Says Connie Bensen on socialmediatoday:
How social media can be both the cause and cure of a corporate crisis.
by Stephen Dodd and Terry Foster
These are tough questions, prompted by increasingly frequent social media-related corporate crises, including the recent ones of Domino's Pizza, Horizon, United Airlines, and Amazon. In particular, Nokia's recent problems in Iran illustrate the new realities of corporate reputation.
Nokia: Caught in the middle
Nokia supplied Iran with technology that could be used to manage, intercept, and interpret digital traffic. After the recent hotly disputed elections, the Iranian government used this technology to identify and locate those it felt were fanning the fire against their perceived interests.
The result was a global consumer backlash against Nokia. Twitter and other social media rapidly spread negative comments. The commercial consequences were and continue to be significant, with consumers canceling services and switching to alternative devices. (See this article in last month's Measurement Standard for more details.)
Talk about being caught between the consumer and an abusive user!
Is Nokia really to blame? The technology in question is not, in and of itself, dangerous or harmful. It is likely that Nokia or its competitors have implemented the same technology in other countries as well as Iran. Although they supplied the technology, they cannot control, influence, or be responsible for how it is used once it's in the client's hands.
But that's not the reality of social media-driven public opinion.
How can Nokia resolve this?
In response to criticism, Nokia tried traditional crisis control, explaining carefully what it did and did not do. But, as for the other companies mentioned above, standard corporate protocol was not effective.
A key lesson here is that when people become passionate about an issue, opinions quickly polarize and reason rarely alters their stance.
The social web: Crisis cause and cure
The social web's ability to facilitate mass dissemination of information -- good, bad, positive, negative, right or wrong -- forces companies to take a new approach to addressing this kind of situation. Social media's ability to eliminate standard corporate-speak is the key to its ability to defuse crisis situations.
As Amber Naslund of Radian6 states, "So many of us have been waiting for years for a communication approach for business that doesn't feel contrived and scripted."
The power of the apology
People generally seem to be able to accept issues created by uncontrollable consequences when they are offered an apology. They typically will not tolerate corporate belligerence and deflection. That just creates further polarization.
If done correctly, an apology will not only stop further damage to your brand but may even increase its value in the long run. Rieva Lesonsky's blog post persuasively addresses the power of the apology: "...many entrepreneurs think they're somehow above apologizing. That attitude can easily drive you out of business."
Nokia could have avoided the deepening crisis by initially -- carefully, tactfully -- apologizing, rather than taking the standard defensive approach. Recent Ford, Pepsi, Southwest Airlines, and Coca-Cola experiences are terrific examples of how and why the apology approach can be very effective.
In a crisis situation like Nokia faced, the best course of action is to take Amber and Rieva's advice and apologize, before the crisis escalates further and irreversible damage is done to your business.
Human
nature is such that is it not difficult to get a positive and empathetic
reaction to a tactful apology. Therein lies the new power of the
social web to redeem your company as a good corporate citizen. 
Steve
Dodd is a Consultant with Muirfield Consulting.
http://www.twitter.com/steve_dodd
Terry
Foster is CEO of SignUp Media.
http://www.twitter.com/terry_foster
Chris
Near's
Measurement Toolbox
BingTweets,
Scoopler, CrowdEye, TweetFeel, and Topsy
by Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners
This is the third in Chris Near's series of reviews of online Twitter analysis tools:
Whether you're an at-home startup or a global Fortune 500 company, brand monitoring is becoming a necessity. With Twitter quickly becoming one of the most popular media platforms in the world there is a lot of interest in seeing how one's company or brand is being mentioned there. The easiest tool to use for this is an online Twitter search engine.
New technologies are making these tools more common and convenient, but, with so many options available, deciding which is best is not an easy task. For this article I selected five Twitter search engines, based on a very scientific process -- the first five new ones that came up in a Google search. I've analyzed each one in terms of accuracy, reach, and overall functionality.
The short answer: If all you want to do is gather keyword or brand mentions from Twitter, then don't bother with these, just use Twitter's internal search engine at search.Twitter.com.
Here are the details:
BingTweets
BingTweets is Microsoft's mashup of their new Bing search engine and Twitter search. They claim that this search engine enables users to see "deeper" with real-time information into the hottest topics on Twitter and the web. Besides simultaneously pulling up a scrolling list of current tweets along with related Bing search results, the site also offers a window showing the most popular Twitter topics of the day:
BingTweets is far from exhaustive and comes off more as a side-note, with the true intent being to showcase Bing's search abilities. The site is good for getting a brief glimpse into the link between current tweets and Bing search results. It's got no advanced search options, sparse results, and only the ability to search back to midnight of the current day.
Conclusion: BingTweets clearly is not designed to be a research tool, but is rather a simple way for Microsoft to jump on the Twitter bandwagon and gain some notoriety for their new Bing search engine.
Scoopler
The newest trend in Twitter search engines is to search Twitter and other social media simultaneously. Scoopler keyword searches index Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, and others. The goal is to give users the most relevant results, updated in real time among a variety of sources. The Scoopler homepage shows you a history of your recent searches as well as a list of "hot" topics and lets you break it all down by video, links, images, or all content:
Sounds great in theory, but in practice the results are disappointing. A search using the word "@kdpaine," pulled up 10 tweets from the past two and a half days. The same search in search.Twitter.com, pulled up over 45 tweets from the past 24 hours alone. It had no advanced search option that I could find.
Conclusion: The ability to search a number of social media types at once is nice, but if you're only pulling up a fraction of the relevant results, then what's the point?
CrowdEye
CrowdEye was created by former Microsoft search engine team leader Ken Moss and wife Becca. At first glance I really liked what this site offered. It lets you search tweets in real time within the past 3 days. You search by key term and it pulls up the related tweets as well as other online links, much like BingTweets (see above). It also builds an instant bar chart detailing the volume of tweets by hour containing your keyword. The site has a filter function and below the bar chart it shows a word cloud with the most popular Twitter topics:
This site was my favorite until I decided to compare their search results with those of other sites. Again I put in the keyword "@kdpaine." My bar chart showed that there were 10 tweets in the last 24 hours with that keyword. Scoopler only gave me 10 in the past 2 and a half days, so CrowdEye outperformed them. But it still wasn't anywhere close to search.Twitter.com.
CrowdEye has a feedback link so I emailed them to see why my results were so varied. To his credit, Ken Moss got back to me almost immediately. Here's what he said:
Thanks for trying CrowdEye and for your feedback. We definitely are working towards getting more comprehensiveness in our tweet stream and have a lot of ideas. In our early beta, we've focused more on extracting actionable data out of the stream of tweets -- which is certainly more helpful on more common words like: http://crowdeye.com/viewer.aspx?query=social+media
Conclusion: This site has a lot of potential and I look forward to using it once their search stream is more comprehensive. This is one to keep your eye on.
TweetFeel
TweetFeel is the simplest looking of all the search engines. The front page reminds me of Google's homepage with just a box to enter your keyword and below that a few links to hot Twitter topics:
Of the five sites I researched for this article, this was the only one to offer sentiment analysis. (For more on Twitter sentiment analyzers, see my recent Measurement Standard article "5 Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed" for reviews of Twitter Search, Social Mention, Twendz, Twitter Sentiment, and Twitrratr.)
I entered my keyword, "@kdpaine," and it came back with 18 results marked green or red depending on sentiment. For search that's OK, compared to the others reviewed here, but not close to search.Twitter.com. Interestingly, there is only positive and negative. No in-between for this site. The site doesn't show the date or time of the post so you have no idea how recent or old they are without opening the link. Every search also came with a disclaimer saying that these results may be incomplete due to too much traffic. A little worrisome; makes me wonder how I could ever be sure any of my searches were complete.
One last note: The TweetFeel sentiment analysis is borderline ridiculous. First, they give everything either a positive or negative label. Can't some posts simply be neutral? Second, their sentiment analysis was highly inaccurate. In the small sample I looked at, more than half of them were wrongly categorized. For example, this tweet was labeled negative: "@kdpaine Wow, the Durham garden is exquisite! & your Berlin garden will be too (love me some walls!) What happens when it rains? Good work!"
Conclusion: TweetFeel would be better off taking out the sentiment function until they work out the bugs.
Topsy
Comparing Topsy to the above search engines really isn't fair. It is not a search engine designed to search tweets, but rather it searches your keywords and ranks the results based on the number of tweets related to your subject, i.e., it is a traditional search engine powered by tweets. Topsy results are based on things that people link to when they are talking about your search term(s). Results can be sorted by month, week, day, hour, or all.
Conclusion: Topsy is targeted more towards searching all relevant conversations through links and keywords rather than searching streams of tweets. Although you can look at all of the related tweets and from there you can look at the links all of those tweets posted. Topsy also ranks Twitterers of high influence.
Overall Conclusions
These tools represent some very interesting technology being developed, and new ways to monitor your brand within Twitter and other media types. But if your purpose is strictly to gather keyword or brand mentions from Twitter, then I'm not sure that any of these tools would currently be that helpful since none of them came close to matching Twitter's internal search engine at search.Twitter.com. However, if you aren't as worried about accuracy and are focusing more on finding out overall tones and themes in Twitter and other media types, then sites like CrowdEye, BingTweets, and Scoopler could be of use.
And
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Chris
Near is Director of Research
for KDPaine & Partners. Chris recently
graduated with his master's in communications
and currently devotes most of his time to
measuring PR and developing social media
methodologies. That is, of course, when he's
not at home tending to his lovely wife, Valerie,
or chasing around his tireless two year-old
son, Brendan.
Measuring Twitter
Tweeting
About Twitter
What does Twitter offer
that you don't already get through email or Facebook?
by Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners
For the previous issue of The Measurement Standard, I wrote two articles about online tools for measuring Twitter. (See "5 Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed," and "Which Twitter Profile Analysis Tool Rules the Nest?") During and since that writing, I have used Twitter for research and follow-up, and the process has demonstrated the value of this new medium.
So, what's so great about Twitter? What does it offer that you don't already get through your email or Facebook accounts? Here are a few examples:
Tweets are heard around the world
Many media have limited reach. My emails, for instance, normally reach a select and predetermined audience. And only my "friends" get to look at what I post on my Facebook wall. But with Twitter, anything I post can be read by, well, pretty much anyone, especially if I use keywords that companies are specifically tracking.
For example, on May 28th I tweeted, "In case you didn't already know, the sentiment functions on search.twitter.com and Social Mention are virtually useless."
Three days later I received a direct response from Jon Cianciullo, the creator of Social Mention: "Can you explain what problems you are having with the sentiment analysis on Social Mention?"
We went back and forth a few times, with him reconciling various problems that I had come across in my usage of his site. We later exchanged emails in which he went on to further address my issues, and even let me in on some plans for site improvements. My impression of socialmention.com had gone from "useless" to useful and my admiration for its creator quickly grew as he personally attempted to resolve my issues with his site.
Would this have happened without Twitter? I think I can safely say that it would not. With the ability for anyone to post virtually anything they want, and for companies to track and manage exactly what's being said about them, there is a whole new world available to provide realtime customer service and make and change opinions where it otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
The speed of Tweet
In another example, I posted that "Socialmention.com beat Radian6 and search.twitter.com in a Twitter keyword search." In barely more than an hour I was contacted by Amber Naslund, Director of Community for Radian6, asking me for more information on my experience and trying to figure out how their product could better serve me. (Jon Cianciullo of Social Mention also used that post as a sort of advertisement, by retweeting through his account.)
Keep in mind, I'm fairly new to the Twitter world and at the time of these occurrences I was following less than 50 people and had less than 50 followers, which is relatively small compared to other users with thousands of followers or more. And yet, even with my small status I'm being contacted directly by CEOs and Directors with immediate responses.
Twitter lessons
These experiences have taught me a couple of things. First, Twitter really is a relevant medium that can be used for more than just telling people that you're "Glad it's Friday," or that you "Hope Kevin's spring break rocks!" It's a forum for sharing ideas, problems, and solutions all in real time. It's a meeting ground where connections that formerly would have been impossible can now come to life in a matter of seconds.
Second,
Twitter is a great place to track what people are saying
about your brand or company. As in my experiences, if a company is vigilant,
then they can instantly track negative comments and conduct damage
control
before things get out of control. Twitter is also a viable forum
for finding new clients or potential partners through simple keyword
searches.
For a medium that limits your conversations to 140 characters at
a time, it sure has opened up a lot of new lines of communication. 
Chris
Near is Director of Research for KDPaine & Partners.
Chris recently graduated with his master's in communications
and currently devotes most of his time to measuring PR and
developing social media methodologies. That is, of course,
when he's not at home tending to his lovely wife, Valerie,
or chasing around his tireless two year-old son, Brendan.
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