[This is part of a series of recaps on this Sennheiser Social Intelligence report]
Surveys are usually touted as being anonymous. Nothing you say can be traced back to you, so you can feel free to complain, gush, or troll to your heart’s content. Customers who don’t file complaints individually but express their frustration in anonymous surveys probably won’t get their concerns fixed right away.
This is why being able to zero in on individual authors of posts is pretty useful. Customer service can address, in real time, a disgruntled customer who posts something like “Sennheiser earphones broke again. Gonna switch to Beats.”
Keeping enemies closer is a good thing, but don’t forget about your friends. Over half of conversation about Sennheiser is from Twitter, so that’s a good place to start. The study filtered for positive authors and sorted by Klout score (something that measures a person’s online influence) in order to come up with some “top advocates” for Sennheiser.
Sennheiser could partner up with them, especially if one of the goals is to get more positive conversation going in order to grow Sennheiser’s buzz. There could even be special offers that are only valid for people following these advocates. These kinds of techniques make me think of word-of-mouth marketing. The only difference is that in the 21st century, words aren’t travelling by grapevine anymore.
Michael Osofsky
Ideas still in the works and the latest thinking on Innovation and Netnography from Michael Osofsky, NetBase Chief Innovation Officer.
