• Listening to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalizing what you hear to improve your business.
• Speaking to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
• Caring about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs..
• Sharing your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
• Building relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.

I had a meeting with a client today who had never thought of marketing in this context before, so I thought it was a good time to reiterate it here.

There is endless advice on how to engage with customers, how to build relationships with influencers and how to use social media for marketing. These bits of advice and best practices are usually written for a general audience of marketing or business professionals and is intended as general knowledge, not as specific suggested courses of action for your business.

The amount of each participation element your company should engage in to meet your goals will be specific to your company, taking into account your industry, your goals, your resources, your product roadmap, your current customer base, your brand personality and corporate culture, etc.

Not every company needs to put the same amount of focus on each participation element, nor is there a set percentage that is standard best practice for the amount of resources to devote to each element. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing a series of blog posts to cover each element that should help give you guidance on determining how much your company should be devoting to Listening, Speaking, Caring, Sharing and Building Relationships.

My Idiom Strategies partners and I have been working our way through the long list of social media monitoring tools that have suddenly emerged–many of which are mentioned in a Social Media Today posting. So far we’ve either been seriously under-impressed by features or overly-impressed by functionality, but at an unrealistic price. (We hope to get around to summarizing our impressions in a later blog post.)

Today, I’d like to share an experience I had yesterday with someone from one of these companies reaching out to me because of a comment I made on Twitter. For full disclosure I’ll explain that I made 2 tweets yesterday–feel free to see the original tweets http://twitter.com/chrissfife and follow future flubs… I mean comments

Tweet 1:

Bad demo by Reputrack. Service sounds good,  sales guy couldn’t sell water to dehydrated camel. Maybe I’ll find a senior person, maybe not.

Tweet 2:

Demoing thru list of monitoring tools http://bit.ly/BO3zY Definite no to Converseon Too $ for monitoring brand & sounds like they smam

My Apologies:

I sincerely extend my apologies to both companies and encourage anyone interested in these types of monitoring tools to request a demo. Just because they weren’t going to work for what we are looking for, does not give me cause to be rude. Honestly, I have no excuse. I was in a bad mood and made flubs. I don’t apologize for having an opinion about their offerings, but simple that I wasn’t being polite in my comments about them.

1) Reputrack. The monitoring tool actually sounded very interesting and could possibly have worked for monitoring the market conversation (different than just monitoring social media for brand mentions). My comment about the sales person was totally uncalled for. It was based on my opinion that I didn’t feel the company/sales person showed any interest in feedback on how the service could be used in a context they hadn’t thought of and showed no interest in exploring anything if we didn’t want the out of the box option–in such an emerging market space I consider this a major missed opportunity for their company or any company who takes an approach like this. Regardless, I could have tweeted something that addressed that rather than the rude comment about the salesman.

2) Converseon. This one is a far more interesting a case. Though my tweet was in no way personal I did make a very blatant claim that they smam without qualifying that the demo sounded like there product could be “used” for smam. I stand by my opinion that they are too expensive and that the demo I was given made it sound like there tool can be used for smam (social media spam–pasting marketing bullet points and product pitches in social media outlets similar to posting banner ads on websites), but in hindsight it would have been more polite to be more objective.

So, in participating in the market conversation after such flubs, I chose to face it head on. I sent an apology tweet. I will be emailing each company with an apology and a link to this post and I raised the question of “How do you correct conversation flubs?” in the Idiomatic: Conversation Marketing group on LinkedIn, in which I again apologized and shared what had happened and how I was going to address it.

Now the interesting stuff… I received an email from Converseon:

Hi Christine — we haven’t met yet, but i saw your tweet today regarding Converseon following a discussion our team had with you.

For Conversation Mining, as im sure you’re finding, there’s a wide range of solutions and quality of solutions.  It ranges from the most basic “clipping type” service to deep levels of sentiment analysis for insights.  We tend to play on the higher end and find that the mantra — you get what you pay for — tends to be a truism in the space.   I hope you find the right fit for your organization.

As for the comment about “spamming,” im not sure what the basis of this was.   Converseon has been in business since 2001 – making us one of the oldest and most reputatble social media agencies — and hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards.   We are governing members of WOMMA and a member of the ethics committee.  Our work for leading brands has won numerous awards for their effectiveness, innovation  and ethical approach.    We hold our reputation in high regard.    I think it’s important if comments are made about us “spamming” that they are based on some level of factual basis.   Any type of spamming approach is diametrically opposed to all we stand for and do.

While we are not a good fit for partnership, I do hope that discussions regarding each others capabilities are based on fact and mutual respect for each others achievements in the industry.

I am, of course, available to discuss further directly with you if you’d like.

I wish your agency the best success in the marketplace.

My analysis of this conversation interaction.

1. They’re listening! That’s great. Companies should be listening to what is being said about them and that’s why these tools and services are emerging right now.
2. They faced negative user-generated content head on. Fantastic! They didn’t shy away, but sought me out and sent me a direct message that wasn’t canned or copy and pasted. This really shows they were listening closely.
3. They made a stand and shared their views. Super props for having conviction! In saying that they are opposed to spam and wanting me to know the activities they’re involved in to illustrate their convictions is commendable.
4. Missed Opportunity? Though the email is essentially polite and wishing us well at the end, I think they missed a great opportunity to accept feedback for future improvements, better understand their audience and share their companies true convictions.

In my first read through, I felt they were more concerned that I’m spreading false truths than in why I ended up with that impression after a demo. Hmmmmm? I would have felt better if they’d shown concern for why I ended up with that impression they don’t want consumers to have. Obviously my thoughts on the product weren’t fantastic, but I would have been very impressed if they had indicated they were sorry that I took that impression away from the demo as it isn’t what they are trying to do. And it would have made me feel important as a consumer if they’d have asked me for feedback on the demo so they can see if they need to make any messaging adjustments or refresh the sales team’s approach to ensure clearity of their services.  I would have happily replied to explain why I developed the impression I did. I would also have explained that I didn’t write “spam,” I wrote “smam” which I defined above and perhaps their views on that are just different than ours.

I do wish them all the best in their practice and I’m sure their clients receive great benefits from their work. I highly recommend that anyone looking at these tools contact both companies for a demo.

My 2-cents of advice for companies trying to engage in their market conversation: 1) try not to let a bad mood for the day make you bitchy in your participation; and 2) approach every negative comment about your company/product as an opportunity to improve, better understand your audience and share your companies true convictions.