Strategic Listening

Companies need to start thinking about taking advantage of the tools, technologies, and data available to drive improvements across many aspects of their business. If you work in product development, strategic planning, corporate communications, marketing, advertising, customer care, sales, or any discipline that touches the customer experience, then it is imperative that you begin using the insights from the social web to better inform your strategies, improve your products/services/business operations, and improve your customer satisfaction.

Over the last month I’ve worked with Ken to create a new graphic that helps illustrate how social analytics (discovery, collection, analysis and segmentation) of data from the social web can make its way through, and be used by the different business functions that exist in most companies.

Social Analytics Lifecycle

Click the image to download a higher res version on Flickr

This version of the Social Analytics Lifecycle is just the beginning, as we expect it to grow and change after discussions with other companies about how they should go about implementing strategic listening programs. We’re excited about the possibilities, please enjoy this visual representation and let me know how you’d like to see it evolve.

This post is a collaboration between Ken Burbary and myself. It is being cross posted here and on Ken’s blog.

Social Media Monitoring can be an overwhelming endeavor, requiring you to sift through potentially large amounts of data to separate signal from noise, all in the hope of finding key consumer/customer insights that a company can act on. The thought of getting started can be overwhelming for big brands with a broad reach. If you’ve made the decision to listen to what the market is saying about you (an easy one) and are ready to take the next step and put it into practice, then consult this guide on the 5 Ws of Listening and create a strategic listening plan first (more on this to come in a future post). Then, and only then, move on to tool selection. There are hundreds of monitoring tools in the marketplace today (In fact, Microsoft launched their own social media monitoring tool today, dubbed Looking Glass). Use the community resources available to decide which tool(s) are best for you, then move forward with the tool that has the best coverage for the media types you’re interested in, and meets the rest of your specific needs.

To make listening easier, try narrowing the focus on a subset of your business. This will make it easier to get started, and require less time and resources (typically, your mileage may vary), than trying to listen for every individual mention of your brand terms. Here are 4 specific areas that companies can focus their listening activities to do this:

• Campaign Specific – focus on the conversation driven by a specific campaign. Not only the volume but more importantly the qualitative components of the conversation. Target keywords, phrases and important details contained in the messaging of your campaign, go beyond generic terms and brand mentions. This can reveal a useful dimension of consumer opinion, passion. Tropicana recently learned this when launching a new packaging design for its pure premium orange juice. By listening around this specific campaign, they learned about the uproar from passionate customers, and ultimately reversed course and reinstated the old packaging design.
• Event Specific – companies invest significant time, energy and financial resources for all types of offline events. Use social media monitoring to measure and track the online conversation about an event. Integrate these the relevant conversation points with data from other channels to get a holistic view of an event’s reach, sentiment and popularity. MTV recently did this at the Video Music Awards with their Twitter Tracker.
• Business Unit Specific – for large organizations, with many businesses spread across the globe, narrowing down which business units you want to monitor is an essential part in trying to lessen the resources burden of social media monitoring. How do you begin to do this if you’re tapped with listening for your company (especially if you’re “housed” in the corporate communications or marketing department)? Start thinking about the process by using these steps:
  • Identify your company’s strategic business units – the companies with several different business unuts surely have some idea which of those are the real revenue drivers now, and in the future. If your organization has five business units, for example, but there are two that are the real revenue engines for the company, those would likely be suspects for your listening efforts.
  • Identify business unit leaders that can help share the burden – one of the central points of this post that we hope you takeaway is that monitoring isn’t an effort that can be left up to just one person. There has to be a decent amount of burden shared across the organization. Business unit leaders know their individual businesses better than anyone else. Tap them not only for their expertise of the business, but for the insights they’ll be able to lend in making sure the data you provide is at its most valuable.
  • Determine which terms you’re going to use – anyone that’s developed a listening program before will tell you that there can be a tremendous time investment in building the keyword/phrase monitoring strategy. That includes terms, which sources to track (if you’re using less sophisticated free tools), and even which topics associated with the business unit you’d like to include. Crunching the data is important, but this stage is often overlooked to the peril of the whole project.

It goes without saying, but after you’ve done these three things, it’s time to start collecting and analyzing data. If you’re interested in seeing how other companies have narrowed listening to a specific business unit, check out this presentation from United Parcel Service (UPS) at last year’s BlogWell.

• Product Specific – if you aren’t planning to monitor around a campaign, event or business unit, you can always monitor specific product and/or service sub-brand(s). The process is very similar to how you would monitor business unit conversations – identify the appropriate sub-brand expert (developer, leader, marketer, etc..), identify those at the product level that can help you share in the burden, develop your list of terms (a time-consuming process as you may already know), and ultimately gather and analyze the data. The folks at Verisign (PDF) have been doing this exact same thing (with the help of agency partners) with good success.

I’ve talked a little bit here, and on my other blog for Dix & Eaton about how important listening in the social media space can be. Not only is it a way to gather valuable intelligence on your p0tential community (if you are using social media channels externally, particularly), but it is also a valuable tool to avert crises that can flare up to ridiculous proportions because of the fluidty of content on social networks.

On Wednesday morning, I was followed by an account named @CableStinks. Now, if you are active in social networking, particularly Twitter, you’ll know that there is a heavy spam component (especially recently) that you must wade through to get to the good stuff. This account struck me as odd though. They were using the Dish Network logo, and some of its marketing copy in its bio and tweets. Normally I’d just dismiss this as idle spam, but I tweeted about it shortly after I received the follow request asking if Dish Network was aware of this account clearly ripping off their logo.

Well, apparently I raised a flag over at Dish Network’s compliance office. I received an e-mail from someone at Dish Network, and then spoke briefly with one of their compliance officers about the account. Unfortunately, I had no additional information to provide them above the fact that I was followed by this obviously fake account.

It seems pretty clear that Dish Network is monitoring social media conversations. How else would they have found me? I wanted to take the time to offer a kudos to Dish Network for monitoring online conversations and trying to put an end to this spam account. But I also wanted to offer up a cautionary tale: Don’t monitor and you might be the victim of someone misrepresenting your brand on social networks!

 This afternoon, Darrell Heaps of Q4 Web Systems, Matthew Lehman of Progressive Insurance and myself will be participating in a panel about social media and investor relations for NIRI Cleveland. As I was preparing for the presentation, I realized that there aren’t many examples of companies using social media for investor relations effectively. Sure, there are companies like eBay that are “live-tweeting” their analyst days and Microvision opening up their corporate blog to questions before an earnings call, but these examples are few and far between. Instead of using social media as truly a “social” tool, many public companies are using networks like Twitter as mass media to blast out earnings releases. Not only is that not effective, but it really is a waste of time for the company. If I wanted your earnings release, or other corporate announcement, I’d subscribe to an RSS feed on your Web site. I don’t need Twitter for that.

So why aren’t there many good social media and IR examples? I think we could point to many reasons, but most people point to regulation as the key burden. It is true, there are a lot of rules and regulations that public companies need to follow, but I don’t think that’s the only reason we don’t see many good IR and social media examples. To me, the larger point is that, in most cases, the investor relations function isn’t in sync with the PR and marketing folks. For social media to be effective, regardless of communications discipline, we know that integration with the other parts of the business is critical. Sales, marketing, PR, internal communications, among others, need to be working in harmony for social media to be its most effective for any company, let alone the public ones. When IR is treated less as a compliance function, and more as an extension of the marketing efforts, we may see more successful IR and social media case studies.

Anyway, that’s just my take. What’s yours?

1. I rely on you for a lot of information - it’s amazing to me how reliant we’ve (I’ve) become on third party sources for news. Whether it be links people post to Facebook, or share via Twitter, or even things I learn of after reading the blogs in my reader, I need you for information. Sure, there are plenty of things I can find on my own, but it is no where near as much as I can learn about when being connected to you.
2. I missed interacting with you - for those that think social media is a big time sink, all you’d have to do it engage with people for a period of time and then take it away to realize how faulty that logic is. I missed reading status updates on Facebook. I missed tweets about college football on Saturday. I missed sharing professional experiences with people I’ve connected with on Twitter. And heck, I also missed checking out photos on Facebook (those are always must-view material after a long weekend!).
3. Escape the echo chamber more often – one of the things I absolutely loathe about social media, particularly Twitter, is the constant recycling of the sames ideas. There are a lot of smart people on these social networks, surely we can come up with more original thinking then we do now, right? I had the opportunity to spend time with people this weekend that aren’t nearly as active on social networks as I am. Guess what? That was comforting. Sure, the topic of social networks came up, but their perspectives on the power (or lack thereof) was refreshing, and eye opening at the same time.
4. Life would go on if social media disappeared tomorrow - don’t get me wrong, I don’t think social media is going away anytime soon. However, I do know that if the Facebook’s and Twitter’s of the world were to go away tomorrow the world would not come crashing down onto our heads. All that would likely happen is that we’d find new outlets to share our ideas — hey, maybe in face-to-face interactions? What a concept!

Anyway, have you had similar experiences where you haven’t accessed social media for several days? What were your takeaways?

That being said, that isn’t what this post is about. In one of my first posts, I referenced the book Trusted Advisor. I’ll reiterate to you that it is an excellent read for communications pros of all shapes and sizes. The primary argument of the book is that, in client settings primarily, we should be focused on high levels of credibility, reliability and intimacy and much lower levels of self-orientation.

So with that as the backdrop, I wanted to continue stressing how important developing relationships are over promoting your own self-interest. This isn’t something applicable to just social media, it’s applicable to life. Get out from behind the computer and meet people in real life (or, IRL if you’d prefer) that you’ve interacted with on social networks. I bet you’d appreciate their insights even more as a result. Are there people you haven’t interacted with that you’d like to spend more time getting to know? Send them a reply on Twitter. Drop them a line on Facebook. Send them an e-mail through LinkedIn.

Whatever you decide to do, remember…relationships > self interest every single time. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy your holiday weekend!

Let me say this, though, that if you were to look at my stream you’d likely see some of my own blog posts mixed in, and that’s OK. I’m not trying to be the Twitter police, but some people are sharing their own blog posts so much that we’re sort of defeating the purpose of what social networking should be about – real conversations about real issues. Not link dropping at every turn.

So what’s the appropriate mix? Is it sharing it once in the morning, once at lunch and before leaving the office (what I sometimes do)? Is that too much? Should you just rely on your content being tweet worthy and leave it up to your community?

I should also say that I’m not sure there is a correct answer. It really is what your community wants, right? If you know there are some people who you constantly interact with that are on at different points of the day then tweeting at different intervals probably makes sense, right? Anyway, who am I to judge? You guys know better than me what your tolerance is…

*Image from Zazzle.com

We all know the saying…”Nice guys finish last.” In a lot of respects, the statement is definitely true. The ones who seemingly get ahead are those that are willing to cut off their neighbors in the name of achievement. By the way, in case you were wondering, there’s a huge difference between competitiveness/achievement and just being downright evil for the sake of winning/achievement.

Anyway, after reading through David’s post again, and watching how some people interact with others lately, I’ve begun to wonder whether or not this old saying applies to social media as well. Sure, there are folks like Danny Brown doing amazing charity work using these tools, but how many know about it outside of people interacting with Danny constantly? Not enough people in my view. This isn’t to say that Danny, or others like him, should go on a promotional spree, but they deserve more recognition than they are getting.

Unfortunately, the people that do get more notice than they should are those that, quite obviously, game the system. I’m not going to name names as I’m sure you’ve had plenty of occasion to interact with them on your own. They don’t spend a lot of time looking for ways to help people, rather, their primary focus is on how many people they can drive to their blogs/Web sites, how many Twitter followers they can amass or even how high of a score they get on some grading platform. But maybe gaming the system is OK…who are we to judge?

Nice guys don’t get enough attention in my view, and until they do, count me in the camp that will be trying to promote them as much as possible. Anyway, how do you all feel? Does the good (genuine) work people are doing get recognized enough? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it.

Last week’s chat (linked above) was based on Chris Brogan’s new book called Trust Agents.  The first question was about outlining some best practices around community building. I’m right in the middle of Chris’ book, and have had similar discussions with colleagues and clients lately, but the issue of community building (which for the sake of this post we’ll call reputation building) really doesn’t seem overly hard to me. Sure, dealing with a number of complex personalities (including your own, by the way) is no easy matter. However, to me it really breaks down into two key categories – time and value. Rome (in this case your reputation or community) wasn’t built in a day, despite the fast moving nature of social networking. You must spend time getting to know the people you are interacting with. What makes them tick. What are they interested in hearing about? What do they want to know from you? Which leads to the second point…value. If you are providing value for your community, whether in the form of links to interesting stories, being a good listener or just answering questions from your community, you’ll be seen as someone who is constantly adding value. Am I oversimplifying? Sure, but start with time and value and you’ll likely go far.

One of the things that’s bothered me of late, though, is how do you properly balance the ”You” and “I” within social media communities. You want to be helpful, but you also want people to get to know you as well. What’s the appropriate balance? This was something we also discussed during the most recent community chat, and the consensus seemed to be that you shouldn’t overshadow your community. Is that fair? Is there any other way to quantify it? Maybe it’s just a matter of feeling out your community? Anyway, maybe you can help me figure this out…

I say this knowing full well that I’ve personally received great value from participating in Mack Collier’s #blogchat, Beth Harte’s #pr20chat, Marc Meyer’s #socialmedia chat and Sonny Gill’s and Bryan Person’s #cmtychat . The experiences they bring ALWAYS add value, and that cannot be replaced.

But here is my concern…I’ve noticed lately that many of the chat’s participants are the same people every time. How does that help us? Sure, sometimes the topics are different but the only way we learn and grow as professionals is to hear different (or alternate if you will) perspectives. Also, wouldn’t there be some natural overlap with some of these chats? Isn’t there an opportunity to bring together these disparate groups into one larger audience? Sure, that get’s a little bit more difficult to manage, but the conversation, in turn, may become more robust.

I’m in no way trying to be critical of the people who are putting together these chats, because they are taking time out of their busy schedules to try and educate the rest of us. All I am trying to do is ask the question in the hopes that you might be able to help me with the answer.  So, what do you think?