Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 211

Listening to the Social Web
Social listening involves strategically monitoring and responding to mentions on the
social web (whether it’s praise or criticism) about your brand, key members of your
organization, your products or services, or anything that falls into your industry niche.
This role can be filled by a single individual or, depending on the size of your
organization, an entire team tasked with monitoring mentions. Regardless of whether
you’re the only employee of your business or employed at a Fortune 100 company, social
listening concepts apply across the board.
These days, a business can fail at social media in many ways. Sometimes, social media
seems like something that was forced on the business world. As a result, many businesses
have resisted participating in social media channels. On occasion, employees with access
to official social channels post questionable status updates that can have an embarrassing
impact on companies and their principal members. But the biggest failure of all is
ignoring social media conversations altogether.
The fact of the matter is that prospects, leads, and customers are actively talking about you,
your brand, and your industry on the social web. If companies are not actively listening for
these conversations, someone may as well have installed a telephone in your customer care
department that is ringing off the hook with no one picking up the phone. There lies the
biggest social media sin. It’s not posting something embarrassing or angering the masses
with less than politically correct statements — it’s ignoring the social telephone.
When we think about users posting complaints and praise on the social web, we tend to
think of Twitter and Facebook as the place to find these mentions. The truth is that,
depending on the type of business you have, people are likely talking about you on all
sorts of channels, from demonstration videos on YouTube to reviews on sites like Yelp and
Amazon. These conversations are the mentions that your company needs to be aware of
and actively listening for on the social web, and they’re what makes a social listening
program so essential.
Social listening is a foundational concept in the social success cycle. Today, people expect
organizations to engage in social listening, and your prospects, customers, and clients
expect your participation in the conversations they initiate over the social web. If you’re
just getting started in social media, don’t begin by networking, influencing, or selling —
begin with listening. Use social media as the customer-service and reputation-management
channel that it already is for your brand. For an example of responsive social listening, see
Figure 9-2, which shows the grocery store chain Save-A-Lot responding to a customer
complaint and letting him know he’s been heard on the Facebook network.