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
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
Well, one of my assistants tipped me off to an interesting debate going on between 37signals and Get Satisfaction. You can find the details here:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-else
To summarize and over simplify, 37signals is mad because Get Satisfaction had a page out there where people were asking questions about their products. It was not obvious (enough) to some that this was not an official channel for support from 37signals and as such 37signals reputation was damaged because of this. They’re probably right.
However, should we be surprised? You could easily substitute Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. and the post would have looked exactly the same. The reality is that people will talk about you, your company, your products, etc. whether you like it or not. The answer is not to try and control these conversations, but to effectively participate in them. You need tools to better manage these conversations regardless of the platform. I am not at all ashamed to tell you is this is exactly what we are trying to help you do. With ChatterBox we want to let you find these conversations and participate even if it is not coming through an official channel.
There are a lot of comments on the 37signals post on both sides. It is worth a read. Just to set the record straight, I am a huge fan of both companies. That’s not easy for a monkey like me to say.
P.S.: I thought about adding some nice battling logos here, but with all the litigation talks on that thread, I figured it was best not to do that. So, I used the mic logo instead. If you don’t like it, sue me. Um wait. Don’t do that. Please send me a polite email offline requesting to take it down.
P.P.S.: 37signals please don’t be mad. We’re not even out the door yet and I would hate to end up on the wrong side of one of your posts… I’ll send over some ripe bananas if that will help.
- Charlie
Update: Get Satisfaction created a blog post on the topic as well: http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/kissing-and-making-up-with-37signals/
Update 2: There is now also an open letter to Jason Fried: http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-jason-fried/
Update 3: 37signals posted a response on their earlier posting: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1661-follow-up-on-get-satisfaction-or-else
–
Charlie Chatterbox
Celebrity Mascot
Posted by: charlie | April 1, 2009 | | categories: Social Media | tags: crowdsource, customer support, reputation
