Social Media Power Secret- Listening

October 16, 2007 · Comments

listening What’s the first sound you hear every morning? How does that affect you? What sounds appeal to you? Which ones bug you? My favorite sound is children laughing. Children laughing at me makes me sad. Unless I’m being funny. And then it makes me happy.

There’s a point here.

Two Ears and One Mouth

Dr. Stephen R. Covey devotes all of Habit 5 of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective people to the reality that we have twice as many ears as we have mouths, and that we should consider this fact. Listen. Hear. Understand. That’s the big secret transition point inside the 7 Habits. The same applies to social media.

HOW to Listen

Conversations are happening online in all kinds of places. It’s important to understand how to get in there, and how to listen where the conversations are happening. Here’s a very impartial list of places to listen and how. But first, a word about Google Reader.

Google Reader is a tool that makes reading LOTS of blogs and other RSS feeds really easy. (Did I lose any of you on discussing RSS? If so, watch this and come back.) How? First, it’s super easy to add subscriptions. Click the big green “ADD SUBSCRIPTION” button and you can add whatever you need to follow. Now, let’s talk about what to add.

Where to Listen

  • Technorati. Get an account there, then build a watchlist. Click the watchlist button and put in relevant search terms to find what you need to track. For instance, for my ego surf, I track: “chris brogan,” “chrisbrogan,” “chrisbrogan.com” and more. Then, click the posts tab, find the orange RSS graphic and the Subscribe text, and right-click (or CTRL-click for Mac users) and copy link location. Take this and go back to Google Reader and add the subscription. (Um, not chrisbrogan, but whatever search terms YOU want to track.) Do this for each search term until you’ve got them fairly covered.

  • Google Blog Search. Similar plan here. Go to the site http://blogsearch.google.com, type in your search terms, and then note the left sidebar where you can subscribe. Copy the link location for RSS, and dump THAT into your Google Reader’s subscriptions. (Note: I have a folder entitled “ME” where all my ego surfing goes. Reader shows you how to add tags or make folders.)
  • Twitter. With Twitter’s new Track feature, you see another place where information can come to you simply. Not sure if this has an RSS handle on it. You?
  • Google Alerts – This is another service for tracking information and it might give you something different. You might also try Yahoo! Alerts too, to be sure you’re catching everything. (note: I currently use neither, and so can’t report if they’re especially helpful).

Apps and Special Systems

There are plenty of social media software consultants out there selling a software solution or at least a baked-up report of how to track buzz. Some of them are really good (for instance, I got a great private demo from Radian6 the other day, and I HIGHLY recommend that product). But there are lots of these that are just snake oil waiting to be snapped up by unsuspecting people who need listening. Not all (so save your flames listening/monitoring companies), but I’ve seen some doozies.

In the mean time, I’m doing my own listening using the ways I mentioned above.

Other Places to Listen

As much as I wish that Google got deep into the bowels of everything to search the Hell out of it (privacy advocates all just shuddered at my suggestion), it’s not all there yet. To that end, if there are industry trades for you to follow, get subscribing. If there are blogs pertinent to your organization or passions, get subscribing.

Pay attention to the people who are paying attention to your area. Don’t be lazy about it, but let them do *some* of the listening, too. I get lots of great information from paying attention to guys like Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel, Geoff Livingston and truly too many more to name here. Do the same. There are people out here looking under rocks and working in their own private labs. Learn from them.

You’ll note I didn’t mention Facebook. Know why? Because there’s only one little stitch of RSS on the whole thing: the news stream. Nice, but not especially useful to this. C’mon, Facebook. Make it easier for me to listen.

Comments

Lest we forget, I spend a LOT of time and effort crafting my blog posts such that I hope YOU contribute. Why? Because I know what I think about these things. I need you to think on them too and help complete the information.

Make it REALLY easy for people to reach you, to leave comments, to send email, to dial a phone number and leave a message. Be as multi-modal in your ways people can touch you as you possibly can.

And You?

What have I missed? You’re all good listeners. Tell me some good tips, or show people the tools I don’t yet know about. Show them YOUR hacks to this same solution, and let them better understand how YOU go about listening.

I’m over here listening for your response.

Photo credit, Paulgi

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  • Candi Imming
    I enjoyed this post and the ways to get information, but I was also hoping for some insights on how the information, once obtained, was consumed, digested, and responded to in a way that would indicate active listening occurred. For example, when responding do you use some of the words from the original post, as I believe people listen for key words in responses as clues that they were heard.
  • I use Google alerts, they can be quite useful for keeping up with what's happening in your niche, the trick is to set them up for the right keywords. But thanks for letting us know about Yahoo Alerts - I had no idea Yahoo had a similar service. I'll check it out now :-)
  • thanks for sharing
  • reeegan
    What about Yahoo! Pipes? I know its a little bit harder to use, but I think ultimately can scour everything in deliver it in one nice package.
  • Thanks Chris for the post, some great tips. I havent been exploring much into Technorati features.

    I use Google Web alerts mostly and combine it with message filters to redirect the alerts to specific folders arranged by categories - social media, RFID, Facebook etc. It is great in that way.
  • Georgia
    I use the Google home page and its tab feature to keep up with what people are saying. The three most recent feed titles are displayed, so I can scan to see what is new. I have about 100 rss feeds that I have organized into four broad categories, including those from my family member's blogs. That way when I log on, everything is right in front of me and I can do everything at once, including email.

    I even have a special tab for meebo, in case someone I know wants to be listened to right that second. :-)
  • A few resources I use for listening:

    del.icio.us: You can get feeds of popular items for a given tag. I don't think there's an easy way to get at it, but you can go to http://del.icio.us/popular/ur_tag_here

    digg: You can get feeds for the results of any search you can think of. Among other things, you can choose if between showing all stories, upcoming stories, or front page stories. I'll typically stay to just front page stuff, to reduce how much noise there is.

    reddit: They don't seem to have a working search at the moment, but they do have a few 'subcommunities' (programming is the one I'm particularly interested in it). There is a lot of noise, without having a search, so I end up aggressively skimming the topics for things that sound like they could be interesting.
  • I haven't tried Yahoo! Alerts, I'll have to give it a try. But Google Alerts is invaluable and something that should be more broadly used. You can use it to find what people are saying about you, your company, your products and your industry. It's easy to set up as well.
  • It's about collecting, sharing and communicating information through the channel of social media. You mention great ways to track this information and I use many of them such as Technorati.
  • Well, I listen to Chris Brogan, so I've on the right path. Good stuff, man. I'm at SMX Social Media now ... listening!
  • Just thinking it might be more attractive to old-school ("let's push our message out") marketing, PR and executive types to call it "eavesdropping".

    But for me, the big follow-up to listening is to turn around and help the users, as opposed to figuring out how to quash, counter, or otherwise deflect unfavorable comments. The best response is to rectify the situation that caused the complaint or bad review. Improve the product, or the service, or have someONE (not some corporate alias like "support@yourcompany.com") get back to the customer and, if possible, offer to make good on the problem. That's what really makes users love you. People realize that everyone makes mistakes. It's what you do afterward that matters.

    ps. If you have GoogleReader enabled, you should just be able to click on an RSS feed icon and it will pop up the Google Reader option and let you choose where to add it. That may require the Google toolbar in Firefox. Not sure. But there's no need to copy and paste URLs, which I think puts some people off.
  • I think an important way to let people listen to you is to use and RSS aggregator (friendfeed, Jaiku, etc.) that way you can consolidate all of your information into one place.

    I find it difficult and cumbersome to listen to people when I have to subscribe to their blog, SNS, twitter, and flickr feeds separately.
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