What to Listen for in Social Media – Part Two: How to Listen, for What, and how to Respond.

In the second of this three-part series on Listening in Social Media, here is some of the best advice I found on how to listen: setting up your listening, analysing the conversation types, and what do with what you’ve heard.

Quoting Tania Yuki in her post on comscore.com:

Listen to the good. Respond quickly to the bad, and respond even faster to the ugly. Enable the conversation, rather than attempting to put it in a chokehold. People are talking about your brand anyway, so you may as well get down in the weeds and know what’s going on.

How should you listen?

Beth Kanter has written a guide to listening literacy skills in Social Media Listening Literacy for Nonprofits which provides help for the bemused, or simply overloaded. A step-by-step guide with links to further reading, it provides a useful reference to such topics as to why you should listen, how to set up keywords, add RSS feeds, identify key bloggers in your space, how to respond, and collate your reporting. Do check it out.

What should you listen for?

David Alston, VP Marketing at Radian6, has made a great list of 20 of the kind of conversations you should be listening out for in social media. Published across three posts (links below), it identifies key conversation types and why you should pay attention to them. He gives a lot more information about each type, but I’ve made a quick summary of each case.

• The complaint – a complaint is an opportunity to demonstrate problem-solving abilities. Catch them early to show how responsive you are


• The compliment – save your ‘good reviews’ for testimonial use


• The expressed need – you can offer assistance or a free demo


• The competitor – keep an eye on your competition’s strategy and customer’s views towards them


• The crowd – follow the swarms who gather around a particular topic to understand the current sentiment and it’s relative importance


• The influencer - Often an influencer’s post appears prominently in a topic’s Google search: use them as advocates or to improve your understanding of negative opinions


• The crisis – use social media to serve as an early warning system to locate issues and track effectiveness of campaigns to address them


• The ROI – measure the performance of online marketing and outreach campaigns


• The audit – analyse the buzz to rank overall sentiment, trends, locations, competitor performance


• The thread – connect together the splintered conversations to improve analysis


• The long tail – get in contact with the influencers, your brand evangelists


• The story angle – you may uncover new ways to talk about your brand from the stories people are telling about it


• The recruit – what do potential employees see about you on the web?


• The brand association – how do your customers and potential customers actually view our brand? It may not be the way you think they do.


• The mashup – what are people doing with your brand? Have they improved upon it?


• The correction – preserving brand equity by stepping in and correcting mis-information


• The advocate – finding and thanking the people who are talking positively about your brand


• The common ground – finding where your like-minded customers are gathering


• The infringement – checking for copyright infringements

The original articles (One, Two and Three) are published one the Radion6 blog.
Update (5 June 2009) In refence to the story angle - I've just read a good article by Nicholine Hayward called The Beginning, Middle, and End of Brand Storytelling, giving more information about how to leverage consumer stories within brand marketing.

And how should you respond?

So, you’ve set up your tools, you’re monitoring the conversations in and around your brand, everywhere from Facebook to Twitter, and from within your own community. But what are you supposed to do now? How should you be engaging your customers or potential customers?
Amber Naslund, also from Radian6, offers some good questions on how to manage the participation side of listening in The How and Why of Listening .

• Do we have to respond to EVERY brand mention?


• How much time does it take each day to do this?


• What’s the best way to handle negative comments? Ignore or engage?


• How does one person manage all of that information?


• How do we keep track of what happens after someone responds?


• Who should respond to brand mentions? What should they say?


• How will we know if all of this is making a lick of difference?

And for some suggested answers to these questions, check out Corby Fine’s comments below the post ...

Update 12 June 09 - Do read this fine advice from Nathan Gilliat in Social Media Today about how to avoid going too far the other way, and creeping our your customers by seeming to stalk them ...

Social media is all about sharing knowledge, so please comment below if you’ve found any other pertinent advice out there. For the third and final part in this series on listening in social media (check out the previous blog post on Tools to Help you Listen ), I’ll be posting some case studies of good examples of brands who got it right - hopefully tomorrow!