John Caddell's blog

Twitter is an interesting beast. I absolutely believe in its value and potential but as you point out, it really requires human interaction and involvement to make the most of it.Thank you so much for the priceless information. I found it so useful. :smile:

Looking forward to hearing your followup post John. More and more companies are recognizing the need to listen to social media but the key benefit definitely lies in active listening - participating in the communities that they serve.

Oh yes and thanks for passing on John's Radian6 shout out.

Cheers. David

Hi John,

You're right that while we talk a lot about the methods and tools for listening, lots of companies are asking about what's next. Specifically, how they take the insights and information they collect to engage with their community.

We're exploring some best practices ourselves and with our clients to share with our community, and I'll be looking forward to your insights on the topic as well.

Cheers,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community | Radian6
@AmberCadabra

Amber, thanks for your comments. I enjoy following your tweets.

I work with companies to gather stories about how their customers use products and interact with customer service, then help them "catalyze" those stories into patterns that can illuminate customer values, and latent problems/issues. Companies can use this information to improve their marketing messages, enhance their products, or fix issues with customer service or operations. Gathering stories is usually done today by interviewing select customers (for B2B clients with relatively few customers) or by sampling calls to the contact center and finding stories in those calls.

The big promise for social media from my perspective is that these stories are now becoming available and easy to find and gather, using tools like Radian6. It's a relatively straightforward process to sort through collected data; what's still up in the air is how much information can be determined from small tweets. My experience working with them over the past several months is that they cannot be read by machine, but can easily be interpreted by a human.

At this point, I am looking for a company wanting to pilot a project using collected tweets and/or blog posts and comments. If you are aware of anyone who might want to be the first to try this out, let me know.

regards, John

John Caddell

Original Message
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Subject: [caddellinsightgroupblog] Re: Customers are talking: many ways small businesses can listen

John,

Twitter is an interesting beast. I absolutely believe in its value and potential but as you point out, it really requires human interaction and involvement to make the most of it. I don't think it's something that's ever going to be fully automated; in fact, the key element to making social media work in the enterprise is re-instituting the human factor in communications.

I'm all for analysis and seeking out trends through social media, and I think it's fantastic that you're working with companies to help collect and make the most of the stories through social media. I'll be interested to hear more about your work to collect tweets and blog posts/comments to help frame those stories. More and more companies need to be tapping the potential of storytelling instead of messaging. :)

Cheers,
Amber