On the night of April 9th, 2017, United Airlines persuasively expelled a traveler from an overbooked flight. The nightmarish occurrence was recorded by different travelers on their cell phones and posted on various SM channels. One of the recordings, presented on Facebook, was shared in excess of 87,000 times and was seen by almost 8 million people within 24 hours.

“One of the recordings, presented on Facebook, was shared in excess of 87,000 times and was seen by almost 8 million people within 24 hours.”

The disaster was amplified horrendously by the organization's inconsiderate reaction. The next day, United Airlines tweeted an announcement from the CEO apologizing for " having to re-accommodate customers ". A complete failure to recognize the mistake further worsened the situation and resulted in public outrage. You can envision the field day on Twitter.

This is actually the sort of PR fiasco business can you can avoid with brand reputation management facilitated by active sentiment analysis monitoring. It’s also an excellent example of why it’s important to care, not only about if people are talking about your brand, but how they’re talking about it. More mentions don't equal positive brand sentiment.

“It’s important to care, not only about if people are talking about your brand, but how they’re talking about it.”

In today’s day and age, brands of all shapes and sizes have meaningful interactions with customers, leads, and even competition on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Most marketing departments measure their effectiveness by volume of online mentions. This KPI – the more chatter, the better brand awareness fails to recognize the negative impact to the brand reputation caused by negative sentiment expressed in some of those mentions. Nowadays, businesses need to look for deeper insights.

So, how brand reputation defense with active sentiment analysis monitoring could have helped United Airlines to avoid their PR fiasco. Unfortunately, it could not have prevented the dreadful decision to forcefully remove the passenger from the airplane. However, active monitoring would have established brand median sentiment score across monitored SM channels and once the outrageous video was posted and sentiment score began to rapidly deteriorate, as more negative mentions were posted, the active defense would have alerted PR managers of this change and BI would recognize the rapidly forming negative brand sentiment trend.

Fast notification of the forming PR problem would have allowed United Airlines PR management to properly assess the severity of the situation and thus advise the CEO on its impact to the brand. This would have facilitated a much faster and more appropriate public statement.

Brand reputation monitoring with active sentiment analysis can also be extremely useful during new products/services launch. For example, a big retail bank is rolling out a major update to its mobile app and internet banking platforms across different countries and even continents. Multiplicity of customer touchpoints affected during such task present a considerable challenge associated with monitoring customer sentiment. This is especially vital if things do not go as planned. Business’s ability to react and facilitate mediation of customer concerns has become paramount to the brand reputation management.

“Brand reputation monitoring with active sentiment analysis can also be extremely useful during new products/services launch.”

Enterprise solutions such as Customer Intelligence Suit provide 360-degree view of customer sentiment across all touchpoints, including social media channels. AI-powered Brand Defender can automatically mediate and escalate targeted sentiment key words, hashtags and phrases, thus providing almost immediate first round mediation of customer concerns.

To test Active Brand defense with AI-powered Brand Defender, navigate to our Twitter page @AZNresearch and tweet hashtag " #aznBISgo " to engage our AI-powered Brand Defender BIS 2.0

Please allow 10-12 minutes and refresh your Twitter page to see automated response.

Automated brand defender can be designated to respond to monitored keywords, phrases and hashtags with different messages. It can thank you for positive comment and acknowledge negative comments with assurance of speedy resolution. Each engagement is sent to Customer Intelligence suite with possible escalation to designate departments; logistics, network, customer service … All this is achieved without human interaction 24/7.

“Logistics, network, customer service … All this is achieved without human interaction 24/7.”