Will Corke's digital gallimaufry

Interesting developments this week from Proctor & Gamble and Mothercare, both of whom have, in different ways, taken steps to address the question of how to have vibrant online communities around their brand(s).

In Mothercare’s case, they have bought a ‘pregnancy and parentin

g social media site’ called Gurgle.  P&G have taken the build rather than buy route, working with an agency to create an ‘umbrella community site, aimed at savvy mummies’, called supersavvyme.com.

Both potentially valid routes?

The nub of the problem for marketers in the social media world lies at the junction between the brand owners commercial interests and messaging, and the community’s ‘s

ocial activities’ - forums, discussions, blog posts etc.  No-one minds a supermarket’s brand on a high-street fascia, but the same brand in the classroom (for example) is much less acceptable (“What did you learn in Easyjet Geography today, kids?”).  It’s a question of context.

On this measure, P&G’s supersavvyme.com s

ite looks like a big fat FAIL.  Why?  Well let’s take a look at the Home & Garden channel, and its ‘The latest Tips’ (see right), where someone called Kate has posted five Tips on a range of topics such as herb growing made easy and the collection of rain water for your garden.  So far so innocuous… but look at the Tip titled ’Clean the floor in one swipe’: ‘Don’t waste time lugging a bucket and mop upstairs – swipe floors clean in a hurry with hygienically disposable Flash Express Floor Wipes’. Crikey, hang on Kate, for a moment there I nearly thought you were a housewife, but let me guess, Flash… yes, it’s that same Flash that’s owned by… P&G.

Oh dear.  Also, there’s very little content (i.e. no real community yet) but endless banners for P&G products.  It’s hard to see how, other than through the relentless distribution of coupons, samples and special offers, P&G are going build the site to any significant scale.  But being P&G, there will undoubtedly be both a plan and the funds to execute on it, so we’ll watch how the supersavvyme brand develops with interest.  I suspect the underlying objective might well be datacapture for DM.

As for the Mothercare Gurgle acquisition, it’s much easier to see how the existing, vibrant, community on this site can be of value to the Mothercare mothership.  And the commercial content and promotional offers on-site sit very comfortably alongside the forums, blogs etc.  So if the price was right, then nice job!

We spend quite a lot of time at Harvest using and assessing monitoring tools such as Jodange, Radian6, SentimentMetrics, and other like them.  Measuring ‘sentiment’ is a hot area for good reasons, as the ability to ‘listen’ to your consumers’ conversations can’t be ignored (is in fact more like a responsibility), and new applications to help us do this seem to be coming out with dizzying frequency.

This morning I have been tyre-kicking www.twitratr.com which looks at twitter data and categorises tweets using negative, neutral or positive keywords.  Simple stuff - no-one could accuse Twitratr of over-complexity - providing a nice snapshot view for big brands (benchmarking territory this).  However, dig into the detail, and holes start to appear…  here’s a search for UK supermarket Sainsbury:

The top Positive mention has misinterpreted the word brave, and should really be Negative. In the Neutral column, the word horrid in the 4th tweet down clearly marks this as also Negative.  Finally, looking at the Negative colum, the top tweet is nothing whatsoever to do with the supermarket…

Does this mean automated monitoring of this kind is inherently flawed?  I don’t think so, just that you need a large enough data-set before forming theories or drawing conclusions.  And you need to work to improve the rules / algorithms - changing the categorisation of horrid from neutral to negative is an easy fix…

It’s not just microblogging data streams that are being diced and sliced either.  I discovered yesterday that online bank First Direct uses voice recognition to turn ALL the calls through their call centre into a data-stream that is anal

ysed by keyword.  Their system then picks up on certain words to trigger responses (customer service measures of one kind or another).  You can see how this data would also give First Direct early warning of problems with, for example, their website or mobile services.  So if you’ve ever wondered what that recorded voice telling you that ‘Your call might be recorded for training purposes’ was really on about, you now know!

A few years ago voice recognition was widely talked about as life-changing technology, but for most of us this never happened.  Even poster-child for the sector, wireless voice-to-text service Spinvox (Corporate tagline - ‘What we say and how we say it is a wonderful and powerful thing’.  Quite.) is now embroiled in controversy after it emerged that some proportion of its ‘technogy’ is in fact a call centre in Pakistan.