FT REPORT – DIGITAL BUSINESS:

How to find out what’s being said about you

By Dan Ilett
Published: Jun 13, 2007

Ewan MacLeod was angry. He had been charged for sending an e-mail from a mobile phone
via a package that claimed to offer free, unlimited data usage.

Months after he had written about the experience on his blog, Mr MacLeod was surprised to
receive a call from the mobile phone company, 3, inviting him to meet chief finance officer
Frank Sixt. Apparently, someone had posted his comments on the company’s blog, set up to
promote the free service.

“Any big business is a faceless wonder, but a blog gives you the power to talk to someone in a
company,” says Mr MacLeod, author of SMS Text News. “I had a call saying, ‘Frank would like
to meet you.’ I was entirely delighted with the result.”

Mr MacLeod was proved correct, refunded and invited to post a blog on the company’s website,
but the story highlights how companies can struggle to monitor the huge amount of feedback
published about them.

“Getting feedback in the consumer market is very important,” says David Ward, manager for
Nikon Europe’s marketing systems. “We’re trying to co-ordinate it on a global basis. But how do
you satisfy the customer all over – globally or locally? With feedback, we can find out what the
customer is really looking for.”

Blogs, forums, wikis and even home-made TV clips posted on websites such as YouTube, have
given everyone the power to publish. So how can companies find out what is being said about
them? And how can they use feedback to their advantage?

“When you solicit feedback, you should act on it,” says Greg Gianforte, chief executive of
RightNow Technologies “With a twice-annual survey, by the time you realise a customer is
upset, it’s too late. If it’s in the mind of the consumer, it should be on the mind of the company.
“As consumers have been empowered, Web 2.0 [the internet's growing networking platform]
creates communities that are independent of the company. Companies must find ways of
facilitating and influencing that community.”

Some companies have tried this approach. As Mr MacLeod points out, 3 is one of the many
that have tried to control the flow of comments about them.

There is potential for this to backfire, however, especially if a company is found to be editing or
censoring text. In 2005, Dell, the computer maker, was criticised when it was accused of
closing its customer support forums in an attempt to silence negative feedback.

“Companies need to keep a close eye on what’s written about them,” says David Bowen, an
FT.com columnist and senior consultant for BowenCraggs, a website advisory firm. “They are
interested in rumours, but the thing they have to watch is if someone has spotted a problem
with a product or customer service.”

Whatever the feedback, each company will have different uses for it – but this is commonly to
fine-tune a product or service. RightNow Technologies advocates pooling the most recent
feedback, then sharing it in the company, so fast decisions can be made.

Collecting information can be time-consuming and some larger companies are investing heavy
resources to understand the kind of comments being made.

“Big PR agencies are now scanning blogs,” adds Mr Bowen. “I know one very large company
that has 30 students permanently scanning the internet [for their brand name].”

In China, people have gone one step further – because labour is cheap, companies can afford
to hire people to write blogs for them and instigate feedback sessions in a neutral environment.
But Mr Bowen believes this approach can easily go wrong.

“It’s ill-advised for a company to enter into a blog discussion,” he says. “And you must not
correct your company entry on Wikipedia. There are agencies, however, that specialise in
nobbling blogs. And the thing about blogs is that there are only a few that are influential.”
Companies without access to a team of students, however, have a number of steps they can
take. Google offers an alert service that automatically tells a company if certain phrases appear
in web news or discussion forums. Technoratti.com allows companies to search for blogs
concerning them.

“In its simplest form, you do this by looking at Google to identify the forums where you think the
conversations will take place,” says David Crane, CEO of 23 – a web feedback monitoring
company. “Blogs tend to get all the headlines, but only account for about 20 per cent of user
content. The forums and discussions are where the most useful stuff is.”

Another site, Sutori.com is an online community that measures consumers’ experience of
brands. While sites like this are easy to search through because the content is based on text,
as yet there is no popular technology to scan through the content of audio and visual content -
that still relies on text labelling.

There are also other technology approaches to collecting instant feedback – UK coach company
National Express, for example, invites passengers to send text messages of their feedback
while riding the bus. A company called Fizzback collects this data, passes it on to National
Express and replies with an adaptive response…says Karen Beasley, its head of customer service.

“If the rating is not high, we ask the customer if they would like us to call them.

On occasions we have had engineers out to check the air conditioning as a result of this, for example.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007