Plebble manages feedback about companies and organisations online. Now managing customer complaints on the web is not new, I mean I’ve previously posted about what happened when I had a wee rant on Twitter once and that seems to be more and more common these days, but this new site has got me excited.

It’s not just another channel for ‘Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells’ to spout bile on. Plebble is managing those conversations in a number of ways and converting dialogue into opportunity by providing businesses with  feedback and access to customers.

The democratisation of the web has already come and revolutionised the way we do business. More and more customers are turning to the web to leverage their consumer power. The days are fading when brands ask me how to “stop bloggers saying mean things” and even more are looking at how best to nurture conversations.

Plebble brings together some of the best elements of online customer feedback and takes into account there will always be some brands, big and small, that:

• nobody wants to hang out with on a brand site or in social spaces like Facebook
• will mainly get negative mentions online (in some sectors, happy customers are quiet customers)
• are strapped for cash to resource online CRM

This is true “e-mocracy”, as Prebble calls it, with a framework to prevent it descending into some Lord of the Flies style brand persecution. I like it.

P.S. British Gas, I am watching you…

I’ve been trialling the eCairn Conversation(TM) Dashboard for just over a year now (thanks to some clever outreach and the persistance the lovely Laurent Pfertzel).

The product has really evolved and now ticks a lot of boxes for PRs conducting social media outreach programmes;

• Build a network of Social Media communities using your own lists OR their search feature and collated blog lists
• Measure influence of your network
• Track conversations across multiple platforms inc Twitter, Video sites, forums
• Organise and manage team activity online
• Measure impact of engagement

The company has a nice approach to building an authentic network and the product’s intended to give you the tools to manage & measure that process. They must know what they’re doing too as they’ve managed to nurture a relationship with me over the months and now look, here I am advocating you sign up for free trial!

Of course I’d still like to see some changes but their responsiveness to feedback and speed of development gives me confidence this is a Social Media tool with a lot of potential.

Sound risky? Well as Econsultancy’s Chris Lake suggested

“It appears to be an extension of the old adage about there being no such thing as bad PR.”

While right now most people seem to be generating warm fuzzy feelings around the brand it could all go horribly wrong. I asked one of my clients, moderation specialists Tempero, for their thoughts and received a perhaps surprising response suggesting more companies should look at putting their brands into the hands of consumers – in moderation of course.

Read after the jump to see what MD, Dominic Sparkes, had to say.

Skittles have taken a fantastically bold approach with their latest campaign and whilst some commentators will consider it little more than a linking to the social net exercise, it actually highlights an approach that many are afraid to take.

Putting your brand message into the hands of customers is always a brave move, even when you have total control of the content.

For the Skittles campaign, they have taken the decision to let the users run wild and post what they like within branded environments on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and more. Despite being a refreshingly open policy, this unmoderated approach could backfire should negative opinion gather momentum and those wishing to cause disruption have their merry way. Even simple usernames can cause offense and having the user “F**K****” (edited for privacy and decency!) commenting on your campaign would be a step too far for many brand managers.

An additional aspect is the potentially inappropriate nature of the content for children and sensitive users. Some would argue Skittles have a duty of care to protect their customers from reading profane or offensive content. On the other hand, they may be targeting an edgier audience in which case, over sanitising the content would negate the point.

Aside from the moderation worries, hats off to Skittles for using the existing social sphere and not taking the often misguided approach of thinking you should create your own social network. I honestly wish them all the best (and we’d be happy to moderate it all!).

To find out more about tempero visit www.tempero.co.uk

Online Reputation Management

Still at MediaCamp London. Have been reading SEO chicks a bit over the past few months so came along to finally hear Judith Lewis talking her thang, live.

Why monitor?

• You need to be aware of the kind of things your customers may be reading about you
• refine your messages, take it as feedback, find out what people are thinking and interested in hearing about you
• Judith shows the Google results for “Starbucks” which I also recently showed to an agency as well as Landrover Discovery
• In summary, it’s all about search (I just spotted Brendan Cooper’s post ‘own your Google page‘ this morning discussing this)

What to monitor?

• Everything related to the company
• Industry news

How to monitor?

• Google & Yahoo search (inc Alerts)
• RSS feeds
• Professional firms or paid for services [disclaimer: I work with social media monitoring service Attentio]

Press Releases & PR

• Good for search
• Paid for and free press wire services – don’t use them all! Pick one or two for distribution
• newswire today is a useful free service
• Write the content you put on your corporate website different to what your official press release (varying content)
• Be careful, don’t spam journalists or the free press wires. Think through your distribution strategy

Corporate blogging

• Authentic voice (check out my previous post on is ghost blogging wrong which achieved a bit of feedback)
• Make personal connections, even if you’re a big business, people love it so personalise your posts in a way which is appropriate to yourself and your company
• Engage outside of your own blog e.g. Twitter, leaving comments

Over all? When stuff goes wrong, change it.

I checked out the demo and the first thing that struck me was that there was no way of seeing at a glance whether you or your product were being spoken about in reverential tones or if a blogger is ‘about to flush [your reputation] down the toilet’ to quote the slightly odd text on the website.

While the tool itself seems to look well put together, easy to use and good at filtering results, if you’re seriously monitoring online reputation, especially on a large scale, this ability to get a feel for the trends of online coverage is important. The demo highlights this by performing a search for Google which returns over 2000 results for one day alone. How are you supposed to cut through all the “so, I did a quick Google search” mentions and find out if any issues are building without reading all of those entries?

I know this technology is not easy to create or 100% accurate but I’ve seen this type of tone indicator in practise with Attentio‘s social media monitoring tool and it’s hard to imagine not having that capability.