Liveworld

At LiveWorld, with our history rooted in real-time online interaction and online events, we’ve always taken a 24-hour, global point of view. As our clients deal with the proliferation of customer content flowing their way, we’re seeing numerous pain points emerge:

• Need for brand protection through timely interaction consistent with customer expectations and values
• Exponentially expanding customer inquiry
• Need to derive insight from massive social data coming from widely distributed sources
• Customers moving across social channels
• Inefficient, manual processes for monitoring and responding

Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group (disclosure: LiveWorld is a client) has a new report on Social Business Readiness that lays out what successful companies are doing to deal with such challenges. From the report (and keeping in mind that my quoting it doesn’t mean Jeremiah’s endorsing what I have to say next):

1. Foundation: First, develop a business plan and put governance in place.
2. Safety: Then, get organized by anointing a team and process to deal with crises.
3. Formation: Next, connect business units to increase coordination and reduce duplication.
4. Enablement: Grow by letting them prosper – give business units the support and flexibility to reach goals.
5. Enlightenment: Finally, weave real-time market response into business processes and planning.

The Altimeter report points out that fully 75% of recent social media crises might have been averted if companies had properly prepared by following the above blueprint (with lots of useful details provided  — read it!). Part of such preparation, the report notes, is to have a team of people monitoring social input during and beyond business hours (including nights, weekends, and holidays).
My intent here is blatantly pro-LiveWorld, in support of our moderation services: The LiveWorld virtual workforce can provide front-end screening for all the social input flooding into company processes. Human eyes, trained to the issues a company defines as critical to its goals, can assess meaning from customer input, triage judiciously, and send info and issues on to the appropriate business unit (or provide company approved responses) — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, around the globe, in dozens of languages.
We have technology to support that effort or we can use someone else’s, and business hours are all hours to us. It’s a service that can help with process and workflow issues associated with today’s social media reality, and we can extend it even further by analyzing slices of the incoming activity and providing specific, actionable insights. Essentially, we can help fill in the blanks left by top-level, positive-negative reporting; provide centralized, leveraged, always-on, front-line troops; and productively route relevant issues and queries across the corporate organization.
If we can help with your social media monitoring or moderating needs, call us at 1-800-301-9507.