The Brand Convection Model

Social media is about more than just listening to your communities, you have to care about what they say. The Brand Convection Model details the process and thinking around how brands can take masses of online conversations, filter them into intelligence and use this information to effect practical changes within the business that will lead to more sales and happier customers.

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Listen

If you listen hard enough, you’ll find the signal within all the noise.

More really is more when it comes to listening. You want to listen to as many online conversations as your budget can afford. It isn’t only the feedback that comes directly to your social profiles that matters, you should be tracking all brand mentions, direct or indirect, misspellings, joke names, industry key words and competitors. You should also be creating content that drives conversation around specific areas you want to investigate. This conversation will be higher value and will require less filtering. The more raw material you start with the better the insights. Once you’ve tapped into as many conversations as possible, start filtering out any content that is irrelevant or contains absolutely no value. Look for conversations that are constructive and reasonable, offer opinions and recommendations, clearly identify positive or negative issues and are from a credible source.

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Feedback

Humans are still the best tools for evaluating other humans.

Now that you have a usable set of information you need to work through the feedback phase, which is to organise the feedback (both positive and negative) into formats that make business sense. The end results of effecting business change can only happen if the information is specific and relevant to the individual people within the business who receive it. A variety of online tools can help you filter and sort through the conversations and your community and reputation managers will help to make the feedback specific to a product / service / location / person / department etc. Finally the feedback must be differentiated between quick and long fixes, the source of the feedback must be specified, red flags raised and competitor movements listed.

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Interrogate

It is not enough to know the what; you have to know the why.

Turn the data into intelligence by interrogating it from every angle possible. The more questions you can ask the more answers you will have. The series of questions you ask will turn unhelpful online conversations into insightful gems. At the very least you should interrogate (in a gentle way) your community managers, the customers who gave feedback, the business units and responsible employees. Ask why over and over until you get to the true answer. Only by asking questions can you get to the pieces of intelligence that hide in every conversation.

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Learn

There’s a big difference between knowing a weakness exists and knowing how to fix it.

You now have a usable, highly valuable set of information that has been distilled and interrogated, it’s time to figure out the lessons. While single pieces of information can contain lessons, the greatest insights come by comparing information. By building visual representations of the information over time you will be able to spot trends and patterns, recognise recurring issues and map the build up of complaints in certain areas. By mapping your information you will be able to identify and define the key lessons that were hidden in all of those thousands of online conversations.

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Report

Don’t talk to me about problems, talk to me about solutions.

The eBook not only analyses the feedback and summarises the lessons, it also converts the feedback and lessons into strategic recommendations to the business. The recommendations can cover any aspect of the business, from product changes to service advancements, however, the recommendations must be realistic, actionable, understandable, measurable, repeatable and aligned to the overall business objectives.

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Solutions

It is not enough to know what is wrong; you have to know how to fix it.

We’re now through the listening phase and into the caring phase. Listening is easy, interrogating and developing intelligence is harder, and caring enough to define and implement changes within your business is harder still. In order to accurately map out solutions you need to understand the background and root cause of the problem, the legacy of the problem and if the company has attempted to solve this problem in the past, why it failed, what lessons were learned. There’s no point in repeating actions that have failed in the past.

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Actions

Actions, not words, are the best way to show you care.

Taking action is the most important part of becoming a social business. The insights contained in the report are only of value if the organisation leverages them to effect real change. When looking at defining the actions you need to split the actions into segments based on the ease and speed of implementing the action. It’s helpful to separate immediately addressable quick fixes and longer term ‘large’ fixes, and sort these according to how or who will address them, whether it’s by geography, product, department or person.

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Processes

It isn’t enough to solve a problem once, you must solve it forever.

Very rarely do problems happen in isolation. If it happens once it can happen again which is why you can’t only directly solve the complaining customer’s individual problem, you need to understand how and where this problem could happen elsewhere and build systems and process to prevent any future occurrences of this problem. As you roll these systems out you must track and monitor their success. The last thing you want is for the system to become the problem.

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Cultural Changes

It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.

It isn’t enough for your marketing team to care. Your entire company needs to understand how socially connected customers have evolved and how your company needs to evolve to keep up with your customers. You can change your systems and your agency but if you can’t change the culture of your people they will be the weak link. Systems, processes, training and new hires must all work together to evolve the culture of your business into one that sees your social communities as more than just an audience. It’s not enough to simply listen, you have to care.

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