Monitoring the Social Dialogue: Being a Good Listener
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on January 9th, 2012
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In my last post on entering the social dialogue with consumers, I mentioned that there are four main stages at which organizations interact with consumers through social media: monitor, prepare, respond, and measure. I’d like to take a closer look at social media monitoring—the fundamental stage of interaction—and the benefits it can offer an organization that is willing to invest in listening to its customers on a social level.
Social monitoring facilitates an enterprise’s ability to build and maintain an awareness of the social conversation conducted online by consumers, vendors, competitors, and bystanders about its brand. This effort enables companies to formulate an analysis and response strategy based on information gathered from social venues via keywords and/or more sophisticated queries.
An ear to the ground
Awareness of what your customers are saying is a good way to listen for and respond to negative feedback online. But this is only one of the benefits that social media monitoring affords businesses – and according to a recent Focus Research survey, fewer than 25 percent of users are likely using social monitoring tools to their fullest capabilities.
Organizations may be overlooking some of the most valuable functionality in these tools. Those that extract basic customer data but never delve into “higher-level” functions are leaving these tools severely underutilized. Consider taking advantage of social media monitoring for:
Competitive intelligence – Real-time monitoring of competitors’ activities as well as shifting consumer sentiments and behaviors.
Consumer insights – Mining your customer base for product and service suggestions, requests, and unmet needs.
Strategic relationships – Identifying and tapping your biggest influencers to help extend your brand, from bloggers to media outlets.
Communication/messaging plans – Setting brand positioning benchmarks prior to marketing efforts, measured against predetermined objectives.
Of course, gathering and analyzing information is only the beginning. The key to making this knowledge actionable is ensuring it quickly gets into the hands of the right individuals within your organization – which brings us to the next step in developing a truly social media enabled business. Once an organization has a social monitoring plan in place, the next step is to prepare the business operationally to take action on a response plan.
In my next post, I’ll look at the factors involved in enabling your people, processes, and environment to initiate a social media response.
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.
Great post Nancy. We especially promote the opportunity presented by social media for competitive intelligence. Often being able to connect the dots allows a clearer picture. The amount of content present in social media allows for many more dots to be visible, and this can and must be used by companies to their advantage!
I agree with Joe that the more information collected, the greater the level of insight a company has at its fingertips — and that can definitely include CI. I would bet this is one of the more underexplored areas of social, as organizations tend to overlook their competitors and their products as potential monitoring keywords.
But to understand the pattern of these dots (the customers) we have to gather the information AND provide them for every agend. So we have to ground our social media activity on a solid cloudbased information device.
Thanks Joe!
Johnsonsen, to your point on how the information is gathered and analyzed, I’m curious why you would look for a cloud-based device/system? It would seem to me the ability to make the data actionable at the agent level is really the critical piece.