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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/325830
68 BCBusiness July 2014 responds immediately. "We respond to anything, positive or negative," says Kate Pasieka, a senior communication specialist for ICBC. "Even when people are swearing or starting out in a very negative vein, we sometimes see them turn around. Sometimes they're sur- prised we respond in the first place." Most importantly, they're engaging the customer in a dialogue where it wants to dialogue (namely, on Twitter)—and not pushing them into more traditional forums. It's this same strategy that Telus put to use when it countered the "Thomas" tweet with its meatball joke. "We see the opportunity, when folks on Twitter are negative about the company, to come back in a friendly way in an attempt to disarm them, help them and hope- fully win them over," says Erin Dermer, director of media relations and social media for Telus, where 18 full-time team members engage with customers on the company's social channels. The Telus user community is so active online, in fact, the company had to create a new platform for it. When their service is interrupted or their PVR instructions prove too mysterious, many Telus customers turn to Twit- ter—but, as is the nature of the beast, responses with advice from Telus often cycle off the page before other needy customers have the chance to benefit from it. Last summer, Telus addressed this problem by launching Telus Neigh- bourhood, a dedicated interactive website organized around forums for customers to ask—and answer—ques- tions, sometimes with the help of a moderator, sometimes just among each other. The launch of the site was heav- ily promoted through the company's social media channels and its own web- site, though it seems to have become self-sustaining: more than 2,000 forum threads—in subjects ranging from everything from monthly usage to " PVR skipping to end of show when I hit skip"—have been developed by over 11,000 users. "The content is driven by the community," says Dermer, who notes that, as of March, the site had reduced calls by more than 28,000, sav- ing the company more than $235,000 in operating expenses. A nd that, increasingly, is the key message about managing your reputation online. It's not just a soft skill, but something that translates into hard numbers: reduced calls, fewer make- goods and money saved. Of course, social media isn't a magic bullet—as SFU's Chow-White points out, a com- pany needs to analyze what the online efforts mean. "We need to think, 'What are the things that work, and what didn't work?,' rather than just jumping on everything," he says. "You need to take an objective view of how to connect your activities in social media—like your sales or staffing." HootSuite's Brookes agrees. "Busi- nesses should look to track analytics that tie directly to their goals. The fact of the matter is, social is not a layer independent of other business goals," she says. "It is a powerful driver of these goals, and should be set up accordingly." Social media engagement also offers companies an opportunity to get a deeper understanding of both their business and their customer—the so- called "big data" analysis that's become the buzzword in both classrooms and boardrooms. By becoming familiar with tools such as Google Analytics, says Chow-White, companies have the opportunity to analyze what's working (and what's not). "If you're asking simple questions when you send out a post— like who reads it, where did they read it, the nature of the content you write and when is that content successful—it can say a lot about where you are and who you are." That means more than just measuring the number of retweets of one of your posts, but really look- ing at what kinds of posts are working, who your most loyal customers are and engaging them. ICBC's Bains notes that her company has used its social media feed as a way to better understand how they need to improve their information dispersal. "It's a great opportunity to get insight into cus- tomers' minds and what we could better address," she explains. "Is there content that's missing online, or FAQs we should be addressing? It definitely started out as brand management, but now we're bet- ter prepared to address the concerns of our customers." ■ p062-069-OnlineReps_july.indd 68 2014-05-29 3:27 PM