The corporate world has long known the power of the voice of the customer.  This started decades ago with traditional paper feedback forms but has evolved to include Net Promoter programs (that measure advocacy), customer satisfaction surveys and online communities that all give your customers a voice.  Now thanks to the prevalence of social media in Australia, listening to the blogosphere can inform you almost instantly of your successes and failings.  And, if integrated with your CRM system, y

When organisations are considering whether to build a branded online community, the most common reason I hear for deciding against this strategy is a concern about opening their brand up to criticism.
 
We agree that providing a platform for your customers to complain in public is a risk but this needs to be balanced with the risk of not providing the platform.  The proliferation of social networks and forums that provide this platform means that these complaints are already out there and this negative word of mouth can be very powerful.

Facebook has once again raised the ire of privacy advocates with the wider roll-out of facial recognition software that invites people to tag photos of their friends in the wildly popular social network.
 

The world of the market researcher has been challenged by the social media phenomenon. That's the polite interpretation. "Turned upside down" is probably closer to the mark. The ability for more research to be done, more quickly and less expensively with willing online participants seems irresistible and often makes traditional research look, well, just irrelevant. So it is not surprising that we have seen traditional market researchers bunker down into a defensive position.

As practitioners in the customer feedback game, we are only too aware of customer voices falling on deaf ears. And with the explosion of social media the imbalance between "user generated content" vs "enterprise generated action" has become the herculean challenge. Which is why any mechanism that enables an organisation to listen more effectively is, well frankly, gold.

This TED talk, Listening to Global Voices by Ethan Zuckerman is something of wake-up call. It is very easy for us - especially the digital us - to imagine that a global internet infrastructure means that we are all somehow automatically connected and gaining a broader worldview.

Resonate is pleased to announce the appointment of Darren Sharp as Senior Consultant, Community Management. Darren brings with him years of consulting and research experience in social media, online communities and user-led innovation. He has been particularly active most recently in the Gov 2.0 space working with a range of high-profile public sector clients on community engagement projects. Over to Darren who'd like to share his thoughts on some of the latest news related to customer co-creation activities. Jeff

The software industry and its acolytes have always fascinated me - even moreso as some of its fundamental tenets are challenged. So it was with great interest that I read Gartner's take on so-called "social software". And to be truthful, I was pleasantly surprised with the clarity of their analysis. Afterall, this is an emerging market dominated by the behaviour of that most unpredictable stakeholder - you & I - in our various social guises of customer, employee etc....

One phenomenon that no longer surprises us (though it still puzzles us in some product categories) is the considerable effort that some people will put into an online community that interests them.

For those of us involved in building healthy online communities, or indeed anyone just curious of where the social web will go, the emerging science of social networks is fascinating. Tim touched on an aspect of this his last post and as practitioners we are all learning - both from academia (see Duncan Watts Six Degrees - the Science of Connected Age) and from real lessons on the ground.