Mar
19
Social media listening – Are you a fly on the wall?
March 19, 2010 | 7 Comments
Millions of conversations are happening through the Internet or an electronic medium. Having a focused social media strategy means that there is probably an engagement with ones audience. But what about the conversations happening outside your immediate circle of engagement?
Finding out about these conversations is called listening – almost like being a fly-on-the-wall. How many times have you said if only I was a fly-on-the-wall? Now listening to what your customers are saying directly to you is also listening, but not the type of listening I am writing about today.
There are a number of ways in which you can listen or find conversations that are happening. The following are types of tools or services people use:
Now listening is really useful and gives you an idea of your reach, engagement and influence. The one thing I think to myself when I look at the information I get when I use these tools is – now what? How do I convert this information into measurable KPI’s? How do I extract the information for analysis? And how do I take my perception out of the equation?
Now the reason I mention my own perception is that what some may perceive as a positive comment another could perceive as a negative: so how do I gage the “love” I am getting out there?
Now some of the results like search engine mentions or ranking or any results that produce numbers can be manually captured if need be, but this is not ideal. We are using a host of tools to listen, even when a single tool provides a host of information, it often differs between tools.
I believe it is a real challenge to capture the results of your listening, but is crucial to your success to have a method of monitoring. I believe the way to get around the perception problem is to have an agreed outline of what is considered positive or negative and a list of words that are associated with these different sentiments. This way you could begin to measure the mood towards you.
If you are listening the you can engage. Can you risk not listening? You can only deal with potential threats to your business if you know about them. You need to be a fly-on-the-wall where ever a relevant conversation about you is happening.
I would be interested to hear about your experience, advice, tools you are using and how you are measuring your listening efforts.
PS: Check out this funky video called: What does it mean to “measure” social media? on my favourite video page.
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Thanks Stan, that is really good advice!
Speaking of tools for social listening, I would advice to focus on those that just help collect social media conversations and statements. Then the analysis should still be done by humans. The ones that claim to automate analysis of human language are still far from perfect. To give an example: text editors are helpful to make writing and editing easier but they cannot tell you if you wrote a good article or a bad one. Or even only if the style is consistent.
Charisse I love they way you have put that so simply. Thanks for the comments.
This is my simple equation for social media ROI:
Followers and leads that have converted into clients = Return on Investment!
For me, social media has been amazing!
Charisse
ChaRene Graphic Design
http://www.ChaRene.net
Lee,
I am contacting you to ask if you can change my contact information on the comment I left to you. We have just recently changed our name and all our contact information and am trying to eliminate the old name on Google as much as possible. Any questions or concerns, please let me know. Below is all the current and updated info.
Charisse Louis
Charene Creative
http://www.ChareneCreative.com
email: c.louis@charenecreative.com
Hi Charisse, I have changed it for you.
I am engaging in SEO service and i can say If you are really want to influence of your expertise area then you need Listing your customer view.And social media is a great path on search engine monitoring and you need to use all tools according to there uses.
thanks