Online Reputation Management (ORM) has become an integral part of customer servicing in today’s date, however, many marketers still fail to understand how not doing it properly can negatively affect the company’s business. In fact a lot of sales (up-selling, cross-selling and even new prospects) are now dependent on how well a company interacts with their customers. “Word of mouth”, which is known to be one of the most effective ways of doing marketing, can be achieved using social media.
Measuring the performance on social media is another important aspect. While running a marketing campaign and measuring its performance seems to be a simpler task, reporting related to ORM can be pretty challenging. In fact it is in many ways different from the general reporting. With ORM, it is not just the performance of the brand that comes under consideration, but also aspects like how positively or negatively the brand has been spoken about, what are the high priority issues faced by the customers, what time of the day do the customers talk about your brand the most, what is the response time your servicing agents are taking to respond to messages online, and the list continues.
Here, I will take you through the entire process of generating an explicit Online Reputation Management report.
1. If you are a big brand and you are handling customer service on social media, you must be using a CRM platform, which helps track the people who are complaining or raising queries about your product/service and replying to them. If the platform in use also allows you to generate reports, it might be helpful.
2. Reporting is a tedious process; it requires generation figurative estimates and graphical representations for all aspects. The basic requirements being, total mentions, total number of cases responded to and the total number or actions taken/cases closed successfully.
Total Mentions for Online Reputation Management
3. The next step is to identify the days/time frames when there was an increase in the conversations about your brand, which should also be backed with data about what led to the increase in conversation. (This can be food for thought for the marketing team)
4. Your report should also contain the sentiment perception towards your brand, i.e. whether your brand is being talked positively/negatively about, which should be presented in graphical representations providing percentage representations for each.
Sentiment Analysis Graph
5. Along with providing what is being spoken about, your report should also be able to tell you who is speaking about you and where. Influencers (people with a higher following, like celebrities) and people who complain repetitively (who might also be spammers) should be identified for further actions.
Social Media Mention Distribution
6. A categorically divided list of complaint types and the issues/topics being spoken about during a particular time frame helps understand where the brand is going and how successful are the marketing initiatives of the brand turning out to be.
7. Measuring the performance of your agents is another important aspect of reporting. Measuring in terms of how many messages were responded to by each agent as well as whose performance is better based on the number of errors made/responses made, helps in future internal endeavors of the company.
This should be coupled with the average time taken to respond to messages and the first response time, in comparison to competitor brands.
8. ORM reports should help the brand managers understand the perception of the brand, by their customers, better. Hence it should also provide detailed analysis of which form of content/strategy is working best for them and what can be the other variations that the brand can adopt based on competitor analysis.
Competitor Analysis Graph
9. As much as it is important to understand the brand it is equally important to also understand the fans. This can be done through gender analysis and generating a count about which fan is talking the most about your brand.
10. Another important aspect of reporting is to provide suggestions and guidelines to the brand about what strategy/content is in trend and helping competitors garner better attention. This can help the marketing team of the brand understand the market better and hence design their future campaigns based on the inputs provided by the report.
A complete Online Reputation Management report contains both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the brand, helping develop effective strategies for future campaigns.