Marketers debate whether they should engage in online video, but there’s simply no excuse for not paying attention to what’s being said about your brand. There are good services that can do comprehensive audits (such as Buzzmetrics). But here’s the poor-man’s solution…
Subscribe to your brand’s name on YouTube. If you’re Coke and you’re not at least scanning videos that are tagged with the word Coke, then you may miss something important. It’s as simple as registering on YouTube and going to your subscriptions. Then enter your brand name in the “tag” section, and you’ll have videos waiting for you if they use your name in the tags.
There are other services doing more comprehensive, advanced and ongoing monitoring by turning speech into text, and then analyzing the content in sophisticated ways. But this is a nice place to start. It’s as easy as setting a “Google Alert” for your brand name to ensure that news and major blog posts aren’t missed.
Big Rant Ahead, Buckle Up or Use the Left Lane!
This seems like a common sense and practical approach Kevin, however, I think the majority of people, especially those who complain, do not believe that big brands care if you like them or not. There’s a certain arrogance these large corps have because they are making gobs of money, mostly due to cheap overseas labor and we know in the states that the largest part of anyone’s budget are people.
What I have discovered over the past year is, if you want service in the states no matter what you do you’ll end up trapped in India or somewhere lost in South America. Can’t scale this wall anymore.
A recent Customer Service situation I had experienced pushed me to the point where I finally gave up and seriously thought the person on the other end doesn’t make enough to deal with my dissatisfaction, so I asked to be transferred to the US HQ; a handy get-some-satisfaction-fast trick I learned listing to NPR. To my surprise the CS team in India had no ability what so ever to transfer me to the US. Further, they gave me the impression that I was out of my mind to even want to speak to someone in the upper echelon. However, after talking to the supervisor of the supervisor of the supervisor I managed to get one brave soul who went out of their way and looked the number up on the internet. The number was non-toll free of course, but it was a US area code. I jotted the number down quickly, thanked the gentlemen for his kind patience and called the US number immediately. The phone rang, I was excited, I knew in the back of my mind I would soon get a courteous and instant resolution, satisfaction was only moment away. I received the voice prompt. Any minute now, I thought, soon I will be to speaking to a US corporate operator, who would surely get me to the president or at least his secretary. Imagine my surprise when the US number voice prompt transferred me right back to India!
I sincerely think that nice or funny commercials aren’t going to make me loyal to a brand any more, they are going to have to provide the Four C’s, Comprehensive & Courteous Customer Cervice first and then they can make me laugh or trust them with their commercial ads. If they don’t clean up their act, they will have to continue to make their initial killing in the market then change their corporate name every six months when people call in for service OR people will eventually reach the maximum boiling point and demand strict government regulations on something that really requires the bare minimum of common sense.
What happened to you on US AIR is precisely where Customer Service has landed. I have to wonder what those guys serving the drinks are making these days. My guess, it’s not enough to wear a smile any more.
All done.
I just subscribed to the word ‘rant’ on Youtube. I think I’ll be happier with those videos.
Jan and Marquis- I love when bloggers comment. Especially when you can learn more from the comment than the post.
What Jan said.
I let my blogging license expire a year ago, Kevin. I’m just a word and image recycler now.
Nalts,
Cool little tidbit, but I did have a question that goes along the same lines. Is there a tool that tracks what is searched in YouTube, the number of times searched, longtails, etc, much like Wordtracker does for the search engines?
Thanks and great site!