Page 136 - Social Media Marketing

c h a p t e r 5 : ╇ S ocial T echnology and B usiness D ecisions╇ ■
114 Taken together, listening is by far the easiest entry into understanding what the
Consider the Workload
worse, customers who are nearby—in the social sense, meaning part of the conversa-
tion or closely connected to the person(s) at the center or it —will also notice any lack of
response. Given a comment that warranted attention, they will likely join in and amplify
it, and will themselves draw a similarly negative conclusion if there is no response to
the comment from an appropriate person within the firm or organization cited in the
comment.
Listening is also generally noncontroversial within your organization. Listening
does not itself oblige you to do anything with what is heard. This can play to your
advantage when first starting out. A great use of listening, especially at the start of
your social media and social business programs, is to bring your organization up to
speed on what people are saying about your brand, product, or service before you
actively engage your customers through social technologies. Like not listening, how-
ever, not responding also sends a message to your audience. Plan to participate not-too-
long after you’ve started listening; prioritize and address the conversations that you can
respond to most easily.
Social Web is all about. By listening—and in particular when using a dashboard-style
monitoring tool—you can quickly see what is being said about your brand, product,
or service. Moreover, you can do the same for your industry and competition—all of
which is great intelligence, even if it’s qualitative. From that base, you can gain solid
insights into how your audience perceives you, in the context of your industry.
Based on this kind of upfront work and analysis, and with an understanding as
to where these conversations are taking place, you can introduce the rest of your orga-
nization to the Social Web in a way that makes the connection to the business obvious.
This will help you build the internal constituency that you’ll ultimately need.
If you’ve ever looked at conversational data pulled from the Social Web—perhaps
you’ve tried Google Alerts, for example—you’re no doubt thinking “Sounds great, but
who’s going to filter through all of this?” If you’ve got a small brand, or you’re in an
industry that isn’t talked about a lot, or you are a professional services consultant, real-
tor, or similar; you may have relatively few conversations that are of interest to you or
require your attention. If you’re Coke or Boeing or Bank of America, and in particular
if your industry is in the news currently or is otherwise talkworthy, you may find your-
self facing hundreds (or orders of magnitude more) of conversations daily. To get an
idea of just how seriously businesses are taking social analytics, use Google to search
for “Gatorade social media mission control.” It’s an amazing installation (myself hav-
ing worked in Mission Control with NASA/JPL) from a technological perspective and
a solid testament to just how important social analytics and understanding what is
happening on the Social Web has become.