Gartner's Jim Sinur posted an interesting blog post titled "The Big Oops: Forget About Social Networking” where he describes 3 scenarios where the feedback from the collective was ignored and caused severe customer backlash, loss of brand credibility and a negative financial impact.

We recently saw the world-wide grounding of the whole Qantas fleet as a result of a breakdown in negotiations between the company and unions. This stranded around 68,000 passengers world-wide. The socialsphere was in meltdown and Twitter was in a tweet tsunami. Qantas responded well under the circumstance and even though there was definite anger and frustration they seemed to be on tweet alert.

The challenge is not just monitoring the socialsphere in crisis times like the Qantas example, but to do it consistently and have the ability to manage the dynamic and unstructured work real time with decision trails and tracking. It is about creating social intelligence and adaptive processes that can learn from previous experience to improve customer experience, brand and ultimately retaining customers.

Not everyone has the luxury of designated social media monitoring and response teams like Qantas, and more than often internal marketing teams monitor social media stream in an ad-hoc and inconsistent manner. Responses are not coordinated, tracked or reviewed and often nothing is done at all. As Jim points out in 'The Big Oops', businesses can't ignore the impact of social anymore.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, pointed out at their recent 2011 f8 Developer conference that, according to Facebook data, the information shared per person on Facebook, doubles every 2 years. It is the Moore's law of social media. Social conversations about organisations will increase exponentially in the foreseeable future.

How will you manage with the increasing number of social media (channels), the increased conversations (content) and corresponding response (contact)?

XMPro for Social is a new breed of social management processes that harness XMPro's ability to 'listen' to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Alerts, Digg, LinkedIn to name a few, for specific words or phrases. If these conversations are found, XMPro will create a process activity and the business rules and logic can benefit from XMPro’s dynamic, unstructured work approach.

Conversations become activities, each with their own tracking and decision trails, business rules and escalation paths. Each can be dealt with differently to suit the specific goals of the business at that point in time. Response teams can be scaled at the click of a button at peak times, such as the Qantas situation, and switched back to normal processes if the conditions change.

Combined with XMPro's agile approach to BPM, i.e. intelligent experimentation and the use of historical process data, organisations can now improve their social management processes and customer service.

Figure 1 - Social PR Task List and Action Forms (see below for expanded view)

The XMPro screens above show how Qantas, for example, could “listen” for Twitter messages tagged  #qantas and create them as new process activities. Each activity can then be managed and tracked as a XMPro dynamic process or case. These social channel messages (or aggregated into message groups) create fully managed social processes.