Too Much Listening: Where is the Collaboration?
You can glean a lot of valuable data from mechanically analyzing the social stream. You can listen in, engage and counterpunch with a comment or a tweet. If you’re aggressive and swift, you may even shift sentiment a degree or two. However, monitoring has so little value as anything but a starting point for a reactive marketing strategy, we have to ask why tools that do it seem to be the only ones that exist. Why is monitoring and reflexively reacting the priority?
The social web is driving a revolution. But it is not the fact that we can now communicate with customers and prospects socially that defines this revolution. It is the fact that we can now collaborate with customers and prospects... as well as with business colleagues, marketing partners, and advocates socially.
In her excellent recent article for Advertising Age, Kunur Patel outlined the struggles big-name social media pioneers have faced trying to implement effective social media content creation and approval processes.
One of the companies, Ford, stumbled on something really remarkable.