[draft chapter excerpted from Strategic Social Media, due out in 2012 from Routledge]
Reality check. People are having conversations every day about your organization and they have been for a long time. Despite these conversations occurring practically under your nose, prior to social media, hearing them wasn’t easy even for the most vigilant organizations. Maybe a customer complaint here, or a comment in the comment box there, a focus group or survey every couple of years communication managers could get glimpses into what audiences were thinking.
Using the info gleaned, the organization could communicate with its audiences but the communication channels were traditionally “one way” – brochures, media relations, websites, events, etc. – and focused on the topic that the organization wanted to talk about.
Fortunately for modern day communicators, we have the ability to easily, and continuously, listen and monitor. You can listen in on those conversations that people are having every day about your organization, its products and services, and even more significantly, the lives that those audiences live, the communities they participate in and how your organization can be a part.
Listening has two aspects: the first – understanding the big picture (what are you listening for) and the second relates to the specific technology or the tools that you use (how you listen).
We’ll start with the big picture. In public relations, we’re often responsible for “issues management” and “environmental scanning.” Through these functions, we can help organizations understand what’s on the horizon and what they need to pay attention to for the sake of preparedness and response. When launching a social media listening and monitoring strategy, the same principles apply, but, as you might imagine, the tools differ.
David Alston from Radian6 wrote a blog post in 2008 outlining the top 10 things an organization should listen for. Besides being a great read, the post provides a useful start when thinking about your approach to listening.
Alston suggests listening for each of the following (see the post for a full description of each): the complaint, the compliment, the expressed need, the competitor, the crowd, the influencer, the crisis, the return on investment, the audit, the thread.
The top ten list can open your mind to the breadth and depth that you must think about when starting to listen and monitor. But let’s take it a step further. In an effort to help you conceptualize listening and monitoring, we developed this chart that depicts the “three levels of listening.”
I created this chart when I was setting up a dashboard for a small start-up company. It captured what I was trying to explain and it provided some shared vocabulary with the client as well as a meaningful structure.
Level 1: At the center of the chart is your organization. Level 1 listening is focused on those terms and keywords that are most closely related to your organization.
Level 2: Level 2, as the chart implies, is slightly more broad and focused on keywords and phrases related to your market and your industry, but not necessary specifically about your organization.
Level 3: Level 3 lives another concentric ring out from the center and focuses on those topics and issues related to the lifestyles and interests of your audience, but probably not specific to your industry or market. Some of the most valuable insights about the “topics” that your audiences are interested in live in Level 3.
We could even combine Lebrun’s top 10 list with the three levels of listening and come up with something like this (note: they don’t all fit perfectly and some overlap).
Level 1: the complaint, the compliment, the crisis, the ROI, the audit, the thread
Level 2: the expressed need, the competitor, the crowd, the influencer, the crisis, the audit, the thread
Level 3: the crowd, the influencer, the crisis, the thread
(you can see more about how to apply this chart in this post about “what to listen for.”)
This basic categorization works to establish a listening and monitoring strategy that helped find the pulse of the audience for your market or industry – what are they thinking about, talking about and interested in. I’ve used it over and over and over for organizations I work with.
To create a listening and monitoring strategy that’s broad enough to be useful, you must think beyond Level 1. If you don’t, you’ll miss much of the conversation. People aren’t necessarily talking about YOU. Certainly if they are, you need to know. But the conversations you must tune into to understand the change in topic are much broader.
Moving beyond Level 1 can be challenging. We “get” Level 1. As communicators we instinctively understand that we need to know if and when conversations about our brands occur online. That’s easy. It’s harder to understand why (and how) to listen and monitor more broadly.
Getting to Levels 2 and 3 takes knowing your organization – and its industry – inside and out. It also takes some creativity, lots of trial and error and patience. But if you don’t get there, you’re doing little more than customer service (which is important) and missing the opportunity to use social media to manage issues, track trends and participate in conversations and communities in a meaningful way.
