I don't know if this will become a standard business practice, but interesting nonetheless. And obviously corporate DHL isn't about to jump in the fray on this page to pimp their company (though plenty of employees have).
Plugging into the word on the Web. As the power and reach of Internet bloggers continues to expand worldwide, companies are discovering that it is smart to pay attention to what they are saying and to cultivate better relationships | Chicago Tribune
the Internet and new media are rewriting the old rules of public relations for companies large and small. .... While the Internet has come to represent instant communication, there are so many messages out there about so many topics that companies risk losing control of their image, said Walker and others. This realization has brought a wake-up call to those responsible for protecting corporate images and dealing with customers.It also has brought some opportunities for researchers who are devising new software programs to do a better job of monitoring what is said about whom on the Web. For example, researchers at Northwestern University's intelligent-information computer lab have developed a program they plan to commercialize this year that helps a business keep track of its online reputation, said Kristian Hammond, co-director of the lab.
...
Dell has dozens of employees combing the Web looking for comments and contacting customers who express themselves in English, Spanish and Chinese, Pearson said. It launched an “idea storm,” soliciting suggestions from customers, which resulted in, among other things, a decision to offer the open source Linux operating system with Dell computers.Several other companies have learned to their sorrow the newfound power that angry consumers may harness on the Internet. A few years ago, after a New York City resident's locked bicycle was stolen, he decided the Kryptonite bicycle lock company, part of Ingersoll Rand Co., had ignored the problem.
yadda yadda. In all seriousness, bloggers tend to think themselves as more influential than they really are, as Thom Brodeur says:
Thom Brodeur, senior vice president for global strategy with Market Wire, a communications service, said the power of bloggers can be overstated.“I'm not convinced that bloggers in and of themselves can completely wreck a company,” he said.
But if you get an email from Wal-Mart that looks like a press release, and you post it, consider yourself compromised just as much as the corporate media you often criticize is corrupted (ever see a hard-hitting news story about General Electric's pollution record on NBC, for instance?).
Again, Thom Brodeur:
Brodeur advises his clients to cultivate popular bloggers in much the same way they traditionally have sought to make contact with reporters for newspapers, TV and other media.Companies can hire services to monitor their mentions online, much as they might hire a clipping service to retrieve published articles, Brodeur said, but this poses a problem for a small business.
“Do you want to pay for a service that you may or may not show up in?” he said. “You've got to make this inexpensive for small and midsized companies to afford.”
realistically, how many companies are going to devote resources detecting what a sixteen year old's MySpace says about her experience at Best Buy? Only if the reports are made into pretty graphs and colorful charts, and statistically valid, would a CFO of a large corporation bother. I smell opportunity.
That's where new technology, like Northwestern's software, can come into play. “If you think of all the ways you can say something nice or nasty about someone and enumerate them all, you can feed that into a Google search and will probably find something,” said Hammond, the NU lab's co-director. “But that could take a long time.”To automate such searches, NU researchers made computers read online reviews to learn the many ways something can be praised or panned. This enables the computer program to ask Google and other search engines for information in a smart way to find online comments about a company.
“There are systems now that can give you charts saying you had 20 percent negative comments, 30 percent positive and the rest neutral,” said Hammond. “But that doesn't get you very far.
”We want to give you five examples of seriously negative comments -- boring design, the controls are rickety. That's something you can do something about. That's what you see people blogging about. We want to provide qualitative information, not just quantitative.“
Walker, the communications consultant, said several firms are developing software to improve a small-business manager's ability to monitor online conversations about his firm.
”We're testing technology that will suck up the data and grade the sentiment of the comments as positive, negative or neutral,“ said Walker.
Perhaps the FBI and the TIA ought to privatize their massive civilian surveillance database, release it as open source? Ahem.
Tags: blogosphere, /Business, /surveillance, /Techno-babble, /Technology, /technorati
