As a marketer, it doesn’t take one long to understand the high impact and the potential of the Social Media Networks on your business.

You will also recognize the fact that the content on the Social Networks is not under your control and it is essentially this freedom of expression and uploading of content that gives the Social Network its huge popularity and growth.

Companies engage professional consultants to create and sustain online communities and thus develop a buzz around their new product launches or promotional campaigns. But building reputation for the product as well as for your company calls for sustained involvement and participation in the Social Networks where your existing as well as prospective customers are available.

Discussions and posts on the Social Networks hold a mirror to the promises that the Organization has made and the actual delivery that it has affected.

In other words, the platform highlights the difference between the customer expectation built and the actual experience delivered to them. Companies would do well to listen, see and understand such feedbacks and act on them to ensure the shortfalls are covered.

The feedback from the Social Networks can provide a lot of information and data to the Marketers and Organizations which can be used in product development, effective customer service and all other areas that concern the customers.

To gather the right feedback, one needs to analyze the information gathered from the Network discussions in detail and methodically tabulate the data. You will find the feedback from the customers in several forms including text messages or posts, audio clips, visuals in the form of photos or videos etc. All of these need to be collated, analyzed with reference to the customer feedback.

Before attempting to analyze the customer feedback from the Social Network content, it is important to establish or answer several questions internally.

1. First and foremost one needs to identify and define the basic promise that the Organization stands committed to.

2. Secondly it is important to state the perceived needs and expectations of the customer and explain how the promise is able to address the customer expectations.

Based on these two points, the list of objectives can be further developed to include the actual delivery and point of sale experience, communication process with the customer both in terms of during the sale and post sale service.

It would be apt to assign a value for each of the promises made with reference to its relevance to the customers and measure the same. Lastly define the various departments that are likely to gain from the feedback analysis and note down their requirements.

Once the feedback analysis scope and method has been defined, the feedback data may be analyzed and trends identified. Such feedback analysis would be of immense value to Marketing, Advertising, Customer Service as well as the RD and Product development team besides the Operations departments.