The topic today is Listening in Social Media
I have a question to start us off. I’m working on a paper on listening posts and I’d like to include recommendations, case studies, cautions … Do you have a listening post? How important is the listening post to your firm? What software are you using to listen? How is your firm using its listening post? How effective is your listening post? What are the major problems you face? What changes do you plan in the coming year regarding listening?
Chelse Benham No we don’t have a listening post. I’m uncertain what that means. Not familiar with the term.
Marketing That Works
A listening post is a system for gathering, analyzing, and managing conversations about your brand. With social media and the internet, there are conversations about your brand going on all the time. You need a system for gathering the conversations people are having that affect your brand (ie. brand mentions, competitors strategies, and customer needs). Once you have this information, you need to analyze the conversations to determine how to handle it. For instance, if there is a negative comment or a misunderstanding about your brand you need to address the issue quickly to avoid damage to your reputation. So, conversations have to be sent to individuals who can get back with those people talking about the brand or posting a reaction in the original source.I made a presentation about this yesterday to the AMA in DC and am turning it into a paper. You can see the slideshare at:http://www.slideshare.net/angelahausman/american-marketing-association-dc-presentation
Annie Pettit Are you referring to social media monitoring or social media research?
Marketing That Works
You know, I’ve not found a suitable definition so I made up my own. Here’s my definition of social media listening: “A centralized location where conversations are culled from a variety of online sources [such as blogs, chat rooms, social networks, and forums] and distributed to employees for appropriate marketing action.” Although, I’m happy to hear how others define it.In my scheme, I think of social media listening as both monitoring and research — that’s the way I presented it yesterday using both examples of reputation management and monitoring brand mentions, etc, as well as netnography to uncover deep social meaning in the data. What do you think?
BTW, I also presented social media listening as a step in calculating ROI in social media.
Richard Winfield Lewis
Listening posts are a new term for an old technology. Back in the day many larger companies would pay for a service that would read and clip articles from newspapers and magazines. These services still exist but I would imagine now use bots to troll the web for the latest industry news. Haven’t used them myself, basically we have too much information at our finger tips and I can usually find exactly what I need with a search online. Lexus Nexus is the only similar service that I have used and is specifically for the legal profession. Provides cases as well as articles if I remember correctly.
New thought Twitter is a great poor man’s listening post. Track posts and follow tweets in the area of interest.
Claudia Havi Goffan
Most companies are starting to use free listening tools that only track certain social media sites may end up doing a disservice to themselves or their clients as their accuracy reflects their price… and it takes up more time (which is more precious to me together with the cost of my resources) to reach the information (and the data) that needed to incorporate into their marketing strategies. I believe that pretty soon companies will start to learn about more advanced tools to monitor the online realm (not just social media as people post comments everywhere) and start switching…
Marketing That Works I actually discovered a problem like this in interviewing someone else for the presentation. He got blindsided by the FDA. Yikes.
Claudia Havi Goffan How so?
Marketing That Works I can’t really share too much about it, but they got something from FDA that they never heard in social media. They should have heard the same issues with the drug in social conversations, but they use a very labor intensive model of going through all the utterances by hand.
Claudia Havi Goffan I get it… and that is exactly what happens… and by the time you get the information, it’s too late to act and you need to react…
Annie Pettit If you want to turn the listening into research so that your results are valid and reliable, then that option is now available. There are methods for ensuring that your results are timely AND accurate. It’s basically applying scientific market research principles to social media data instead of to surveys and focus groups.
Listening Posts in Social Media: Discussion from Ask a Marketing Expert http://tinyurl.com/5wwcv73