contests they’ve recommended to WarningTrack.
That’s all there is to it! In just a few minutes time, Roger has:
- Created collaborative workspaces for 3 clients
- Simplified client management by sharing access to the ChatterBoxes with only those colleagues who are responsible for the accounts
- Given his clients access to monitor progress through either of 2 channels: direct participation or RSS
- Minimized the chance of overlap when multiple people are listening and engaging from a single Twitter handle
I’d be interested to hear from PR folks about the use case I just described. Are there additional feature you’d like to see that are specific to your industry? Please leave a comment or reach out to me with your ideas on Twitter!
Posted by: Chad Northrup | August 27, 2009 | | categories: Using ChatterBox | tags: archive, categorize, ChatterBox, Collaboration, engage, iPhone, Jeremiah Owyang, listen, location, monitor, PerkettPR, pr, public relations, reputation, search, sentiment, Social Media, tag, tweet, Twitter, workspace
So, ChatterBox has been in private beta now for three weeks and things are rolling along nicely. We’ve been learning a lot since the launch to our beta users. So far the feedback has been very positive and we have been lucky to be able to attend some great events.
After our initial launch at the 140 Twitter Conference (#140tc), we were invited to attend Mass Innovation Nights. A huge thanks to Bobbie Carlton for organizing such a great event and for giving us the opportunity to participate. All I can say is that I am never going anywhere without a few ChatterBox monkeys. People love screaming monkeys. If you create a ChatterBox for the #MIN3 hash tag and the word monkey, you’ll see what I mean. I think I might need to invest in the Super Fly Monkey company!
As with all initial releases, there are some things that we need to improve in the application. I thought it might be useful to share some of these items. We’re working on planning the next release now. Aside from addressing some of the general usability items from this release (and some exciting enhancements), we want to make sure that your feedback is included. So, please send us anything you can think of and we’ll start to factor it in to our plans.
So, here’s the list of things we have found so far:
1. Expect a lot more data than you think!
So, believe or not, there happens to be quite of bit of content on Twitter. During 140tc, we opened up private beta invites for 24 hours and got about 70 users signing up to use the app. After 24 hours we found that about 10% of the users on the system had already accounted for 1.2 million conversations pulled-in from Twitter. Now for some that may not seem like much, but for us those numbers made us a little concerned. We want to have quite a few users on the system and to scale up to that amount of capacity over a short period of time will pose a challenge for us self-funded start-ups. So, we decided to make a couple of changes to the application. The first change was to put in a limit for the number of conversations a ChatterBox will pull in for that day. This helps by limiting content for very broad ChatterBoxes that may not be in use regularly. We also added an option to restart the ChatterBox conversation collection if needed.
Personally, I don’t think this solution is optimal. We’ll be improving this over the next release to give you a more “live” feel to the information and to try to take out limitations like this one from the system.
2. The workflow isn’t working out exactly as planned
We love the fact that when a conversation comes in to a ChatterBox, it’s easy to put that conversation into workflow and categorize and tag, prioritize and assign those conversations to other ChatterBox participants. The UI makes it easy to get to the conversations, respond and then update them with additional information. However, it’s not so easy to see which items you have already reviewed and also which items have been updated since you last looked at that ChatterBox. While we have a number in the ChatterBox tab for “untouched” conversations, 
it’s not all that clear what that number means. Also, in looking at the conversations, it’s not blatantly obvious which items have been updated since we present the conversations in a collapsed view. Notifications fall into the same camp. We underestimated the value of email notifications. That’s quickly become the #1 piece of feedback on our UserVoice forum. So, RSS is great, but email is better for notifications. We’ll get that addressed.
3. It’s a team app with a limited sense of team
One of the main ChatterBox features we’re proud of is the ability to collaborate with other members of a team in the management of conversations. It’s a powerful capability that let’s teams see the full trail of conversations and respond easily from a single account (or individual accounts if desired). One problem. You can’t really tell who is participating with you in the ChatterBox. If you are the admin of the ChatterBox, you can see who you have invited and who has accepted, but as a participant, the only way to really know is to look in the assignment drop-down. This will change in the next version. It was one of those oversights that will be addressed.
Well, that’s all for now. Keep the feedback rolling-in. We’re very excited to have people using the app and we’re on a mission to make sure that it provides the best user experience possible.
Thanks!
Charlie
Posted by: charlie | June 12, 2009 | | categories: ChatterBox Info | tags: ChatterBox, Collaboration, Social Media, Twitter
There is no doubt that Social CRM is the future for traditional CRM. CRM tools are swarming to build functionality to monitor your brand across the various social networks. There are lots of great blog articles out there discussing this topic, including posts by Jeremiah Owyang (”The Future of Twitter: Social CRM”), Brent Leary (”Social CRM in Pictures….and Words” and “Social CRM: Not Your Father’s Customer Relationship Management“) and many others. I really like Brent’s definition of Social CRM which is as follows:
“Social CRM adds a whole new dimension to the traditional view of customer relationship management. The focus is undoubtedly on people and not technology. It’s about joining the ongoing conversations our customers and prospects are already engaged in — not trying to control them.”
The key statement to me from Brent’s post is about joining ongoing conversations and the value in building relationships. However, what is missing here is the fact that this is still CRM, social or not. The ultimate goal is to manage your customers, partners, etc. to obtain the most value you can out of that relationship and to build that 360 degree view of the customer. Don’t get me wrong. CRM has value. Social media needs a different approach, though. Companies should come to these conversations as participants and not overseers using tools to monitor the social networks to help fix a customer’s problem or clean-up after a PR debacle. The real answer is to give users the tools to manage these relationships and not just the organizations themselves. Users should have the capability to share information with their vendors on their terms and not the vendor’s terms. These tools should still give vendors the ability to easily participate in those conversations and extract the value needed from them, but I do not see the same value for Twitter providing the Social CRM capabilities that Jeremiah outlines. Twitter’s value comes from the users and not the brands. Twitter should instead focus on providing improved capabilities for users to be able to express their preferences and issues. Admittedly, I’m still not sure how you monetize this any more that what they have now, though.
So, is this Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)? Doc Searls leads ProjectVRM at Harvard University to support the development of VRM tools and methodologies. Wikipedia defines VRM as:
“VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. VRM describes a set of tools, technologies and services that help individuals go to market and manage relationships with vendors. In turn, vendors who align themselves to these tools, technologies and services will have the opportunity to build better relationships with their customers.”
Sounds like it. Or does it? VRM advocates putting tools in the user’s hands. VRM also describes transactions, relationships, conversations, user-based control, etc. Paul Greenberg presents a good case for VRM and Social CRM being the same thing in his “Vendor Relationship Management: Jumpin’ On The Three Wheeled Bandwagon” post. VRM, however, has its own set of challenges. In Graham Hill’s post on “Four Fallacies of Vendor Relationship Management” he outlines a strong set of reason why VRM is overly extreme. Ultimately it comes down to the management of information and whether or not the VRM economic model works. So, perhaps VRM is not the answer for social media either. This makes sense if Social CRM is the same as VRM as Paul describes.
So what capabilities really are needed for social media tools so that both users and organizations can get the most value. Here is my high-level feature list for this new type of tool:
- Designed for users and not organizations
- Organizations should be equal participants in the conversations and not observers
- Inherently free so that everyone can gain value with value-added services provided on top of the core system
- Exposes interfaces so that organizations can extract data approved by the users
- Social network independent
Perhaps this is what Graham calls “Customer Managed Relationships?” I’m not sure. I do know that this type of tool needs to focus on collaboration more than just relationship management. Perhaps the best name for this is Social Collaboration Management instead.
Todd
Posted by: Todd Clayton | April 28, 2009 | | categories: Social Media | tags: Collaboration, reputation, social CRM, Social Media
