Social Media Product Launch
Making Sense of Community Buzz
With the widespread adoption of social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and countless alternatives, online conversations swirl around brands and organizations of all sizes. Sitting just outside of traditional media and customer feedback channels, these conversations can often go unnoticed, with golden opportunities to participate missed. In order to better understand this landscape and come to grips with reactions from across the Web to their products and brands, savvy organizations are turning to social intelligence solutions such as Visible Intelligence® from Visible Technologies® to compliment a social media product launch.
The need to monitor social media is especially pronounced when an iconic brand launches a game-changing new product. That’s the position the team at Xerox found themselves in with the release of the ColorQube, “the world’s first high-speed solid ink multifunction printer.”
The Challenge
The launch of the ColorQube presented both an opportunity and challenge for the Xerox office business group team. They knew there would be a high volume of reactions from users, reviewers, and commentators from across the social media landscape and decided to embark on a monitoring effort as a pilot project.
They realized they needed a platform to monitor Twitter and the blogosphere for mentions of the ColorQube, one they could get up and running quickly and without a major investment of staff time. It also needed sufficient flexibility and functionality to potentially scale across the enterprise and support a push into active engagement. Finally, the Xerox team needed to be able to easily generate compelling data and reports to help them sell the value of social media across the marketing and product groups at Xerox.
The Solution
To meet these varied needs, Xerox turned to Visible Intelligence solutions, working with the experienced team from Visible® to get up and running quickly. With a monitoring and reporting platform in place, a product launch looming, and initial buzz starting to build around the ColorQube, the team set out to filter and make sense of the high volume of chatter flowing from multiple social media channels.
By selecting keywords related to the ColorQube and defining sentiment scoring and related filter values, Xerox was able to quickly process a vast array of posts, comments and tweets relevant to the product launch. The Visible Intelligence enabled the Xerox team to measure overall sentiment, calculate the volume, pull, and reach of each online mention of the product, and identify high traffic source domains as well as influential individual authors, which will be particularly useful for later use during engagement efforts.
Auto-generated aggregate data, charts, and spreadsheet exports could then be quickly assembled into useful and compelling reports for distribution across the marketing and product organizations.
The Results
The high-quality Visible Intelligence reports generated interest elsewhere within Xerox, helping the team quickly gain traction around the value of social media monitoring and lay the groundwork for a possible future investment in engagement. The initial pilot team has since grown to include a broad group spanning corporate communication, advertising, Xerox.com, and representatives from each of the business groups. In addition to continuing the initial monitoring project, the new team is charged with evaluating corporate-wide adoption of social media monitoring and engagement tools.
We knew there would be a lot of chatter happening around the ColorQube, and we looked to Visible Intelligence to help us both monitor and understand it. Visible Intelligence was a great platform for our small team to get started with, and it has the capabilities to grow with us as we move towards engagement.
Jason Bartlett Senior Advertising Manager, Xerox