Web Development Tips

View Listen Now, Talk Later on Slideshare.

Back in high school we took a senior class poll in which we voted on who was “most
likely to succeed,” “most
likely to end up in jail” and so forth. Your school probably did the same thing.
The answers were then printed in the yearbook. In our yearbook, Julia Talsma
and I were listed as the responses for “talks least, says most.” I don’t recall
who won “talks most, says least,” but was glad it wasn’t me.

The same idea applies to social media. "Talks most, says least" is
not going to make you popular* on Twitter, Facebook or most other social spaces.

*Popularity isn’t our goal, but we do want to forge connections with our
audience. They are more likely to listen to us if we also listen to
them.

Alas, many
individuals and businesses see social media as an extra publishing channel.
Our species seems drawn to fast easy solutions, and publishing an RSS feed
out to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. seems easy. It is. But it’s not always
productive. The true value is found in two-way communication. If we start our
social media efforts with listening activities, we can learn how our audience
perceives us (if they do) and what they want to hear. Then, when we’re ready
to speak, we’ll know what to say.

What we listen for varies by our goals. In a recent client training session
I focused on how we could use listening for that client’s specific niche. But
there are some general principles that can be adapted to a wide variety of
use scenarios. On January 25th I gave a presentation, Listen
Now…Talk Later: Listening as the foundation of your social media strategy, to
our “Local
Entrepreneur & Social Media Network Meetup Group” (run by another client)
in which I discussed listening in this broader context. After reading this
you may find it helpful to peruse
those slides as they include screenshots
and other examples of what I’ll discuss here.

Listening for brand, product and service monitoring.

For marketers and public relations professionals, monitoring is nothing new.
They’ve used clipping services to monitor brand and product mentions in mainstream
media, conducted focus groups and surveys among customers and target audiences,
and otherwise monitored feedback and opinion for years.

Monitoring our brands and products is important for a variety of reasons.
Whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or an individual freelancer,
monitoring can give you insights into:

• Brand/Product/Service awareness (name recognition)
• Brand/Product/Service perception (what do people think of who you are and
  what you offer)
• Customer Satisfaction (how happy are current customers)
• Your Competition
• Your Industry
• Opportunities for product/service/customer service improvements
• Opportunities for sales and lead generation
• Market needs (gaps in the industry which you may be able to fill by providing
  a new product or service)
• Liabilities (product faults, bad press, potential communications crises…),
  etc.

Now that we’re in an era when customers blog and share opinions via Twitter—and
media outlets publish their content online—monitoring is easier than
every before. Rather than paying for expensive clipping services, we can
search online ourselves. If the budget allows, we can also use commercial
monitoring tools that can give us far more data than we’ve had in the past.

<!–

Animation about listening for customer service.

<!–

In this video a somewhat unscrupulous boss finds a new opportunity to take advantage
of buyers after social media listening uncovers a customer service problem related
to cow making equipment.

When you listen to what
mainstream media and the public have to say about you, your competition and
your industry, you can then apply that knowledge to everything from your marketing
strategies to product development. For example, If you manufacture machines
that make plastic cows, and your listening habits tell you of a growing need
for plastic pigs, you can retool your equipment to produce pig making machines
and get a jump on your competition.

Or, if a user has found fault with your plastic cow making equipment, you
can fix the problem for that customer and put your engineers to work to make
sure that it doesn’t happen again. If the customer has complained publicly,
you can also publicly share how you solved the problem to your customer’s satisfaction—thus
resolving the issue before the customer feels compelled to share his complaint
so loudly that it becomes the most watched video on YouTube.

Listening is only half the battle. You still have to make plans for what you’ll
do with what you learn. But if you listen, then you can plan…instead
of having to react in an emergency when it may be too late.

Listening for content curation.

Just as we listen to what customers think about our products, we can also
listen to learn more about their interests. If we can find out what intrigues
them, then we can create content strategies designed to serve their needs as
well as our own goals. Listening also helps us select the content we share
on our blogs and through our social media channels. Many companies just blog
about themselves. Their Facebook status updates all relate to product news,
usage tips and announcements. If you’re Apple this type of content could be
interesting enough to draw in readers. But if you manufacture plastic cow-making
equipment it probably isn’t.

By listening to your target audience (plastic cow and other novelty toy manufacturers)
you can find out what else they want to hear. Perhaps they’ve shown an interest
in toy trends or the development of new polymers that can produce more resilient
cows. If you keep listening you can find blog articles, news stories and Web
sites that appeal to their interests and share them through your social media
channels.

When you become the go-to source for the information they seek, you give them
a far better reason to follow you than if you only shared information about
you.

Listening to converse

<!–

Animation showing what happens when you don’t listen in social media

<!–

Imagine this conversation on Twitter. Here a dog food manufacturer quickly offends his new follower by talking at him, instead of to him. (No dogs were injured in the making of this video.)

The easiest people to listen to are the ones with whom we already have a connection.
These include the people who comment on our blogs, the people we follow on
Twitter, the friends we make on Facebook, Ning, etc. If we want to make friends,
share information with peers, convert followers to customers, and so forth,
we can begin to forge these connections by listening to them.

On Twitter
this means reading your stream one or more times per day and responding to
Tweets that are relevant to your industry or interest. If you have a Facebook
Fan page this means visiting your page daily to respond to comments and posts
made by fans. How often you do this depends on your own situation.

To those familiar with social media this seems obvious, but for those more
accustomed to traditional publishing channels, this is a new idea.

When I was working at Case Western Reserve University I created the Case
News Twitter account to share our latest news and press releases. These
were (and still are) automatically posted to Twitter via Twitterfeed. I then
started following Tweeps who might be interested in the university and followed
back those who followed the account (with the exception of spammers).

Once a day (usually during lunch) I would skim through the stream to see what
people had to say. If it was something related to Case or academia I would
respond. In doing so I could answer questions, wish students good luck on exams,
thank alumni for donating, etc. I also added event and other postings of interest
that weren’t included in the automated news feed. Doing this helped me connect
with followers and gave me a better sense of what they wanted to hear from
Case. It also showed readers that someone was listening and would respond if
they wrote to us.

Many organizations just post without listening. This works fine for services
like Twitter accounts that post weather updates. But for organizations that
want to use social media to build business, posting without listening and responding
can send a message that you don’t really care what customers think. It can
also lead to a rather boring Twitter stream that customers don’t find interesting
enough to read. This isn’t unique to Twitter. The same principles apply to
Facebook, Ning, YouTube, MySpace and others.

If you follow a large number of people you won’t be able to read everything.
But if you check in once or more per day, read all replies and skim the rest
of the updates you’ll easily find opportunities to converse.

How to listen: news, social media and related searches

Tools and services such as Radian 6 and Social
Mention are designed to help
with monitoring, but you can also learn a lot through targeted searches. By
searching on brand and product names, keywords related to your industry, competitor
names and related topics you can find news stories, blog posts, social media
comments, discussion boards and other online resources related to what you
are monitoring. Here are a few (of many) possible sites to use for social media
and related searches.

• Addict-o-matic (social media monitoring)
• Board Tracker (discussion board search)
• Delicious (social bookmarks)
• Digg (crowdsourcing)
• Google News
• Google Blog Search
• How Sociable? (brand visibility
  scores – more useful for comparison w/competition)
• Reddit (crowdsourcing)
• Same Point (social media search)
• Social Mention (social media monitoring)
• StumbleUpon (crowdsourcing)
• Twitter Search
• Whos Talking (social media search)
• Yahoo Advanced News Search

You’ll notice that some of these are typical search sites while others may
include bookmarking and other services. Which of these is best for you will
depend on your goals and your industry. Generally you’ll find that you can
choose a select combination of tools that suits your particular situation.
Subscribing to blogs in your industry is also a useful way to find out what
topics are hot in your field and discover articles you may wish to share with
your followers.

<!–

Simpsons Coke commercial.

<!–

The link to this Simpsons Coke commercial was the most popular message found
when searching Twitter for “coke” today. (The Superbowl was yesterday, so it
makes sense that a Coke ad would dominate the search results.)

When searching it is worth noting that it is easy to get false positives.
If you are "Coca Cola" then most of your results for that phrase
will be appropriate—but a search on "Coke" may also bring
up posts that have nothing to do with refreshing fizzy beverages. Key word
terms and phrases can be equally vague. A search on recruiting may bring results
ranging from employment and military recruiting to student recruitment and
recruiting for cults. But if you specify something like "executive
recruiting" you can
get more focused results. You may need to experiment a bit to find keyword
combinations that provide the results you seek. For Twitter searches you can
also compare your results for plain keywords and commonly used hashtags. #recruiting,
for example, is popularly used as a hashtag for recruiting related to employment.

Subscribing and sharing via RSS Readers

Many of the search tools listed above will provide you with an RSS feed for
your search. Feeds allow you to subscribe to your search so you don’t
have to conduct fresh searches each time you want to listen.

For those unfamiliar with RSS, such feeds function like magazine subscriptions.
If you subscribed to the print edition of National Geographic, then
a new issue would show up in your mail box each month. When you subscribe to
an RSS feed, new articles show up in your feed reading software as they become
available.

Google Reader is one of the most popular feed readers. Once you sign up for
a Google Reader account you can subscribe to blog posts and search feeds and
organize them by topics for easy viewing. To read the articles you just check
Google Reader on a regular basis as you would check your e-mail account.

Slides 22-30 in the Listen
Now, Talk Later presentation include a video and
screen shots that demonstrate how one uses Google Reader. Google Reader is
but one of many readers available, but most work in a similar manner. NetVibes is another popular choice. Some users also use e-mail programs such as Outlook
to subscribe to feeds.

To listen is to learn

Listening takes time, but with the right tools we can find manageable ways
to listen. What we learn will then guide us to better serve our audience.
Now it’s my turn to listen to you. I’ve only covered the broad strokes of this
topic here. If you have more tips and ideas for social media listening, please
share them in the comments below.

Social Media Listening Resources

When I pick the related links to share in my blog entries, I try to choose
articles that will expand on what I’ve written, or offer a different perspective
or insight, so that you can delve deeper into the topic. While some are found
through Google I also find them using the listening strategies I’ve discussed
in this post. The following were found via blogs I subscribe to, Twitter searches,
Delicious and Google searches.

• 5 Simple Twitter Listening Tips Every Marketer Should Know by ReadWriteWeb’s Elyssa Pallai
• 
  Framing Your Social Media Efforts by Chris Brogan
• Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
• Listening Literacy For Nonprofits
  by Beth Kanter
• The Five W’s of Social Media Listening by Chuck Hemann
• The Importance of Social Media Audits by Jeremiah Owyang

Fan me on Facebook – Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don’t get written as frequently as I’d like.
But that doesn’t mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over
on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool,
I’m sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something
interesting I’ve found in the blogosphere. At one tip per week day it won’t
clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you’ll find something useful. And
for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I
usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.
(I also have links to more accounts on My
Social Media Profiles page.)

Note to local northeast Ohio readers: The
Lake Erie Moose Society is holding its monthly meeting tonight, February 8, 2009. If you blog, or are thinking about blogging please feel free to join
us.

Tags: Amp, Audience, Class Poll, Easy Solutions, General Principles, Insights, Listening Activities, Media Efforts, Media Strategy, Meetup Group, Niche, Popularity, Scenarios, Slides, Social Entrepreneur, Social Spaces, Talsma, Training Session, True Value, Yearbook

Related posts

• Would You Like to learn how to Earning A Living In During These Hard Times? (0)
• Niche Socializer is still to revolutionise the way that Social Networking is perceived (0)
• Looking for Knowledge About Make Money At Home – Check this Publication (0)
• Important Essentials for Article Marketing and its Benefits (0)
• Goal-driven social media strategies & tactics: how are you interacting with your target audience? (0)