Why Active Online Listening is Essential

Whether you are in marketing, PR, or sales, the first step in any active communications strategy is listening. PR Newswire calls active listening ?the key to relevance.?

What businesses don?t often realize, however, is that listening is a constant process, not just something you do once. Internet and social media monitoring gives companies the knowledge and insight they need to inform every step of the business cycle.

As McKinsey Quarterly stated about the marketing power of social media, ?it no longer makes sense to treat it as an experiment.?

?Brand monitoring?simply knowing what?s said online about your products and services?should be a default social-media function, taking place constantly. Even without engaging consumers directly, companies can glean insights from an effective monitoring program that informs everything from product design to marketing and provides advance warning of potentially negative publicity. It?s also critical to communicate such feedback within the business quickly: whoever is charged with brand monitoring must ensure that information reaches relevant functions, such as communications, design, marketing, public relations, or risk.?

According to McKinsey, there are 10 social media strategies that they deem the most powerful. As they put it, ?One of those ten?monitoring what people say about your brand?is so important that we see it as a core function of social media, relevant across the entire consumer decision journey.? (See graphic below.)

Monitoring/listening is the core piece of the social media strategy, and should be constant.

The others are all strategies that benefit greatly from an active listening program, especially one that?s pulling in targeted posts from all over the web. Companies should have different topics that are always running concurrently to help with things like crisis management, product launches, fostering communities, etc.

This graphic shows the process loop of constant monitoring. After defining the objective of your Internet and social media search, you must do a web audit to benchmark where you stand at that moment. Figure out what is important to measure and set up your keyword searches to find the targeted information you need. Then it?s time to look analyze the data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and trends that will impact your objective.

Using that insight, it?s time to improve and adjust your strategies according to the business function. Which department does this newfound insight impact? Product development? PR/crisis management? Customer service? Marketing?

Now you?ve established what the web data looks like for your brand/product/industry. It?s time to compare the new, incoming social data to your initial benchmarking data and start learning all over again!

Has this process helped your company stay ahead of the curve?

Tagged as: active communications strategy, active listening program, brand monitoring, constant monitoring, customer service, social listening, social media monitoring, social media strategies

Source: http://www.spiral16.com/blog/2012/10/why-constant-social-media-monitoring-is-a-must/

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