In May, one of my food/beverage clients began executing upon the social web strategy I wrote for them about three months ago.
One of the tools they're using is Twitter, and they've been active in the micro-blog space for about two months now. They now have about 250 followers, and they're following another 500 people, roughly. When they first started, they followed best practices by just "hanging out" and "getting a feel." They simply listened, for the most part, for about a month. I like to think that there are about four different guiding principles in a brand's social web strategy; "listening" is usually the one that I recommend to brands that have either (1) not "done" social web work before or (2) brands that have very little conversation in their marketplace.
During the last few months, my client has built up their listening capabilities. Together, we created a "mother-feed," composed of hundreds of custom-made individual feeds, to push their listening capabilities far beyond the microblog space. When you're a smaller brand that doesn't have a ton of buzz around its brand name (think Jones Soda vs. Coke), the conventional big-brand social media tools (e.g. BuzzLogic, Radian6) may be effective, but not entirely predictive. Sometimes you need to make new, custom tools on your own, in order to hear your customers and prospects effectively. (Incidentally, I am using some of the "big brand" tools for this client too, but they're more useful for competitive monitoring).
So, the other day, my client was really surprised when he asked a question that had nothing directly to do with his brand, and he got 8 replies, within minutes. That means that about 3% of the people in the conversation responded. And that engagement metric is really consistent with what big food/bev brands (Starbucks, Pringles, Jack-In-The-Box) are seeing as a low-level engagement metric (e.g. wall posts, comments). And I'm pretty cool with saying that the "listening" is working, and the brand is becoming a part of the conversation.
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