Of Trust & Reputation in Social CRM

Today, Guido Oswald touches on the topic of Trust in a Customer Relationship Model 2.0 in his blog on CRM 2.0, spurred by the recent brouhaha over policy changes in Facebook & its eventual roll back.

I had touched upon Trust & Reputation in Social Media a few months back during the (in)famous launch of twitterrank.

Human race is pretty fickle actually when it comes to trust. It doesn't take much to lose trust in someone. That someone would have gone to any lengths to build a reputation & trust. But that doesn't matter.

And since a brand's reputation means a lot in terms of business (goodwill) it makes sense to manage it. Its pretty difficult in the web 2.0 & social media world which has proliferated abundantly and is myriad. Hence there are online reputation management tools available for that very same purpose. [Read this PDF on ORM for more]

Trust is an important aspect to manage ones online/digital reputation. And in cases of inadvertent destruction of trust/reputation, like the recent Facebook event, the best a person/brand/entity can do is to retract gracefully, explain your situation & apologise for any inconvenience caused. Facebook did that, twitterrank did that too.

However, one cannot do that if they do not even listen to what the community is saying. So yes, listen first & then talk. :) And if no one is talking about you yet, ask first & then talk! ;)

Tools like SM2 from Techrigy & Radian 6 do help in "keeping your ear to the ground". They help you collate information from across the web 2.0 world pertaining to your brand (and also your competition, which makes good sense too). Using sentiment analysis & other natural language processing (NLP) techniques, they even provide you some analysis of the tone of the conversations around your brand. With improvements in NLP, expect these sentiment analysis tools to get only more useful in determining the sentiment of the market about your brand.

Once you are aware of the market sentiment about your brand you can plan to affect changes to these sentiments, which my collegues at work call as sentiment correction. Sentiment correction is nothing but the actions that you take to change the sentiments about your brand in the social media. You might want to change it from negative to positive or positive to more positive.

For want of a better term, I stick with the term Sentiment Correction for now. Correction tends to make one feel that you are righting a wrong. However, there need not be any wrong sentiments for you to decide to change the sentiments in the market.

So, the three steps to manage your reputation:

1. Listen to what your customers are saying about you.
(Image source: http://flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/243814203/)

2. Analyse the sentiments behind what is being talked about your brand.
(Image source: http://flickr.com/photos/71172892@N00/3024639616/)

3. Influence the market's sentiment through relevant conversations.
(Image source: http://flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/243814203/)