Each of the abovelistening, analyzing, and some aspects of respondingcan be done without any direct connection to your customers or visible presence with regard to your business or organization on the Social Web: In others words, its very low risk. While it may not be optimal, the activities around listening and analyzing, for example, can be managed within the marketing function. With workflow-enabled analytics toolsfor example, using a listening platform that automatically routes tweets about warranty issues to customer serviceyou can certainly make it easier to oversee all of this. Building on this approach, when you move to the next stepresponding to a policy question or product feature requestyoull be glad you pulled a larger team together and built some internal support. Otherwise, youll quickly discover how lim- ited your capabilities inside the marketing department to respond directly and mean-

How so? Suppose, for example, that you see negative reviews regarding the gas mileage of a new model car youve introduced, or you see those posts about an exceptional customer service person. In the former case, you can always play the defensive role True, but the mileage our car delivers is still an improvement over.... Or, you can ignore the conversation in hopes that it will die out or at least not grow. In the case of the exceptional employee, you can praise that particular person but beyond the ben- efit of rewarding an individualwhich is important, no doubt about itwhat does it really do for your business? What would help you is delivering more miles per gallon, or knowing how to scale exceptional employees, or how to create more exceptional

Ignoring, defending, and tactically responding in a one-off manner doesnt pro- duce sustainable gain over the long term. Instead, the information underlying these types of events needs to get to the product teams, to Customer Support or Human Resource (HR) managers or whomever it is that is responsible for the experience that is being talked about. In the case of the mileage, someone needs to determine whether there is a design problem: Does hot weather cause mileage dips, and are your Texas auto dealers leading in sales? Or, is it an application mismatch (such as buying a Hummer to run back and forth to the gym or tanning salon) or simply an unrealis- tic customer expectation (set by, gee, I dont know...maybe those EPA estimates that appear in bold type in automobile advertisements?). All of these are real examples. To address these kinds of issues, action is required, and the action has to con-

This generally means involving a team beyond marketing. Otherwiseif the root cause is not addressed, the current conversations will continue. What you are really afterand where social business practices can actually deliveris in understanding, validating, and implementing the processes or process changes needed to move the conversation in the direction that supports your business objectives. In the case of the exceptional employee, what is this persons history? To whom does this person report? How can your organization encourage more people to adopt the specific behaviors that drove the positive comments? These are the types of issues that a holistic approach to social business can impact. In all of these cases, the take-away is this: Faced with an issue of interest coming off of the Social Web, your next steparmed with the conversational data and some