Enterprise stuggles to harness Facebook, Twitter feedback

Sales and marketing technology group, RightNow, has published a report on ‘rules of engagement’ for enterprises looking to integrate social media utilities such as Facebook and Twitter into their operations.

The report follows a series of roadshows throughout Australian capital cities on the eastern seaboard and New Zealand, designed to promote the company’s new social media monitoring tools and canvass opinion regarding social media in an enterprise environment.

Brett Waters, managing director of RightNow, said that the management overwhelmingly wanted to utilise feedback on services via social media, but the level of engagement across the 230-odd attendees was mixed.

“Overall, they recognised that this was an emerging opportunity for users, consumers and constituents to voice their opinion,” he said.

“What was coming out of all the conversations across the different networks, was that they were undecided on the value of the feedback.”

Micro-blogging utility Twitter was a focal point across the fora, and Waters noted the response of representatives from the higher education sector as indicative of the quandary facing enterprises trying to integrate such tools into their customer service strategy.

“Students like social networks because they can express their opinions, but [the universities] didn’t think they would appreciate them as an institution engaging and responding back to them on channel,” he said.

“But on the positive side, they saw the potential if they could capture what they were actually saying and use it to change or better processes on a more macro level.”

“The overriding message I took away from it was: we can’t ignore it. We’re still not quite sure what to do with it, but the ability to understand what’s going on and put it in an actual format was seen as positive.”

Rightnow’s report, Customer Servie meets Social Media: Best Practices for Engagement, is available to RightNow members.