As we move from tactical social media activity to a more strategic approach, it's important to start thinking about how to build your social brand.
Three core principles can help drive this initiative, the first of which is listening to our stakeholders and markets. This may seem obvious, but I wonder how many people are actively listening?
Wikipedia defines active listening as the intent to 'listening for meaning' which I think is more aligned to what we want to do. I'd like to go even further and suggest that active listening should be considered as a systematic, comprehensive process, starting with monitoring and finishing with action.
1. Monitor - Ongoing monitoring of conversations via keyword searching is the most basic of these activities. You can do this by using one, or a combination of, paid-for or free tools. Some of these free tools are platform or channel specific like Twitter Search and Google Blog Search, whilst others have a broader search net like Addictomatic and Socialmention. It is also possible for you to build a fairly comprehensive 'monitoring system' as explained by Chris Brogan's excellent 'Grow Bigger Ears' blog post.
2. Measure - Next, you should be looking to identify some appropriate metrics, with these in place you are then into the activity of measuring. These metrics should have some targets and be linked to some business objectives - see this post for more info '7 Steps Social Media Analytics Strategy'.
3. Track - Closely linked to measuring is tracking, where trends can be discovered over time. For example, you could be tracking the sentiment around a brand, the number of comments on a blog post or the number of retweets. What we're interested in here is tracking the velocity and acceleration of any changes as this will start to turn the data into information which we can respond to. Nathan Gilliatt provides further detail around tracking velocity and acceleration in his blog post 'Derivatives in media measurement'.
4. Alert - In order to respond to a real-time online crisis, or opportunities for that matter, it is important to consider setting up your alerts. These alerts can be based on a volume threshold for some of the metrics that you're tracking or be based on the mention of a specific phrase that you may be monitoring such as 'Brand sucks' or 'Brand FAIL'.
5. Insights - Over time you are going to be building up a huge volume of data, all of which could provide a wealth of insights. Depending on how you're collecting and holding this data will depend on how insightful and how easy it will be to mine. Currently I believe that appending information manually to the data collected provides the best results. These insights could be applied right across the organisation from product development to customer service, from HR to marketing.6. Disseminate - Obviously (although not happening comprehensively enough from my experience), the output from all of the five active listening activities above need to get to the right person within the organisation at the right time.
7. Act - And lastly, to ensure that the listening has been Active Listening, we need to ensure that the business responds to what has been heard either through immediate action or by informing future strategy.
So are you monitoring, actively listening or somewhere in-between? It would be great to hear about your approach.
