Social marketing research, social media monitoring social media analytics have become essential tools for companies seeking to identify issues and correct misperceptions in real time. 

Reputation management on global scale requires a combination of social media monitoring software and human intelligence.

Online issues management and sentiment analysis may depend on instant analysis of Twitter conversations around keywords, but human common sense is needed to interpret emotion, sarcasm and slang.  

Social networking research tools represent the latest evolution in the offering of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group (@DowJonesInsight), a descendant of Factiva media monitoring service, according to Martin Murtland, vice president and managing director of Solutions for Communications Professionals at Dow Jones Enterprise Media. 

Dow Jones today offers a suite of high-tech, customizable analysis function, including social media monitoring   Issues management is also nothing new for Cindy Droog (@cindydroog), APR, senior public relations specialist in Corporate Communications at Amway (@Amway) a Dow Jones client using its services to field an ongoing reputation study in 19 markets per quarter. Amway, along with other direct sales giants like Avon and Mary Kay, have long battled against misperceptions, including that they are akin to illegal pyramid schemes.

What has changed is that Amway now instantly learns of negative conversations in the fifty countries it does business in, and engages with factual arguments in hopes of changing minds in a public forum. They also have learned the value of going beyond reaching out to “influencers” with 1,000 followers in Twitter to engaging those with ten followers, if they think they can win that person over. Cindy and Martin sat down with us in DC at the PRSA International Conference.    

Show Notes:  

2:41 Media monitoring is just the first of four product elements built by Dow Jones for marketing and PR customers that fall under the acronym MADE (for communications success).  M is for media monitoring (Factiva tradition), A for analysis (Dow Jones Insight, listening platform covers social media research and analysis), d for discover (research-on-demand services for issue discovery) and E for engagement via internal communications (a newsletter publishing platform called Editorial Workbench) and external communications (Dow Jones Media Relations Manager, a news-enabled media contact database).  

4:39 Reputation management forms the core of Dow Jones’ value to its client Amway, which uses the Dow Jones product suite to run a reputation study based on real-time conversations in Russia, China, Japan and Germany. Social media strategy for the company is then shaped by observation of the human-technology mix and culture in each market.  

5:54 Web 2.0 research now represents a main method by which Amway achieves opinion mining in the search for brand misperceptions. As the “grandfather” of direct selling, Amway and its PR function are continually grappling with the traditional misperception that the company represents a “pyramid scheme.” The later phrase continues to represent a central keyword in Amway/Dow Jones complex searches along with strategic qualifiers.   

7:23 Sentiment analysis efforts must be efficient to be valuable, a fact that has required Dow Jones technologies to become ever better judges of relevancy.  Without combining the technology with real people in each country, especially as a company seeks to listen to conversations in several languages, true relevancy cannot be measured. Google Translate and Tweetdeck’s translation tools have value for a topline read, but nuances will be caught by native speakers,...