Brilliant breakdown of how to refine your listening strategy! It is very easy to become overwhelmed with the mass amounts of data that may come streaming in with any tool. The key is to match your listening strategy to relevant objectives. Know where you are going before you end up being sidetracked down a rabbit hole of data (although sometimes that path yields actionable insights, it is not always the best use of time and human resources).

Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL

A comprehensive social media strategy is needed, but what I'm pointing out in this post is the need to have a refined listening strategy too. It's not enough to plug brand terms into a tool and hope for insights. I'll be elaborating more on that in a future post.

I've been having a lot of conversations with peers and clients lately around social media monitoring, and what I tell them is that the goal of social media monitoring is to reveal insights that yield actionable outcomes (regardless of department). If the data isn't supporting any actionable outcomes, then its value is diminished.

Thanks for stopping by Mike. Appreciate your input.

Basically you to perceive what opinion is being mobilised about you (company, brand, product service or whatever), where (the media), who (stakeholders, consumers, customers, former customers etc) and with what impact. Think that through and then define some proper, reasonably measurable objectives, potential benefits and essential resources required.