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The Hard Art of Social Media Listening

Didit Editorial

Surfacing objective data to share with customers generates better social media conversations

May 30, 2014: We’re constantly told we need to listen more to clients, customers, and prospects. But what do we do when these people aren’t talking? Or — even worse — when they communicate in confusing and contradictory ways?

Social media has materially changed the way that brands communicate with customers. For example, according to a study by Aberdeen Group, 73% of the brands it surveyed now use Facebook as a primary customer service channel. Relationships are forged on social media every day. But there’s also a strident, destructive impulse amongst service providers to attempt to find economies of scale solutions – “set it and forget it.” This kind of attitude is like putting a gun to the head of one’s business, and is short-sighted to boot. In the current setting, power has shifted fully into the hands of the client, be they one of a million small retail clients or a billion dollar retail enterprise.

If the business community is to win the battle for customers’ hearts and minds, we need to listen and then to act. Here are some tools that can be used to listen to — as opposed to merely hear — what people are asking for.

Determine The Surround. Customers do not exist in a vacuum. We can gather hard data from conferences, networks, and professional research to determine what our customers need and how we can provide it to them. Professional social media listening platforms can show us what people are saying about our brands.  But merely watching a Facebook Page or Twitter feed isn’t enough – determining basic models and reporting from returns on social media analytics, email campaigns, analysis of Big Data and even good old intuition based on social conversations all need to play a part.

Engage in the conversation. This sounds easy but can be very difficult, because “the conversation” can mean many things on multiple levels. One can participate on social networks, but not be heard above the noise. Using social to reach out to key stakeholders doesn’t just provide good marketing intelligence; doing so can generate good PR. Talking authentically with stakeholders about difficult issues means accepting the risk that one may say something that pierces through the usual corporate PR mask. Not every brand can do  this. But doing it shows customers that you’re committed to their interests. If you’re not committed to helping your customers win, don’t expect them to have any commitment to you.

Collate information.  Information informs strategy. Assemble all the actionable stuff and try to determine trends. This is where Big Data and analytics are valuable. A big takeaway from a recent Webinar I attended on customer retention hosted by Directmarketing Depot and Ethology was that “Data Beats Opinion.” Sure, sometimes opinion is the only thing we have to go on, but hard, actionable data is the floor under our feet. We want hard data from any conversation.

Once you gather your data, tease out your trends, and see what your stakeholders are saying and doing, take action. This is often the hardest part, as action entails risk, and there can be a huge gap between how we want things to be and how things are. Again, here, data equals relevance; surfacing objective data to share with customers brings forth better conversations.

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