A recent eMarketer article suggests no, companies “don’t need to respond to every ounce of negative buzz.” The article suggests letting other customers (or brand advocates) address some of the problems. That strategy can backfire, though, if a number of customer questions go unanswered. For example, 49.5 percent of respondents in a Conversocial survey said they’d be far less likely to buy anything from a company that had unanswered complaints or inquiries on their social sites.

If customer questions are bogging down your brand page on social sites and your social media team, consider establishing a separate page for customer service-related issues. For example, Comcast’s @comcastcares and Delta Airline’s @DeltaAssist pages on Twitter are good examples of companies successfully setting up a separate presence to handle customer issues.

If the thought of managing multiple pages makes your head spin and you’re not going to address customer concerns on your brand page, consider directing customers to where they can get help. For example, Virgin Airlines offers a clear statement in its Twitter bio: “Although we won’t address specific guest service issues on Twitter, our team of experts is eager to help you at http://vgn.am/GstHlp or call 1-877-359-8474.” This is also a good tactic if you’re in an industry that deals with sensitive personal and/or financial information, such as banks.

If your company is constrained either by budget or resources—or both—and you know you won’t be able to respond to every customer question that comes in over the virtual transom, I recommend establishing criteria to help prioritize the questions you should respond to. Consider whether the problem or question is related to any of following:

• Brand reputation
• Product quality
• Safety
• A potential legal issue

When you do respond to customer complaints, keep in mind that it matters not only what you say, but also how you say it.

Are you using social sites to field customer service issues? How do you determine which questions or complaints to respond to?

He’s right.

The site is little more than a redirect to the Ford Drives U site, which is a program offering special deals, rates, financing, etc. for college students wanting to purchase Ford cars. It’s the prototypical example of how not to use Facebook.

BRAVO

The site features 500+ photos of all kinds of Fords in varying states of stock to fully modded. That’s it: Photos. Of cars. Most—but not all—of them Fords.

TRY AGAIN

The site hasn’t been updated since May 2008, when Ford posted a call for entries to the College 500: Driven by Ford. Billed as the “The road trip of a lifetime,” mtvU and Ford were looking for college students “to take part in a competitive journey across the country in the new reality show.”

There are no updates to the page, so I initially assumed that either the show got scrapped or they didn’t get enough entries. Not true. The show aired on mtvU last year. Hmmm.

There are 7,613 fans on the site as of this writing; yet there are no posts, no chatter, and no engagement between fans and Ford or among the fans themselves.

The answer is in Twitter’s booming growth. According to Web measurement firm Nielsen, Twitter’s number of users grew 1,382 percent from February 2008 to February 2009, a rate that easily dwarfs the competition’s growth.

Here at Tendo, we’re curious not so much about whether Twitter is doing something right (they are) or whether all of its recent attention is warranted (who knows?), but rather, is Twitter relevant to business? As the audience engagement experts, would we advise our clients to embrace tweeting as a viable tool for connecting with their audience? Or do we tell them to run the other way?

Bill Golden, managing editor, and David Vespremi, director of client services, square off:

Bill: Twitter is arguably the most efficient tool right now for firing off quick sound bites and updates throughout the day. With a 140-character limit, nothing else comes close. I recall reports that the US Airways Hudson River plane crash story broke on Twitter well before any mainstream media outlets caught wind of it. People were actually tweeting from the scene. And in terms of a business application, it’s also hard to beat. It gives companies a conduit for immediate and personalized contact with customers and the broader Twitter audience.

David: I’ll agree, but point out that Twitter’s inherent speed and efficiency are also what make it such a dicey proposition for business. These days, most companies treat their Facebook and MySpace pages as extensions of their core corporate identity. There is very little that ends up on those platforms that escape at least some level of the “is this good for business?” filter. The fact that Twitter is so new that few companies have adopted guidelines around its use at work–even while they may have policies in place around the use of personal blogs during work hours–makes Twitter the Wild West of the business world. One would generally think twice about updating a personal blog on an iPhone under the boardroom table to make a catty comment about a colleague’s lame idea or personal hygiene issue. But Twitter is rife with these kinds of personal observations and the “edit” filter is set low, if not off, when most people submit tweets.

Bill: You bring up a valid point. Twitter does make it incredibly easy for an employee tweeting on behalf of his or her company to say something stupid and have it potentially reach an enormous audience. But this begs a policy question–who in a business environment should use Twitter and to what end? Companies can only do so much to control what their employees say and to whom. At the end of the day, it doesn’t require a whole lot of plotting for an employee to denigrate his or her company. Twitter just makes it super easy.

David: Or business twits! The problem isn’t just limiting access, it is also about voice. When you think of a brand–Apple, Ford, IKEA–you think of a unified brand persona. Apple is a great example. Everything Apple says and does, no matter when or where, looks and feels like Apple. If you start adding in a disparate mix of voices from Steve Jobs all the way down to Jim in the mailroom, aren’t you undermining the brand? Suddenly a cohesive brand identity and voice begin to seem a bit disjointed and schizophrenic. . .

Bill: Yes, but many companies could benefit from adopting a more casual and approachable connection with customers. Twitter does that by making a company more accessible to its audience. As a customer following a company on Twitter, I suddenly have a voice and channel to connect directly with a company. Granted, it would be smart for companies to have standards for what is and isn’t appropriate for employees to say. As far as disparate voices go, are you out of your tree? Do you really think an employee will undermine a company’s brand with a 140-character message?

David: But this begs the question, does any of that good will last? It seems like the Holy Grail for many businesses is all about SEO and page rank. That being the case, is spending time on Twitter the best use of social media when other platforms have the proven ability to drive traffic?

Bill: Yes and no. Twitter by itself won’t necessarily push people to a company Web page or blog. But Twitter can be an effective means to draw more visitors to a company’s website or blog. Since Twitter updates constantly, there will always be fresh content for the search engine spiders to pull. And the more social network sites you link to, the better your all-around page rank will be.

David: Which is all well and good, provided that the content is relevant. If employees are engrossed in fascinating tweet exchanges about everyday minutia (“Hey, did you catch Idol last night?!”) and that ends up on the home page, and in fact, drives more traffic since “Idol” is more searched than a company’s core offering, that’s not so great. Still, I agree, that Twitter can effectively be tied in to other social platforms as another feed source to a corporate site.

Bill: OK, then I suppose it’s a matter of a company’s appetite for risk and how closely it wants to police its brand. I agree that relevant tweets are important, both in terms of value to your customer and how a search engine indexes Web pages. But I think this goes back to setting up the right standards for how employees tweet on behalf of their company and making some effort to monitor the behavior. Because in real life, if an employee of a business I’m patronizing offends me with something they say, I’ll definitely think twice about giving them my business.

Bill and David: So, it looks like the verdict is a definite maybe on Twitter. It is certainly not a one-size-fits-all marketing tool, but for the right company and in the right setting, it can be a great resource for connecting with your audience. Twitter isn’t always relevant, but it certainly can be.

Whereas traditional media was controlled by the networks and the corporations that paid money to advertise on them, with social media, the platform and the content are controlled by the audience. Anyone can praise or punish your brand to a global community. Instantly. Social media is not only a two-way medium, but also a multi-direction medium with many voices—voices that can have strong sway over how the masses gravitate toward or away from your brand.

What Is Social Media Buzz?

While pre-social media buzz might have been two airlines blitzing the TV networks with ads during a ticket price war, or an over-the-top Super Bowl commercial generating water cooler buzz, the tactics today are more varied. Social media buzz could be a blogger advocating your brand, a link to a YouTube video zipping around the Web, or a contingent of Facebook members so smitten by your product that they’ve created an affinity group around it. Given the variety of social media, let’s look at the different types and how buzz can be uniquely carried out with each.

Social Networks

Popular networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn serve as powerful buzz agents by allowing companies, politicians, or organizations to virtually hang out with prospects, customers, or constituents. This allows you to join the dialogue and make your presence known and felt, not just as a marketer.

Trendy retailer Target aced its first foray into social media with a back-to-school campaign on Facebook called “Dorm Survival Guide.” Anchored by a Target-sponsored Facebook page designed to help students overcome the anxiety of moving into a small room with strangers, the campaign aimed to provide valuable advice to students and give them a place to interact and share information—they offered design advice, recipes, and a personality test for furniture. The campaign also included banner ads on Facebook that drove traffic to the page.

According to Target’s ad agency, the campaign succeeded by closely researching the Facebook community to understand the “conversation” taking place. They used that information to position the campaign, speaking with students in their language and focusing on advice, not brand promotion.

The results? The “Dorm Survival Page” generated more than 7,000 members, 37 discussion groups, and lots of positive dialogue. Target’s back-to-school sales were 6.1% higher in 2007 than in 2006.

Blogging

Blogs offer one of the most direct ways to engage and generate buzz with your customers, partners, or employees. Blogs allow you to hold a personal and candid dialogue without the filter of a marketing message, which tends to hinder any efforts to engage customers. Blogs also give customers a voice by allowing them to post comments and responses of their own. But in order for blogs to work, they have to be consistent and unscripted. If you neglect a blog or just recycle marketing communications jargon, you’ll lose readers in a hurry.

When Jonathan Schwartz became CEO of Sun Microsystems in April 2006, he simultaneously became CEO of the largest company who also maintains an external blog, a status many say made him a trailblazer among CEOs.

Schwartz believes the transparency and openness of his blog will become a competitive differentiator. He thinks customers appreciate candor and authenticity so much that his “tell all” blog will strengthen customer loyalty and presumably lead to more business. Although it’s difficult to link Schwartz’s blog to Sun’s financial performance, it receives more than 400,000 visits per month. At minimum, he’s maintaining a real dialogue with his audience. And in a post-Enron world that abhors corporate secrecy, that says something.

YouTube

We’re giving the wildly popular and irreverent video sharing site its own category. YouTube is part social network in that individuals can create profiles, post and share videos, and rate and comment on content. It’s also part video network where one can access and view thousands of videos across multiple channels and genres.

What makes YouTube such a powerful buzz platform is that anyone can use it to post virtually any kind of video. YouTube videos can be shared easily, and the process and standards for posting videos are far less cumbersome and restrictive than a TV network. As a result, companies can take much bigger chances with the kind of videos they post, reach a large audience quicker and more cheaply, and the videos themselves can easily morph into viral campaigns, as people send the video to their friends or link to it on other sites.

Take this quirky video from Honda featuring its popular Element SUV carrying on with a crab at the beach. The Honda Element is, in essence, part of a comic video rather than the subject of a promotion. This offbeat video began as a series of commercial spots, but its popularity snowballed when it was uploaded to YouTube; the videos garnered more than one million views, according to Wikipedia. In this instance, YouTube helped a company get more mileage out of an ad campaign and connect with a demographic that may not have seen its television ads.

Try to Keep Up

The opportunities to create buzz with social media are as wide and varied as the different types, and new technologies and applications are popping up all the time.

To stay on top of what’s happening in the social media space, keep an eye on these sites: www.socialmediaworld.com (focused coverage on social media); www.technorati.com (aggregates a range of user generated content); and www.imediaconnection.com/social media (social media news, strategy, best-practices).

Then consider this: How will you begin building buzz with social media?

Note: For more on this topic, check out our blog post on hybrid social media and a site that’s bridging the Web and human interaction.