Listen and Learn

As I mentioned in my previous post,  before launching into a social media engagement program the first thing you need to do is listen to the conversations that are going on about your brand, your product(s), the broader business marketplace or between the people who make up your target audience.

There are a variety of free and paid solutions in this space, and you will often hear people differentiate between brand monitoring and brand listening.  The approach you choose should be based on your goals and objectives.

In its simplest form, brand monitoring tools search the web for mentions of keywords that you have identified as part of your topic area.   These tools are good in providing you with a list of posts to cull through, but can be hard to analyze and produce usable insights for marketing.  Monitoring tools will track metrics like post and/or discussion volume, which can provide a conversational volume comparison against your competition and changes over time.  Most also provide the websites where the conversations are happening and a visual tag cloud of the key terms used by your audience in relation to your topic, brand, or product.  In my opinion, monitoring tools are best used for customer service and PR crisis avoidance, however require more staffing resources given the volume of information that needs to be reviewed and potentially responded to.

Brand listening tools start with a similar keyword input, but also apply additional intelligence or natural language processing in order to read and understand the conversational themes and their corresponding sentiment.  In addition to the share of conversation metrics, site list and tag clouds that monitoring tools provide, a brand listening tool brings to light what is most important to your audience. With this information you can develop appropriate messaging, content, or even product or service improvements.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, key uses from brand monitoring/listening information include:

• Overall share of conversation metric that can be tracked over time to show the success of your efforts.
• Knowledge of where to focus your social media engagement efforts based on targeting the most relevant sites/communities/blogs/forums with the highest conversational activity.  This allows you to target your internal or partner resources most effectively.
• The key themes/discussions that your audience is having about your brand, product(s) or specific business issue.  This allows you to tailor your engagement efforts around the topics that your audience is focused on versus what messaging you may have planned to push to them.   This, in conjunction with a content audit, will also allow you to fill in any gaps you may have in your content arsenal.
• User generated tag clouds allow you to tag your content appropriately and increase your SEO results.
• For listening platforms, sentiment analysis lets you quickly understand what is working well or may need improvement—for you and your competitors.  It is amazing what insights you can glean by mining your brand and your competitors’ negative sentiment.

Again, whatever type of platform you choose—brand monitoring or brand listening—will depend on your specific goals and objectives.  Just remember, you can’t have a true conversation without listening to the other person.

How do you listen to your customers and how are you leveraging those insights as part of your marketing mix?

Full disclosure: As part of our social media marketing services offering, IDG has a brand listening platform—IDG Social Scout—which is powered by Networked Insights technology.

How to approach social media marketing

When having a conversation, it is usually helpful to check to make sure everyone is on the same page. To that end, when I talk about social media marketing I am referring to the process of applying traditional marketing principles/disciplines to rapidly evolving communications that allows for real-time, 1:1 conversations with your target audiences. Above all, it’s about creating a dialog with your current and future customers by providing content & functionality that users find relevant and engaging.

In speaking with clients as they begin or evolve their social media marketing efforts, perhaps the most important realization is that social media marketing requires a long-term view and commitment to be successful. You are establishing a dialog with your customers and once you begin, your audience will expect you to hold up your end of the conversation. Just like in any conversation, you may not always like what the other person has to say, but smart marketers value and learn from that input.

While there are many ways to approach social media marketing, here is what I suggest:

1. Listen
   Before engaging your audience, the first thing you need to do is listen to the conversations that are going on about your brand, your product(s), the broader business marketplace or between the people that make up your target audience.
2. Understand
   As in any marketing plan development, it is necessary to determine your objectives, targets, strategies and success metrics before launching into program development and execution. While it is fine to test, learn and evolve, try to avoid “random acts of social media” whenever possible.
3. Prepare
   Content is king in social media. It is important to map and maximize your content in order to increase your Share of ConversationSM . Please remember, content in social means a variety of things: a blog post, a webinar, a whitepaper, a contest, an offer, a poll, etc.—whatever fits your objectives. The key is to understand what you need to hold up your end of the conversation.
4. Engage
   After you have listened to the conversations about your brand/products, clarified your objectives, developed a strategy and prepared your content map and initial content, the fun begins. There are various ways to engage with your audiences depending upon your objectives, but the key to creating any dialog is to remain truthful and real. This is what generates trust.
5. Measure
   Measurement ties the outcomes of your efforts back to the objectives established during the planning stage. Whether it be engagement trends like Share of ConversationSM or changes in brand sentiment, to tracking impressions, links, leads, registrations, event attendance, influence rankings, etc., you need to establish clear success metrics from the beginning to maximize and showcase ROI.
6. Integrate
   Finally, social media marketing does not operate in a silo. The knowledge and insights gained via your social media marketing efforts should be deeply integrated into your overall marketing communications and your traditional marketing efforts should promote your social media programs and touch points. Remember back to your Marketing 101 classes? It ALL works together!

While this is how I recommend approaching social media marketing, what are your thoughts? Does this approach resonate with your experiences to date?

Deidra Bodkin is VP, Client Services with IDG Strategic Marketing Services. She leads the team responsible for developing and executing social media marketing programs for IDG’s technology clients. Follow her on Twitter at @deidrabodkin.

Let the Conversation Begin!

Deidra Bodkin

IDG SMS Vice President, Client Services

Welcome to my blog on social media marketing. My goal is to cover a wide range of social media marketing topics, some of which may be good reminders for your existing social media marketing activities and others that may spur you to think about things differently.

As with any social media endeavor (and the title indicates), I hope to create a dialog with you and encourage you to submit comments and questions—including topics that you would like to see covered. Let the conversation begin!

Deidra Bodkin is VP, Client Services with IDG Strategic Marketing Services.  She leads the team responsible for developing and executing social media marketing programs for IDG’s technology clients.  Follow her on Twitter at @deidrabodkin.