Listen to your stakeholders
Sam Ford of Peppercom:
Listen at all opportunities – make every moment a listening moment. We’re talking to our customers all the time but are we listening?
We have new media platforms – blogs, Twitter, Amazon, Yelp and Get Satisfaction. Everyone is a publisher. Technology has changed the way people communicate. It’s changed the way we find news and information. It’s changed the source of influence.
Now that the customer has a voice and a publishing platform customer service issues become PR issues.
You can use new media platforms to do traditional PR activities – like surveys. You can do online focus groups. Communispace is one way to build an online community for focus groups. These are managed conversations. And you should be listening to organic conversations as well.
How does listening help a company?
- Product development – getting insights from your cusotmers can help improve products
- Improve customer service
- Solifying/Adapt messaging
- Crisis Preparation
- Outreach
- New Business opportunities
- Finding new audiences/markets
Learn to share information internally. Set up systems so that different departments can listen and share what you find. Who are the stakeholders internally that need to share this info? Make a comm chart that connects these people.
Questions:
Who should you respond to? Look at their motivation, is it isolated or is it gathering comments, how prominent is the blog, what is their traffic, who links to them – all these things will give you a sense of their influence.
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Agreed. One point I’d like to add, listening is not monitoring.
When you monitor you have a pre conceived idea of what you’re looking for, your brand , your product.
1- our experience is that people talk far less about brands than about issues, opportunities and challenges
2- using keywords like brand name give people a biaised view on what’s really going on in a community.
Also you only listen on the surface:
3- you need to figure out things like: these key people don’t talk about us or about this issue anymore, this person keeps referencing people that are not favorable to us, there is an emerging topic that we did not think about … …
As you can imagine, listening with the prospective to understand PEOPLE also mean that you keep listening on the same people over time…. which leads back to targeting.
No one can do true listening to 100’s of millions of voices, I mean up to the point that you learn from the person.
As an individual, you can pretty well cover a few hundred to a few thousands people, if you’re well equipped.
As a team you can probably do a 10X.
In communities as well, all voices are equal but some are more equals than others.
The first challenge is therefore selecting who to listen to and figuring out who matters.
Great points, dominiq. First of all, monitoring what people are saying about you is akin to going to a get together and only paying attention when people start talking about you. We know that behavior doesn’t behoove us personally, but brands often don’t know about it. Monitoring for mentions of yourself is better than nothing, but selective hearing doesn’t truly provide listening. And I think that’s another important distinction to be made: between hearing and listening. Hearing means gathering what people say about you. That is not listening. Listening implies something more active than that: acting in some way on what you’ve heard, whether that be responding, tweaking future messaging, etc. I’ve had several brands say to me, “Well, no one’s talking about us,” as if that’s reason for ignoring what people are saying in social media. Again, that egocentric approach can be awfully limiting.
Monitoring for mentions of your name is at least a place to start. But we should be moving past the ‘toe in the water’ approach by now. Actively listening to the broader conversations about key topics related to your business and identifying which individuals matter can be a goldmine.
Research is too often skipped. The excuse used to be time and money – now it’s more time than money. And lack of know-how.
Every cent and every second spent listening will reap rewards. You can’t do an effective social media strategy without listening first.
Great points, Sally. Agreed on all fronts. I think that time is especially an issue because of confusion about how to effectively plan and time manage listening in social media. Some of it is a chill factor, in that people think it sounds more time consuming, or foreign, than it really is.
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