A great word-of-mouth and social-media program involves both great outreach and great response. For a lot of brands, the outreach part comes more naturally — but it’s the feedback, the raw reviews and the unedited conversations that are still a new challenge.
In her class at GasPedal’s Word of Mouth Supergenius conference, Converseon’s Lindsay Lebresco, who spent nearly seven years leading Graco’s community engagement, shared her strategies for responding to feedback, posts, comments and reviews. A few of her big ideas:
- Great response begins with great listening. Lindsay recommends the basics like Google Alerts, Twitter, Technorati, RSS and social search engines to focus on key categories like brand sentiment, who’s talking, context, community discussions, trends and hot topics.
- Who responds is one of the most important decisions you make. As Lindsay says, your online representatives should be passionate, have a deep understanding of your products and your company, and really understand what those you’re engaging with are experiencing.
- Ignore the trolls. There are going to be trolls in every community. It happens in the mom blogger community, and it happens in every community. There will be trolls that don’t deserve a response, and there will be real customers who do. You learn this from listening.
If you like this presentation, check out our upcoming Word of Mouth Supergenius event in New York on July 20.