Social Media Portal interview with Karl Goldfield from Brandchats

Social Media Portal (SMP) profiled interview with Karl Goldfield VP of social sales from social media monitoring solutions company Brandchats

Social Media Portal (SMP): What is your name and what do you do there at Brandchats?

Karl Goldfield (KG): I?m Karl Goldfield, VP of social sales. I?m tasked with bringing the Brandchats solution to the United States.

SMP: You?ve recently joined Brandchats, what were you doing before?

KG: I worked with start-ups to develop their sales and marketing strategies. From go to market to team building, I worked with entrepreneurs to help them formulate the messaging and processes that lead them to profitability. Past companies include Demandforce, Work Metro, Jade Global, Teambox and iRise.

SMP: Briefly, tell us about Brandchats (for those that don?t know), what is it and what does the company do?

KG: Brandchats is a leading provider of social media monitoring solutions. With a strong presence in Spain and Latin America, Brandchats is taking its services global.

Two unique features of the product:  The system has a desktop application that provides bar none flexibility in report and dashboard creation. The system is designed to be integrated into other solutions, making it functional throughout an enterprise and able to deliver information to other tools.

SMP: What are some of the main products and services that the company provides?

KG replies with:

• Brandchats Software as a Service (Brandchats SAAS) edition does all of its heavy lifting in the cloud. Then through a handy desktop or mobile app, Brandchats users have the ability to sort through a massive amount of data in seconds. Not only does Brandchats offer the most accurate analysis available, but the solution provides simple drag and drop configuration for report and dashboard design.
  
  
• BrandChats Express is the perfect solution for Freelancers and SMBs. It is lightweight, easy to use and a simple way to quickly monitor your brand and your competitors.
  
  
• Brandchats Enterprise Solution is designed to live within the corporate firewall. All of the accuracy of our SaaS solution within the walls of your organization. Install your Brandchats instance in your server farm or cloud instance.

SMP: Who is your target audience and why?

KG: Any business that wants to monitor and manage the social media discussions related to their brand and their competition. Initially, Brandchats will focus on reaching out to community banks, retailers and media outlets. These groups tend to be greatly effective by swings in social opinion and we want to help them see how the entire business can react and better their presence.

SMP: Why is monitoring, measurement and analysis so important for agencies and brands?

KG: This is a great question, and one we are confident more and more organizations are going to start to understand the answer to in 2013.

The power of a positive or negative discussion within the confines of business community before social media meant a small ecosystem of people understanding the good or bad your company allegedly provided. Now with the potential virality of any comment from anyone, it is now absolutely essential to manage these explosions in opinion.

It is not just the negative sentiment and reactions that we need to control. Yes, stemming the tide when bad goes to worse is a huge factor, but equally as important is to be able to manage and leverage the positive mentions and feedback your brand earns. Whether its managing increases in demand or just building a stronger team of customer evangelists, social networks give us new opportunities and challenges that must be monitored.

SMP: There are many monitoring and measurement tools out there, what?s different about yours  - and why?

KG: There are three differences that Brandchats is proud to share with enterprises.

1. Accuracy. Brandchats can tout a false positive rate in the sub 2%. This is an unbelievable statistic and one that allows a business to trust monitoring enough to delegate without manual checks and balances.

2. Flexibility. By using a desktop/mobile app to manage dashboarding and reporting, Brandchats offers the most powerful design engine for monitoring. We do not force you to use our thinking when it comes to analysis, you can quickly build your own reporting and dashboards using simple drag and drop technology.

3. Integration. Brandchats is not merely interested in offering another ?look what is happening now? solution. Our philosophy from the beginning is to get the right information to the right person and allow them to react. This is not limited to marketing, but a sales, service and R&D requirement and responsibility. Brandchats is built to connect and plug in to all of your enterprise applications making the social content you need synonymous with all your other data.

SMP: What are the low moments of what you have been doing so far (in regards to Brandchats and working in the social space)?

KG: Really the only low moment for me is how long it is taking the majority to understand the importance of social media for business. The consumer is already immersed and managing their buying process via social opinion and research. What are all these businesses waiting for?

SMP: What are the high moments of what you have been doing so far (in regards to Brandchats and working in the social space)?

KG: This space is an evolving entity filled with some of the brightest minds in the business community. From social media evangelists to the pioneers of Sales 2.0, it has grown from simply knowing who is reacting to your emails and browsing your website to the real time reactions by sales people to triggers on Twitter and forums.

It is wonderful and always exciting to participate in a change that affects the global business community.

SMP: What?s the next big step for social media / networks and what impact may this have in what agencies and brands do (and in turn the services that Brandchats provides)?

KG: I call it actionable social business intelligence (actionSBI). The ability to react immediately to the update that started sentiment and reaction. The ability to deliver the right information to the right person in your organization so that they are able to respond from a place of understanding.

SMP: What?s going to be the most interesting aspect regarding community management, social media / technology for the next 12 to 18-months?

KG: From the monitoring side, it will be two things; user adoption and product consolidation. We are going to see the early majority start to subscribe to the need for monitoring. We should also see several products fall to the wayside or get absorbed by their competitors.

Outside of monitoring, expect visual social media to continue to stake a claim and many niche specific Pinterest spinoffs and new ways to share images and video creep into the market.

SMP: Who is the ?social consumer? and how might they behave ? and how is Brandchats helping agencies and brands understand them?

KG: The social consumer is no longer a relevant concept. With most consumers actively on social networks, the real question is, ?Are the consumers not effected by social media still a large enough group to worry about??

Social media is a tool, and consumers are now using it. Whether it is OpenTable, Yelp, tweeting or status updates, the world is talking about your brand and you are beholden to the conversation. If you do not engage and do it from a place of understanding you can expect to fall behind your competitors that do.

Brandchats makes it easy to manage and integrate that management. By doing so you can truly take advantage of social networks.

SMP: What are your top five tips for brands on moving beyond sentiment and conservation and using actionable information to enhance their activity / campaigns to reach the social consumer?

KG replies with:

Now you are speaking our language!

1. Integrate social tools into every customer facing department. Make sure that ambassadors of your brand are the ones managing your social presence.

2. Educate your ambassadors on how to engage and who to engage with. It should not be assumed that they understand the way to behave when entering social conversations.

3. Send more than just the content. 360 views of the person talking, an understanding of their business, industry news. This could all be packed up and delivered along with the comment that triggered a desire to respond. By delivering this type of content, enterprises will see better results from social media management.

4. Don?t be afraid to test. There is no certainty that anything anyone is doing today is going to work tomorrow. The social media industry is in its infancy and evolving at a pace beyond the understanding of previous industries. To wait for others to prove something works may deny you the advantage of the processes as they become stale.

5. Start to carve out a role that is hybrid IT/Marketing that focuses on social media technology. This person should be tasked in building a plan and potentially a platform that will allow an enterprise to truly manage their actionable social business intelligence.

SMP: Best way to contact you and Brandchats?

KG replies with:

Email: kgoldfield @ brandchats.com

Twitter: @brandchats_USA

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/1259998

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrandchatsUsa

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/brandchats

Google+



SMP: What did you have for breakfast / lunch?

KG: Cashews, banana, salami, smoked salmon, arugula and raisins. In that order.

SMP: What?s the last good thing that you did for someone?

KG: Fed them.

SMP: If you weren?t running or working on Brandchats what would you be doing?

KG: Making hot sauce.

SMP: When and where did you go on your last holiday?

KG: New York

SMP: : What?s one of the best communities that you?ve seen and why?

KG: Santa Cruz where I live.

SMP: What?s the first thing you do when you get into the office of a morning?

KG: I am in the office when I put my laptop on my lap. I work from home ;)

SMP: If you had a superpower what would it be and why?

KG: Adamantium bones and the ability to heal (because Wolverine is awesome... duh).

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