Entries Tagged 'Reputation Management' ↓

Last week I heard from Toby Bell at Gartner that we had been selected as a “Cool Vendor in High Performance Workplace” in their semi-annual report on emerging companies and technologies.

A thank you to Toby and the rest of Gartner team for investing time in learning about Visible Technologies and our solutions. The report from Gartner highlights vendors with a common goal of brokering better relationships, whether between users in an enterprise, a social community, or both.

Gartner defines a “Cool Vendor” as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are:

• Innovative; enabling users to do things they couldn’t do before.
• Impactful; have, or will have, business impact, i.e., not just technology for the sake of technology.
• Intriguing; caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

We are extremely honored to have been acknowledged in the report. Will follow up with more commentary and link to report on the Gartner site as it becomes available.

Blake

Visible Technologies

Business Week’s 2008 Customer Service Champs edition contains a variety of interesting rankings, facts and sidebar articles that underscore the new media challenges faced by those in corporate America today. Although we’ve all heard most of these customer service horror stories before, it’s still good to learn about the progress some brands made from last year to now. The trend for many brands to do more is definitely up from last year.

Unfortunately, Business Week plays the scared tactic card again (like many publications have done in the past) in its Consumer Vigilantes piece - profiling angry out-of-control consumers smashing their products to gain attention and rebates. While there is no question that some companies deserve such wrath and need to listen more closely to their customers, the vast majority of brands have exceptional customer service. If you’re in the business of honest measurement of consumer sentiment about brands like we are, then you know most companies do a pretty good job at taking care of their customers. I doubt we really need to constantly profile out-of-control consumers to gain the attention of most brands today.

Business Week was smart though to balance its coverage with a more realistic view from Jeff Jarvis called “Love the Customers Who Hate You,” that points out how and why customer service is fast becoming the new marketing of this century. Lots of others, like John Bell and Pete Blackshaw also offer their views on the new rankings.

Mike Spataro

It took awhile but it’s good to see that Duke University (where my daughter now attends) has taken a bold step in protecting the safety of its students in the aftermath of last year’s tragic events at Virginia Tech. Following what was an exhaustive study of its own emergency response capabilities, Duke has developed what could be the most pro-active emergency preparedness plan for an academic institution in the country.

Covering every type of emergency from hostage situations to biological terrorist attacks, the Duke plan includes a variety of smart alert features, such as an RSS feed for students and parents, email alerts, a specially designed Web site, a dedicated phone number, a public address system and siren on both campuses. They’ve also included text messaging alerts to cell phones, a tactic I have called for in the past that should be deployed by every school and company in the country. The university is also encouraging students to enroll family members in the school’s emergency database.

While no system can guarantee protection for every student on campus, at least Duke is making a major technology investment to do what it can in a crisis. Other colleges are sure to follow.

The Blue Devils may be top 10 in basketball, but every parent who has a child away at a school would rather have a national ranking in student safety. Duke may just get ranked for their new system.

Mike Spataro

There are three reports that came out recently worth noting for those a bit behind in their reading like I always seem to find myself.

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff was generous enough to share his recent report on Keys to Creating a Social Strategy in which he lays out what he calls the POST method for social strategy development. Josh contends that most companies are going about creating social strategies backwards by focusing first on technology rather than audiences and strategy upfront. I couldn’t agree more even though I work for a social media tech firm. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in meetings where technology and tactics were the topics over strategy and objectives.

The POST method revolves around People, Objectives, Strategy and (then) Technology. Josh’s report lays out a sensible approach for companies to follow. It’s well worth the time even if you’re late to the reading game like me.

The second study was the widely covered and discussed “Digital Footprints: Online Identity Management“ report from Pew Research concerning the number of Americans who Google their own personal information. Research analyst Mary Madden expressed surprise in interviews this week that only about half of the people in the U.S. with Internet access have Googled themselves.

I don’t find that number surprising at all. In fact, I’d bet it’s lower than what Pew found. When you get away from the urban tech centers of our country, the average American isn’t living online, Googling all their friends and relatives, blogging every day or Twittering every five minutes. Some of us have a slanted view of the real world. Only a fraction of people who really need to be concerned about what appears about them in search engines have ever taken the time to check their results. If more of them did, I promise you’d see more people freaking out than you do at the moment.

The third study from USC’s Annenberg Center and Ketchum PR found that many communicators are out of sync with the way consumers now use media. This trend has been underway since the invention of the browser. Findings related to the growth of media usage by emerging markets make this study worth reading too.

Mike Spataro

Delivered a presentation with Clint Schaff from M-80 on Blogging and your Brand yesterday in Las Vegas. We had a decent audience size and mixed up the session so that we could drive audience participation and conversation verses sitting in the front of the room reading from slides. Viaspire blogger captured the essence of session. Lots of good discussions and insights.  Appreciate everyone who attended and participated in the discussion.
Blake

Visible Technologies