This post is a collaboration between Ken Burbary and Chuck Hemann. It is being cross posted here and the Dix and Eaton blog.

Social Media Monitoring can be an overwhelming endeavor, requiring you to sift through potentially large amounts of data to separate signal from noise, all in the hope of finding key consumer/customer insights that a company can act on. The thought of getting started can be overwhelming for big brands with a broad reach. If you’ve made the decision to listen to what the market is saying about you (an easy one) and are ready to take the next step and put it into practice, then consult this guide on the 5 Ws of Listening and create a strategic listening plan first (more on this to come in a future post). Then, and only then, move on to tool selection. There are hundreds of monitoring tools in the marketplace today (In fact, Microsoft launched their own social media monitoring tool today, dubbed Looking Glass). Use the community resources available to decide which tool(s) are best for you, then move forward with the tool that has the best coverage for the media types you’re interested in, and meets the rest of your specific needs.

To make listening easier, try narrowing the focus on a subset of your business. This will make it easier to get started, and require less time and resources (typically, your mileage may vary), than trying to listen for every individual mention of your brand terms. Here are 4 specific areas that companies can focus their listening activities to do this:

• Campaign Specific – focus on the conversation driven by a specific campaign. Not only the volume but more importantly the qualitative components of the conversation. Target keywords, phrases and important details contained in the messaging of your campaign, go beyond generic terms and brand mentions. This can reveal a useful dimension of consumer opinion, passion. Tropicana recently learned this when launching a new packaging design for its pure premium orange juice. By listening around this specific campaign, they learned about the uproar from passionate customers, and ultimately reversed course and reinstated the old packaging design.
• Event Specific – companies invest significant time, energy and financial resources for all types of offline events. Use social media monitoring to measure and track the online conversation about an event. Integrate these the relevant conversation points with data from other channels to get a holistic view of an event’s reach, sentiment and popularity. MTV recently did this at the Video Music Awards with their Twitter Tracker.
• Business Unit Specific – for large organizations, with many businesses spread across the globe, narrowing down which business units you want to monitor is an essential part in trying to lessen the resources burden of social media monitoring. How do you begin to do this if you’re tapped with listening for your company (especially if you’re “housed” in the corporate communications or marketing department)? Start thinking about the process by using these steps:
  • Identify your company’s strategic business units – the companies with several different business unuts surely have some idea which of those are the real revenue drivers now, and in the future. If your organization has five business units, for example, but there are two that are the real revenue engines for the company, those would likely be suspects for your listening efforts.
  • Identify business unit leaders that can help share the burden – one of the central points of this post that we hope you takeaway is that monitoring isn’t an effort that can be left up to just one person. There has to be a decent amount of burden shared across the organization. Business unit leaders know their individual businesses better than anyone else. Tap them not only for their expertise of the business, but for the insights they’ll be able to lend in making sure the data you provide is at its most valuable.
  • Determine which terms you’re going to use – anyone that’s developed a listening program before will tell you that there can be a tremendous time investment in building the keyword/phrase monitoring strategy. That includes terms, which sources to track (if you’re using less sophisticated free tools), and even which topics associated with the business unit you’d like to include. Crunching the data is important, but this stage is often overlooked to the peril of the whole project.

It goes without saying, but after you’ve done these three things, it’s time to start collecting and analyzing data. If you’re interested in seeing how other companies have narrowed listening to a specific business unit, check out this presentation from United Parcel Service (UPS) at last year’s BlogWell.

• Product Specific – if you aren’t planning to monitor around a campaign, event or business unit, you can always monitor specific product and/or service sub-brand(s). The process is very similar to how you would monitor business unit conversations – identify the appropriate sub-brand expert (developer, leader, marketer, etc..), identify those at the product level that can help you share in the burden, develop your list of terms (a time-consuming process as you may already know), and ultimately gather and analyze the data. The folks at Verisign (PDF) have been doing this exact same thing (with the help of agency partners) with good success.

When did we, marketers & brands, lose touch with humanity and thus reality?

When did we stop stop putting the needs and concerns of our customers first?

When did we throw common sense out the window?

Perhaps some never have put customers needs first, or maybe they did at one point but lost their way. A lot of the marketing that I see now is still centered around what the company wants consumers to think about, feel, or do/take action on. That worked for a long time (before social technologies leveled the playing field) but just doesn’t cut it anymore. This isn’t news to many marketers (in theory), and yet there are still so many brands and companies that haven’t yet begun to embrace helping customers and prospects instead of trying to get them to listen to the brand message. Your brand message should be:

I’m here to help make it easier for you to work with my brand

I recently presented on this topic at the Midwest Digital Conference because I believe there has never been a better time for brands to change their approach, and realign their efforts with customers expectations. The interuptive messaging of advertising continues to be less effective. Yet so many brands continue to sit on the sidelines, bury their head in the sand, and ignore the alternatives available to them. News Flash:

The problem isn’t going away because you are ignoring it

We’re in a new era. The social marketing era. An era of new expectations for brands, new rules for interacting, and new methods/techniques for reaching customers. One of the best things about this new era is that you don’t have to guess anymore about what your business should focus on. Why not? Listen to your customers and they will tell you what is wrong, what they need yet aren’t getting from you, and what direction to focus on moving forward. A well planned, ongoing listening program will unearth this info for you. No more guessing. No more well-planned focus group projects. The internet is your on-demand focus group, providing real time feedback every day. All you need to do is harness the tools available and be open to hearing what people are saying. Make no mistake about it, customers are talking!

Taking the next step

Once the needs are identified, deciding what to do next is easy. Solve customer problems! Build a product they are asking for. If you’re a service provider, then use common sense and be helpful! Social marketing offers a tremendous way to do this. With it, big companies can get smaller, by offering individualized, helpful interactions. Small companies can get bigger, enabling them to increase their reach beyond their physical and/or geographic limits.

If you’re planning a strategy to reach consumers online, consider these tips:

1. Offer value - Use common sense, provide customers and prospects with value, not messages.
2. Feelings matter – People remember how you made them feel, not what you said. Plan accordingly.
3. Think holistically - Focus on every touch point a consumer has with your brand. Consumers interact and form opinions of your brand on web sites, social networks like Facebook & Twitter, communities, support forums and video sharing sites. Every individual counts. Everyone is an influencer.
4. Be sincere – You need to genuinely care about helping your customers and prospects. Fake it, do it half heartedly, and they will notice. Don’t dilute your interaction by taking their loyalty for granted. Wake up each day assuming today is the day you will earn that customer’s loyalty. Difficult to gain, easy to lose. As @Garyvee would say, HUSTLE!
5. Ask questions – Once you have identified the problems, objectives and established relationships, ask questions. Lots of questions. Relentlessly inquire about what your customers think. And constantly remind them you want their input and involvement. You will be rewarded with ideas and suggestions the internal product development team can’t produce on their own.

Is any of this groundbreaking? No. In fact, it’s common sense (or should be). Common sense is often one of the trickiest things. My colleague Len Kendall reminded me today how difficult this all can be, with this quote  “We know our common sense is right, most of the time we just find it hard to prove it”

Hopefully the path to proving it got a little bit easier with this reminder.

Google plays such a big part of your everyday online life, whether you realize it or not, that it’s not surprising someone took the time to thoroughly dissect Google’s Strategy. Have you ever wondered?

This presentation does a great job explaining the answers to these questions.