How often in sales training do the experts tell sales people “listen to what your prospect is saying. Repeat back what you heard to confirm you understood the question.” It is a fundamental principle in good selling – understand the prospect to be able to provide the solution. This practice applies well to Social Media engagement for business.
An excellent blog post from Washington DC communications firm Livingston talks about this. We have the step of “listening” as our very first element in working with clients. The difference in Social Media is that you don’t begin by vocally asking your “prospect”, in this case your market, what they want/need. You listen to them talking in various Social Media channels.
We work with clients to frame the questions for which they need answers. Then we do a lot of listening using our own set of proprietary tools. There are many On-Demand services that can do this listening from radian6 through to Buzzmetrics. Regardless of what tool is used (they all have good and bad elements) the act of listening is a critical first step towards engagement with Social Media on a business level.
While a company blog may be useful, it’s not where to start, for that is “telling” as opposed to “listening”. Through listening first, a business can understand the shape, tone, style and nature of the conversations taking place, or not taking place, in the Social Mediasphere. The insights from this “listening” will help form a better strategy for how a business deals with Social Media. You will be able to better determine budgets, resource requirements, technologies to use and more.
If you want to close the sale, you need to listen and understand the prospect, provide the right solution…and then ask for the sale.
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)
Long before Social Media entered the mainstream, our parents and mentors told us to “listen”. We know that listening plays a key role in communicating with others. Effective listening is not just hearing either, it’s watching for visual cues given by the speaker. This fundamental of communication carries over to the “corporate entity”, which is striving to learn new “listening skills” as companies develop new conversation skills. How does Ketchup play a role in our listening outcomes?
So how does a company “listen”? While there are many tools such as Social Media monitoring services (there are over 40 and here’s a good list) and Business Intelligence applications, the concept of “Corporate Listening” goes beyond the available tools. You can have all the tools you want, but unless you know how to use them and have a philosophy around “listening” they will not serve very well. So how does a company develop these “Corporate Listening” skills?
It starts at the executive level with a concious decision to engage in “listening” as a whole; recognizing that your market is saying something (beyond the usual focus groups and surveys) and that what the company might learn may result in fundamental change. Take for example the Ketchup Conundrum as Malcolm Gladwell wrote about. You may discover that your market wants more. They may even be willing to pay for it and your revenues may increase. Do you want your competitor to know this before you? While Social Media may not immediately replace focus groups, it can give you insights you’d never uncover in a structured focus group.
When “listening” starts at this basic, philosophical level, then it is easier to decide, we argue, what you are listening for and where you need to be listening. Then you can decide on the appropriate tools to help you listen. Key to succeeding then, is deciding what you are going to do with what you learn. Once you connect to Social Media, you will hear about many aspects of your company; from HR issues to product usage. You also need a plan on how to manage, disseminate and integrate that commentary into the organization.
So “Corporate Listening” needs to be more than a marketing project and begins with a fundamental acknowledgement that your market is out there talking and you can benefit. So just as in real life, listening in the virtual world is critical to success in communicating with your market.
(Excerpt from eBook “Conversant Corporation“)
Why do marketing and communications professionals struggle with the validity of Social Media? Perhaps because it is raw, unstructured, unfiltered and immediate. All of which is contrary to the marketing communications discipline. This post is inspired in part by Tony Steward following a recent Twebinar hosted by Radian6 (a leader in Social Media monitoring for PR and marketing) based around “listening”, which has fueled a lot of intense discussion amongst Social Media professionals.
Trained and/or experienced marketers and communicators have worked with a set of “listening” tools for many years; Focus Groups, Research (often done by 3rd parties), Telephone & Web surveys, spot surveys and customer support feeback. Often, the “listening” is done by contracted research houses and filtered back to the client. This has (and in many cases still does) work very well. Marketers work with promotions calendars and schedules all tied into budgets with projected ROI. Reports are given to senior management and campaigns measured and analysed for success and determining if they should be repeated. I suspect few consumers know the depth of work behind a “simple” ad campaign. Add into the fray marketing, PR and advertising agencies who execute (often very well) a lot of this work, and you have a complex set of rules and best practices.
Now toss in the ability of the consumer to immediately and instantly comment on their experience with a product and the ability for many others to also instantly provide feedback very openly and uncontrollably. This is raw, uninhibited feedback. There is no filtering and even the CEO or chairman of the board can see it. Regardless of whether it is negative or positive.
There are methodologies to deal with this collection and analysis of raw material, although few systems exist today. Mostly this can be somewhat filtered and organized through the use of monitoring tools (in marketing and PR there are approximately 60 monitoring products out there) but as Tony Steward aptly points out; what is the action that is taken? How does a company incorporate that feedback?
The implications run deep. They may also lead to entirely new ways of doing business. What do you think? How does a company, government department or non-profit learn to integrate such raw feedback alongside more structured “listening” tools?