By: Carla Bobka, SocialPie

Good listeners are big learners. And they are armed to create big value. It’s true in friendships, in education, and on-line. When you listen to your customers, your business grows, too.

Listening is the first step in any digital media program. It’s how you figure out what the rest of your program needs to include. When you hear what customers are interested in you can tailor conversations to their needs.

Sounds simple, right? It is hard to listen on-line, and it’s hard to convince clients to bother. In fact, it is the toughest part of an on-line marketing program for clients to agree to. They are already experts in their field, and they don’t see what they could possibly learn.

The thing is, every listening project I’ve been involved with has opened the door on discovery. Good listening projects uncover gems. One client found they had a whole segment of customers using their products that they didn’t know about. Another discovered they were selling cups of ice. In fact their ice had a cult following.

What to Listen For
On-line listening can be done a hundred ways. And every tool works differently, you have to sift through what’s best for you. That isn’t an excuse to skip it. In social media good listening is the difference between playing and winning. People are more interested in telling their story to us, than listening to our story.  So listen first then frame your story so it resonates.

Some things to listen for:
•    Industry trends.
•    Competitive intelligence.
•    Customer comments on your business.
•    Customer service issues.
•    Macro cultural trends that will signal a new product need.

How to Listen
Listening on-line is tough. It takes practice, patience and an open mind. Tools for listening range from simple to complex; free to expensive. Free fits everyone’s budget. The down side is you have to sift through volumes of data that doesn’t apply to you. Think about “Swiss Army.” Their brand is also a military establishment. Free listening tools won’t separate the references. That has to be done manually, and time is money.

Expensive tools give you the cleanest information. They use sophisticated super computing to fine tune the search process so the results are about you instead of someone with a similar name. They give you information instead of data.

The best part is you don’t have to use an expensive listening platform forever. Really good ones can be used periodically, 2-4 times a year. Like going to the dentist for a cleaning, it’s maintenance to keep your strategy tuned up. That’s budget friendly. And the information they bring back to you is priceless.

Choosing a Tool
As you evaluate tools for your listening research dig into what on-line outposts each tool includes in its results. Each tool is different, and each type of entry on a given site may or may not be covered.  For instance, does a tool cover blog content, but not comments on blog posts. Here are some examples to look for:

•    Website and blog content.
•    All news resources.
•    Blog comment streams.
•    Community forums and chat room posts.
•    Comments on forum posts.
•    Facebook posts
•    Tweets and MySpace.
•    LinkedIn status updates, group posts and post comments.
•    Which languages; is English enough.
•    Is it working real-time or have a lag time.
•    Does it pull a sampling of data from each platform or robust enough to ingest everything on the web.
•    How is the data returned to you – links for you to follow to look at each return or report summarizing findings.

Don’t skip the listening step. Smart people are life long learners. And information is more valuable than ever.

Get Another Slice

Testimonial:
“Carla exemplifies a great business consultant. She quickly establishes rapport, listens and zooms in on issues, she proposes solutions that are implementable, and she gets it done!“         – Rita Wilkins, president, www.MyOnlineDecorator.com

Carla Bobka is the owner of SocialPie.  She’s been helping businesses forge deeper relationships with their customers for 20 years. SocialPie teaches business owners how to leverage the web’s latest tools to make their relationships stronger, deeper and more profitable.  For those with no time to spare. Find us on facebook.com/SocialPie and at www.carlabobka.com/socialpie. Sign up for our newsletter at http://bit.ly/socialpieregistration.