Social Listening: Are you listening to your customers?
define: Social Listening The act of listening to the chatter in social media about your brand, industry and competition.
The latest question for online businesses seems to be to what degree do they step into social media and commerce. Regardless of what the outbound marketing strategy is, you should be using social media to hear what you’re customers are saying, because they’re most definitely talking about your brand.
The successful companies have been the ones most in-tune with their customers. In the desire to segment and splice our customers into different marketing groups, we create internal dividers, but rarely think to ask our customers who THEY think they are.
Five Six Ways to listen:
Set up Google Alerts. Set up alerts not only on your brand, but your key business terms too. If you’re a manufacturer this means setting up alerts on on your product lines. If you’re a B2B marketer, it means setting up alerts on relevant buzz words. And don’t forget your competition, you should be listening to them too. If you’re not, you’re going to have a hard time analyzing market threats in your SWOT analysis.- Stalk the industry chat boards. Chat boards and forums are notoriously search engine unfriendly, they’re gateways to registration prevent most most threads from getting picked up in Google, and thusly not picked up in your Google Alert announcement. It’ll take a little time and research to identify the relevant forums where your customers are talking about your industry, but once you find them it’s a gold mine of free market research. And once identified, you potentially have a new advertising outlet for your banners and content co-sponsorship. If you’re having a hard time identifying good boards, try identifying affinity relationships in Del.icio.us (below) and ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS.
Ask your customers. Inexpensive tools like Survey Monkey and Wufoo make surveying your customers painless and cheap. You don’t want to go to the well too often, as your customers will tire of answering questions over and over from you. But don’t be afraid to use your customer profile to ask IMPORTANT questions. The key is of course asking a question that elicits an answer that you can do something with. Asking “do you like our new redesign” isn’t very helpful because you’re not going to get actionable information, and you’ve also set yourself up for failure – would you really rollback to your old design? What you should ask BEFORE that aforementioned redesign is “What don’t you like about our current site?” If you have a handful of customers, set your survey up for narrative responses. If you have thousands of customers to poll, consider a mix of quantitative questions that quickly format into charts but still keep the verbatims - you want that free story.
Join relevant Facebook Groups. With a 150MM+ people on Facebook there truly is a group for everything. Be a part of the discussion. Even if you just observe and listen, you’re getting a lot of value from the community voice.
Search Twitter. Twitter’s micro-blogging format is unfortunately the perfect method for people to rant… about your brand. This is edging on engagement instead of just listening, but not everyone wants to call your customer service department. Some people just like the immediacy of complaining in the digital space, and that gives you three options: not listen and ignore, listen and try to improve, engage and diffuse. You’ll notice there’s a hierarchy in that last sentence – think about following it.
Track your Brand’s affinity to other brands with Del.icio.us Social Bookmarking. If you visit Del.icio.us you can search for both URLs and by brand names. The gist is pretty simple, at the most basic level search for your brand and/or domain. Look at the people who are linking to you, then look and see who else they’re linking to. It can give you a sense, especially if you start calculating aggregates, where people who visit your brand also visit. You already have an idea what people are doing when they’re on their site, but a good marketer should be concerned with what you’re doing when you’re not on their site.
Got better ideas on how to listen? Post below, in the comments - share with your people!
And yes, I’m fine with responding to my own post…
Don’t forget to ask your phone/customer care team too! Your phone team talk to customers daily, operating as scores of soundboards. Even if it’s as simple as an email to the marketing department, find some way to capture the feedback your customer care team gathers, don’t let it die on the telephone.
Here’s an additional one as well.
Set up a feedback mechanism on your web site that is easy to find and easy to navigate. Yes, it will be labor intensive to dig into anything that comes in, but you just might mine a real GEM out of it.
I’m a firm believer that you cannot make it too easy for a customer to do business with you or to communicate with you. So many companies have buried their feedback mechanism - form, email, snail mail address, and even phone numbers = so deep into their web site that it takes longer to find the contact/feedback info than it does to give the feedback. If it’s too hard for me to get in touch, I’m outta there. And I’m pretty persistent when I want to be heard.
Make it easy, make it prominent, and make it useful. People will open up and respond.