Interesting thoughts on econsultancy.com about companies giving up monitoring of online conversations. My question would be, how do companies then listen to things people say which arne’t on that company’s own website?
“Imagine, if every conversation in a pub, coffee shop, meeting etc. could be monitored and then filtered to specific brand conversation and sentiment relevant to you, would you use this technology to improve your offering? Probably not.”
Not sure I totally agree with the premise that all online conversations are held in the same way as ones at the pub. Different online spaces have different contexts, complaining about a brand, for example, on twitter it feels much more appropriate for that brand to reply to you than on facebook I’d say. Nonetheless, predictions about decreasing the massive effort that goes into listening to what people are saying online include:
- “As the majority join the social web and it finally becomes “the web”, people will become more negative towards organisations using monitoring technology in order to “gatecrash” conversations. Brand consumer trust will diminish.
- The time, effort and resources associated with managing online buzz will become too much. Organisations will realise (some already do) that people will always express their opinions and they should be allowed to do it in, what they consider to be private.
- Organisations will ease up, become less paranoid, maybe a bit more human. They will adopt levels of transparency, inviting and making it easy for people to provide feedback and opinion if they choose to give it. They will listen and respond to this.”
