Monitoring Your Customers on Social Media: A Bad Idea?

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Though businesses are still fleshing out the particulars of effective social media design, a virtual consensus has emerged in support of the notion that monitoring must be at the heart of all such strategies.

Social, at its core, is about getting closer to the customer, and maintaining a keen awareness of what customers are thinking—and how they are communicating those thoughts throughout the marketplace—is essential for developing that closeness.

Ensconced in the fabric of social media "best practices," nary a single customer management author, speaker, consultant or advisor refrains from urging brands to aggressively—and creatively—monitor audience dialogue. That seemingly endless compulsion, which has thrust "social monitoring" to the top of many a corporate to-do list, has also created millions of dollars in business opportunity for those solution providers who make such monitoring more feasible.

Ironically, for all the emphasis on monitoring customers, it appears far less effort has been devoted to actually monitoring how customers feel about social media monitoring.

And as it turns out, customers are apparently far less warm to monitoring than "best practice" wizards would have brands believe.

A new study by JD Power & Associates reveals a significant disconnect between what business leaders and customers perceive the optimal brand presence on social media.

Numerous recent reports about poor social media response rate, for instance, argued that brands should respond—and quickly—to any and all mentions on social media. Customers, however, believe such responses should be restricted to communication that is directed specifically at the brand (such as Tweets to the brand’s account or posts on its official Facebook page). For roughly 65% of customers (with levels peaking at 67.0% for 18-24s and bottoming at 63.5% for 45-54s), mining and responding to the full gamut of social media dialogue is not a best practice.

And for between 38.1% (25-34s) and 53.8% (55s and up) of customers, such monitoring is downright "intrusive." Only between 36.8% (55s and up) and 56.9% (45-54s), meanwhile, believe brands should monitor to improve their services; as many as 58.5% of customers (and no less than 40.9%) believe that customers should be able to talk about companies without representatives for those companies listening in.

No matter how the specific research question was framed, the significant doubt regarding the importance, value and morality of social media monitoring is unavoidable. Customers do not necessarily expect a response to non-direct dialogue, and, in fact, believe responses would be inappropriate in certain situations.

The overall trend in the data—that of a dampened enthusiasm towards the notion of monitoring—speaks to a broader question about how customers presently perceive "social media."

When beginning their forays into social, many brands focused on the fact that customers now had a platform for instantly communicating thoughts to the masses. Suddenly, one customer’s frustration could become a talking point for millions more.

Customers might know that social offers this potential, but they evidently also expect some sort of privacy and control when it comes to their online dialogue. The "personal" nature of social media—connecting with friends and coworkers on networks like Facebook—often shelters customers from the reality of how open the channel can be, and that leads to an overstated sense of privacy.

Suddenly, customers believe themselves to have the option of whether or not their tales of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction get communicated back to the brand. And that option is theirs alone; the company does not get to determine whether or not it wants to monitor and address that customer’s feedback.

This does, nonetheless, create quite the catch-22. When sharing feedback, customers are offering definitive insight into what worked and did not work about a particular experience. But if brands do not have access to this knowledge, how can they properly focus on the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in the future? How can they get closer to the customer and deliver the right experience?

Overworked brands might not want to hear it, but the answer is context.

Making brands aware that they need to monitor and respond to customers was an important first-step, but as the channel evolves, it appears brands will need to remain flexible to the whims of customers. When a customer anticipates a response, the brand better be ready with a hasty, complete response. When a customer is venting to friends and does not want the brand involved, the brand needs to keep some distance, even if it chooses to "monitor" that dialogue for relevant insights.

In some cases, that context will be easy. Many customers will state their response expectations with abundant clarity, and at that point, the only challenge is assuring the company responds appropriately.

But other, more complicated cases will pose challenges for social customer care representatives. More than sixty percent of customers expect a response to an outright complaint, but when it comes to softer dialogue, there is no definitive formula for determining whether a positive or negative comment is more likely to require a response.

According to the JD Power study, consumers are slightly more inclined to believe brands should respond to negative comments than positive ones, but the differential is minimal—and not enough to produce a concrete social media response strategy.

In such cases, the organization will need to evaluate the context of the comment, the implicit (or explicit) expectation of resolution, trends within the brand’s target audience and the specific nature of that customer’s relationship with the brand. Only then can it be confident in its response protocol.

But because customers expect hasty responses on social, the window for conducting such an analysis is very small. And that means that monitoring—even if not relevant or desired in the case of all customers—must be taut enough to give brands a quick, yet exhaustive portrait of the situation.

Monitoring is not inherently bad, but companies must remember that they are monitoring for customers and not just monitoring them. Customer needs, above all, are what direct a social media strategy.

This article explained a key challenge facing customer management professionals. At our 4^th Social Media for Customer Management Summit, our free virtual event series, leading speakers will provide strategies for solving those problems. Click here to secure your spot.