Twitter, your brand’s real-time NPS

By David Barnes, Director, Business Intelligence

The Resolution Media executive team met this morning to discuss the results of our Ultimate Question survey. For those not familiar with the Ultimate Question, it is a fantastic book written by Fred Reichheld, who lays out a simple framework for measuring client loyalty. The single question used to calculate your customer’s NPS (net promoter score) is simple; How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend of colleague?

The results are then bucketed into groups that can be defined as promoters, passives and detractors. Without going into too much detail on the properties of each group, we can summarize them as such; promoters help actively promote your business, passives are neutral in that they have nothing truly positive or negative to say but will offer truthful information when asked, and detractors, as the name suggests, have historically had a poor experience with the company and will ultimately hurt a brands reputation.

So what does the Ultimate Question or an NPS have to do with Twitter?

Resolution Media has made it a practice to pose this ultimate question to clients and agency partners twice a year but the reality is promoters, passives and detractors are all in cahoots, exchanging information all the time. For brands, although word of mouth and product review sites like Yelp and Amazon aid in this inevitable exchange of information, there’s a new platform of choice. What is this rapidly growing platform that allows this questionable collaboration to exist? Of course, Twitter.

Let’s look at Twitter from two perspectives.

  1. First, the submitter or he/she who tweets. For whatever reason people are absolutely bananas about Twitter (I will only partially include myself as one of these people). Twitter savvy folks are constantly, sometimes relentlessly submitting information about where they are, what they are doing, seeing, thinking, etc. If you are able to consolidate what you are doing in 140 characters or less, then the Twitter-verse is listening. Mind you not all tweets are affecting some brand’s NPS. But see for yourself. You will likely be hard pressed to find someone not chatting up your brand, thus potentially altering a follower’s perception.
  2. And this leads us to the second perspective, the Follower or searcher. These are the folks looking for real time information. Sometimes this is as simple as wanting to know where the cool kids are hanging out on a given night. Other times people are searching for product reviews or looking to share an experience. I have personally used Twitter search as a means to decide for or against purchasing a product. Some corporations have adopted Twitter as their primary vehicle for communicating new products, releases or a way to inform followers of service outages.

Calculating an NPS is not all that new. However, the speed by which people receive information on your brand, which might ultimately affect your NPS, is. As business owners, company leaders and marketers; it is in our blood to look out for our NPS. It is no doubt that this real-time data is of extreme value to us. Now all we have to do is quantify it and put it to use.

0 comments:

 
Copyright © 2008 Resolution Media, Inc. All rights reserved.