Listening

Listening tools have more than one application: they’re useful for customer service. They’re good for PR & crisis management. They’re also good for marketing opportunity discovery, and finally as an R&D lead source. Realizing that there are many applications for the same category should give you a sense of what needs doing. Again, let’s look at this like a frame for your efforts. Once you’ve decided to take on listening, you’ll have to answer the following:

• Which tools should I use? (Free? Radian6? ScoutLabs? Sysomos? A combination?)
• Who should do the active listening?
• Where do we route the information?
• What are we doing with analytics tools? (Hubspot, Google Analytics, etc)
• How do we measure success?

Listening is primary to many of the other areas of practice, because it’s your primary instrumentation. As you can see, I include mechanical “listening,” the use of tools like Hubspot and Google Analytics, into the space of listening. This is normally bunched up in company’s web departments, with an SEO person. And yet, I believe we should align it here.

Connecting

Connecting embodies all the points of social presence and outreach, as well as community building. This is your Twitter and Facebook usage, your commenting on blogs, your building of private communities or your nurturing of other people’s communities. This is your HR hiring process as well as your lead generation. This is where all human interaction opportunities are routed. Even when listening detects some action to take, it should be handled by whoever is assigned to connecting. (Note: this could and might likely be the same person.)

Tools for connecting (just some serving suggestions – don’t use all of these):

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Blog accounts like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous (“passports,” as I mentioned in my personal branding ebook).
• Bookmarking accounts like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon
• YouTube, Flickr
• Ning.com
• And what do you do on these? Who do you connect with? What are your contact policies? What are the rules of engagement?

What you do in connecting is very important. Here’s where social media really shines. Connecting and making it a two way street is such a big opportunity. It’s a chance for your customers/clients/prospects to feel seen, heard. It’s the essence of giving people what they really want most times: an interaction where both sides feel heard. It’s also the primary place sales people will find value in social media. It’s also where new blood is found for projects and initiatives. It’s where databases grow. It’s where you can nurture your organization and its connecting points. It’s where community can happen.

Publishing

The last of the three areas, but no less important, publishing incorporates how social media does what it does best. The ability to blog, make video, share photos and audio effortlessly, and do so for free or cheap is one of the reasons people come to the social media shores. Once you see the value in content marketing (organic SEO results, the opportunity to connect, the ability to share news in a non-email way, the chance to tell stories that matter to you and your organization), you won’t want to stop.

Publishing has many tools:

• Blogs such as WordPress (either hosted for free at WordPress.com or hosted on your own site, using WordPress.org), Moveable Type, Posterous, and more.
• Video platforms like Blip.tv, YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and dozens more.
• Audio platforms like BlogTalkRadio.com
• Live video like Ustream.tv, BlogTV.com, and more.
• Photo sharing on Flickr.com

The trick with publishing is to make the information relevant to the consumer of this media. B2B has great opportunities in using publishing to improve the communications/sales process by making simple, short videos instead of simply lobbing white papers. Customer service can create behind-the-scenes blogs to show how to better use a product. Smaller businesses can capture their best customers in a photo or quick video. People can record radio shows that cover what matters most to the business. The possibilities are endless, and the opportunities to promote great content are equally dizzying in their promise.

Tying It All Together

It’s in how these tools are all used, in the nuances of good etiquette, quality content creation, effective promotion, useful policies, and a myriad of other pieces that the details become important. We’re all chipping at this stuff in some way or another, and this part’s where we work on tying it all together.

At New Marketing Labs, we have worked with companies in all these areas, but it’s fun how there’s always a variation on the emphasis. In some projects, we do much more publishing work. In others, we’ve done almost all connecting. Blending these areas and fitting them appropriately for our partners is what is most exciting.

Your Take

Does this lay out the way you see it? Are you working in these three areas? How are you working on these projects with clients or inside your own company? If you’re a smaller business, how does this translate?

Photo credit pdz_house

I love many of the professional products out there like Radian6, Techrigy, BuzzGain (just launched today!), and Crimson Hexagon to name just a few. But you know, there are ways to listen simply, and though they’re not perfect, they’re free.

I always recommend both. Use a professional platform to get the depth, the reporting, the other added value. But I recommend setting up a free listening station, too. Here’s a quick step by step to start that kind of station off. You might have more ideas for the comments section.

Grow Bigger Ears in 10 Minutes

1. Get a gmail account. – http://www.gmail.com
2. Log in to Google Reader. This will become your home base for listening. Note the position of the “Add Subscriptions” button (mid top left) – http://www.google.com/reader
3. Now, go to Google Blogsearch. Type in your query about your company, your organization, your competitors, and the like. We’ll use the results in the next step. – http://blogsearch.google.com.
4. Note the “Subscribe” links on the bottom left of the page. Right-click the RSS link, and select copy.
5. Go back to Google Reader, click Add Subscription, and select paste.
6. Repeat this for as many variations of searches you want for blogs.
7. UPDATE: I hear this feature is going away. You can do the same thing at IceRocket, if so, just do this step at Icerocket instead of Technorati. Go to Technorati. Perform the same queries there. Neither Google nor Technorati finds it all, so cross-posting works. – http://www.technorati.com
8. Go to Twitter Search. Do the same. – http://search.twitter.com
9. Fine tune your searches by seeing what inaccurate results come from your first attempts, and replace bad searches with better ones.
10. Take the payload of all that raw searching and SORT it using Google Reader. By this, I mean the following: when you find something to note, either Share it (Shift S), or email it to a core team ( type E on the keyboard). Send only the important stuff. Then, let internal employees see the RSS feed of the shared items, or just use the email feature. Whichever works best. This is how you sort the larger pile of info into the smaller and more useful packets that your organization can consume.
11. Most important to the process – DO something with what you’re learning. Figure out the business value of the listening you’re doing, and route it to the right places. Listening isn’t for marketers. It’s for the organization. It’s for customer service, for product management, for the senior team, etc.

In a nutshell, that’s the plan. You can do this. It’s not especially tricky (though the tuning can be challenging). My question to you: why wouldn’t you?

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Photo credit tanakawho

…but I’m hoping we escape the grips of centralized thinking and remember that what made blogs work was that everyone gets their own platform to speak their mind. TechMeme takes us back to the place that didn’t work, where everyone fights for scarce attention.

Our websites are a point in space, and a moment in time, but they are not the end-all of our online presence any longer. To be engaged, fully, on the web, is to build your passports, configure your listening tools, and launch off to all the various places that hold pertinent conversations and information at hand.

Is search the most important tool, or just the most used? How’s listening starting to rank for you? Because to me, listening is a big part of the game.

Read Dave’s whole post here.

Social media tools are a great way to get the word out about your passions, your interests, the company’s latest products, but we tend to rush right into the “speaking” side of the toolbox without giving much thought to the “listening” part. Knowing what people are saying about you, your competitors, and your industry as a whole are just as important as blogging and making good video.

It’s interesting to note that companies will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 on a good website design, but will fail to implement even the most rudimentary listening tools to move their capabilities to understand the impact of such a site beyond the realm of hits and clicks.

As part of our social media strategy, let’s presume that all businesses will need a way of listening to their audience, their customers, their partners, and their detractors. Let’s start with the tools, and we will talk about the strategy for dealing with what we hear in a subsequent post. By the way, the guts and tech behind most every one of these tools is RSS. Click that link to watch a quick YouTube video by Common Craft, if you want a refresher on what RSS is/does.

Five Tools I Use for Listening

• Google Reader – I use Google Reader as my home base for collecting and reading all the various sources of information I collect. It’s web-based, fast, and easy to use. It allows me to blaze through content without thinking much about it. Use Google Reader by adding various searches to it (described in the next few bullets).
• Technorati – Go to Technorati, put your company ( product, brand, personal) name into the search bar, and see what people are saying about you. Note the little orange RSS subscription button in the upper right. Copy that link location (Right click the link and say “Copy Link” or however your browser words that). Now, dump that into Google Reader as one of your listening searches. Repeat this for your competitor’s name, brand, individuals, and some industry terms (if you can make them succinct).
• Google Blogsearch – Go to Google Blogsearch and do the same thing. Sure there will be some overlap, but it’s important to capture both. The subscription to searches link is on the left hand side about 1/3 down the page.
• Summize – If you’re thinking about using social networks and social media, it’s likely that some of your customers are using Twitter. If so, go to Summize and put in your search terms there, too. Cook as many searches as you need, grabbing the RSS feeds and throwing them into Google Reader. Build a strong catalog of searches, and then remove bad or ineffective ones after you trial them out a bit.
• Link Checker – Here’s an off-the-beaten path one. Go to SEO Pro and use their free link checker. (Note: it’s a bit slow to crawl for technical reasons, so don’t get worried if it takes a while to respond to your query). This tool checks who’s linking to your URLs, what the link text is (what’s in blue on the web page that people might click to get to you), and all kinds of stats that matter to search engine optimization experts, but might not matter to you. Why? Because it’s important to know what people are saying about you with their linking efforts.
• BONUS ROUND: Crazy Egg – If you want to see how people are looking at your website when they’re NOT commenting and talking about you, try out Crazy Egg. The tool is chock full of visualization data, including heat maps, that show you how people are interacting with your website. Sometimes, people aren’t saying something on your blog posts because they’re being distracted by something else. Here’s your chance to figure that out.

The Pro Stuff

If you want something a little more advanced than hacking search tools and sucking the RSS feeds into readers (which isn’t that bad, you know), you might try tools like Radian6 (note: I just completed a 3 part webinar series with them that we’re airing soon. Go to Twebinar.com for details) or BuzzLogic or a series of other tools in the same category (they’re all listening, so I’m sure they can swarm here and give links in the comments section).

There are values to the professional products, and if you’re a larger company and can afford the not-too-very-expensive splurge, you get a lot more dashboarding and reporting with such tools. But if you’re bootstrapping, stick with me, kids.

How are You Listening?

I’m curious to know who’s doing what in the world of listening. Are you doing something formal with your organization? Have you tried any of these tools for this purpose? What else might we be missing in our tool set?

Photo credit, tanakawho

1. What’s first in your day? What do you do before any other social media task?
2. How do you listen? (example, I use Google Blog Search and Technorati search)
3. Where do you connect with your communities?
4. How many communities do you visit?
5. Is your social media use primarily for personal use or business or both?
6. What are your goals with using social media?
7. If you could list a bunch of tasks you perform with social media, what would they be?

   I’d love your ideas on this. And, if you’re going to either Web 2.0 Expo or New Comm Forum next week on the left coast, please let me know. I might want to interview you for a project.

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