In  a letter to Greenpeace, Nestlé chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe highlighted how the two organisations could work together to address the problem of rainforest destruction and joined the Coalition on Palm Oil. Great to see Nestlé finally listened and is now no doubt more activey managing its social profiles and reputation. The spotlight is now on the financial services sector, in particular the HSBC.

By investing in Sinar Mas, Greenpeace claims the bank is supporting a destructive industry contradicting  claims made in its sustainability statements on its website. As companies make their sustainable development positions more widely available online they must be prepared to be more closely scrutinised.

Brands taking sustainable development seriously can gain credibility and support by joining organisations such as the Global Reporting Initiative designed to help multinationals standardise their sustainability reporting and practices through industry wide guidelines.

Greenpeace got a great result with Nestlé but the best result for a brand is to be ahead of the environmentalists. By embracing sustainability driven innovation, they have a chance to lead rather than react. As the Nestle versus Greenpeace story shows the currency and relevancy of this term, coined by Arthur D. Little consultants in 2005, is only increasing  as time passes.

Andrey Ternovskiy, the 17 year old high school student from Moscow, who created Chat Roulette could have a massive hit on his hands given the  novelty of the concept and the impressive numbers it has reached in such a short amount of time.

At this stage, it covers some of its costs through Google Adsense but to scale up and attract big brands,  it would need to address its edginess. It is simply too risque except for the bravest of brands or those too cheap to invest in a more serious engagement strategy, although, the approach depicted below works quite nicely for Harley Davidson.

Perhaps a licensing model will emerge whereby brands can offer access to a white labeled version of the software to its members. This method could work particularly well for online dating agencies although monitoring behaviour could prove to be a challenge.  It could also be an innovative tool for market researchers, sociologists and anthropologists wishing to connect with vast random samples of humanity assuming  it maintains its  current popularity trajectory.

Fascinating  to see where technology leads us when put in the hands of a  precocious  teenager and also how Chat Roulette might be applied in the future.

In trying to suppress Greenpeace’s campaign, Nestle has presented itself as naive and also draconian. The critical feedback it has received on it’s Facebook page and across the web proves it. Just what the people behind the brand were trying to achieve remains unclear,  although it is unlikely they set out to demonstrate their fundamental misunderstanding of the medium.

A more positive outcome can be still achieved if Nestle adapt their approach quickly. It would appear like many brands they jumped on the social media bandwagon without understanding the inherent power shift that underpins the social web.

It is now time for Nestle to listen and learn. Only by assessing the key concerns of their online audience can they devise an appropriate strategy. If they don’t want (or are not prepared) to have real engagement and dialogue with their stakeholders, they should not have set up shop in a social space or tried to mess around with democracy. Trying to control the uncontrollable is never going to work and establishing a social presence without an appropriate value proposition has opened them up to serious reputation damage and potentially diminished sales.

A sensible move would now be to use their Facebook page to start talking about what they are doing to address Greenpeace and others’ concerns about their social and environmental impacts.

Greenpeace has a history of digital campaigning including its CoalFinger campaign designed to raise awareness and encourage action against the coal industry. Whilst it puts a lot of energy and resource into its digital campaigns, Greenpeace could improve their effectiveness through a more sustained approach.

An additional requirement was identified by Marshall Sponder (aka as the Web Metrics Guru - yes!) at the event. It was  for the standardisation of buzz metrics/measurement. It was a point well made and one that I support. Thanks so much to everyone who viewed and favourited this presentation and I look forward to further conversations on this topic.

This subject is fascinating and I feel like I’m just scatching the surface with this presentation - so watch this space for more mullings on the topic.

It claims to monitor buzz in real time (if that is the case, they have succeeded where many others have failed) and will integrate other types of data from back end systems like CRM, customer service and sales to show correlations. Not surprisingly it depends on other Microsoft technologies like Silverlight and Sharepoint.

The effective integration of other types of data is bound to help buzz monitoring become more mainstreamed. Microsoft is not the only company taking this approach.  Some industry players like Jive are partnering with existing providers like Radian 6, whilst others like Sales Force are working to integrate social media monitoring into their offer.

Exciting developments are certainly taking place. Watch this space for further updates.

I’ve been doing ‘buzz research’ using a combination of free and licensed tools for a number of years now and I thought it might be useful to share a few thoughts and experiences given all the ‘buzz about buzz’, in particular, the growing interest in professional listening platforms.

Let me begin by saying, my starting point is has always been scepticism regarding the ability of machines to do the job on their own. Whilst I am  fascinated with Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity concept, I believe we are still a long way away from computers being smarter than humans. The current limitations of listening platforms prove it.

So the question for me has always been which tool is the best minimiser of the need for human intervention, not which one will replace it. The tools on the market today are simply not sophisticated enough, if they ever will be, to deliver full automation. And are we really ready for it, if they could?

The list below provides an overview of what I consider to be the top strengths and weaknesses of the majority of tools on the market.

Strengths: They help make sense of the data

• Provide sophisticated dashboards with easy to use reporting features
• Facilitate early detection of problematic issues which could negatively affect product sales or share price
• Provide a ‘temperature check’ on a wide range of issues and metrics
• Increasingly help manage engagement through response management tools and workflows

Weaknesses: They are machines not humans

• Automated sentiment is not always accurate due to natural language processing limitations
  
• They do not capture everything that is relevant although they get better with training
• Assessing who is influential is hotly debated and contestable with no standard methodology in place across providers
• We need to supplement tools with human analysts to properly vet and classify the data

In spite of their limitations, they are incredibly useful tools for what they do pick up. It is then up to the human analysts and planners to make sense of it all. The ability to identify problems and consequently take corrective action before an issue becomes a crisis reaching national or global proportions makes these tools entirely worthwhile.

But early detection of customer experience and service problems is not the only reason to have a listening service in place, other reasons include identifying who is influential in conversations about your brand, your share of those converversations,  and where they are taking place. You just need to be aware that you need to factor in time to vet and classify the data if you are going to fully reap the benefits.

If you are interested in finding out more, please consider attending Monitoring Social Media 09, where I and others with experience in this field will be speaking in depth about this topic.

Brands need to understand the dynamics of social media, in order to participate credibly because word-of-mouth has eclipsed traditional broadcast messages as the primary influencer of today’s consumer.