Online monitoring is now firmly on many brands’ radar but opinions on how it should be implemented remain divided. Take for example, The Mail’s decision to stop moderating its forum recently; NMA’s readers are almost equally split (52%/48%) on whether this is a good or bad thing.
The confusion continues when it comes to which department is meant to handle it. While marketing can push from a brand and SEO perspective they aren’t geared up to handle the negative comments coming the other way from disgruntled customers. Equally we wouldn’t want to leave it to IT to deal with it as happened in the early days of the web.
One solution adopted by NTL recently was to task their telephone customer service team to spend an element of their time trawling for newly posted complaints online and responding to them. This makes a lot of sense – they have the skill, they have the resource and with more complaints moving online, it transfers their efforts to an area that needs it.
Whether they’re uncovering all the complaints this way though is up for debate. Some suppliers have sprung up specialising in this area but it’s hard to see how their software improves on established search engines. Some talk of ‘deep search’ but is ‘deep’ going to throw up the most important results brands would be most keen to deal with?
Free help is at hand from Google who quietly added some very useful buttons to web results pages enabling anyone to search specifically in forums, reviews or videos – something that would have come in very handy for a company like Domino Pizza recently.
Doing online monitoring well is, like many emerging areas of online marketing, an exercise in applied common sense and web know how. With no proven path to follow, brands must largely make their own way or take advice from an agency the required mix of expertise.
While The Mail has decided they can live without consistent monitoring on their forum, it is at least a considered position. The main risk for other online entities is not having a position at all and no clear strategy for coping with damaging brand comments inevitably coming their way.