8 Stages of Listening: Social Media Tips from Jeremiah Owyang

On June 15^th, MarketingProfs hosted a webcast, titled “8 Stages of Listening: How to Monitor, Analyze and Participate in Customer Conversations using Social Media”, featuring Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group.  This one hour webcast was jam packed with information and to help make it easier to digest it was broken down into three main topics: 8 Stages of Listening, Developing a Listening Program and Identifying Specific Business Objectives.  Below are a recap and the social media lessons learned from Jeremiah Owyang.

8 Stages of Listening

1. No Objectives at All: This first stage involves a listening program however there is no specific goal or actionable items taken from the data.  It can be described by a company that is using free tools (Google Alerts, Twitter searches, etc.) for self-awareness.
2. Tracking of Brand Mentions: In this stage, a company is using a paid monitoring tool to track the number of brand, key personnel and competitor mentions yet the program lacks depth and tonality.
3. Identifying Market Risks and Opportunity: Involves adding the necessary staff to proactively engage in discussions online.  By participating organizations can identify flare-ups and put them out before they escalate, identify prospects and poach unhappy customers from their competitors.
4. Improving Campaign Efficiency: By using a listening platform, dedicated staff and a reporting tool (i.e. Google Analytics) companies can evaluate the success of their marketing campaigns while they are in process and make adjustments to improve results.
5. Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Social media allows companies to view real-time discussions (including sentiment) about their brand/product.
6. Responding to Customer Inquiry: This requires an active customer advocacy team that is empowered, trained and available to respond to customer questions/needs in real-time.
7. Improving Your Understanding of Customers: This involves using a social CRM program to improve customer profiles by adding online behavior, locations and preferences to them.  It offers the opportunity to not only serve customers in their preferred environment but also offer a richer experience.
8. Being Proactive and Anticipating Customers Needs: This is the most sophisticated approach and requires an advanced customer database that allows views into historical data which can be used for identifying and engaging prospects before your competition.

4 Steps to Developing a Listening Program

1. Identifying Company Model: You must identify which of the 5 ways to organize a social business is best for your organization.
2. Creating a Social Media Triage: This is your plan for participating in social media and responding to inquiries and negative feedback.
3. Identifying the Key Roles: The two most common roles are Social Media Strategist (responsible for building the program and accountable for the ROI) and Community Manager (customer facing role, responsible for implementing the campaign strategy).
4. Reporting: A combination of web and community analytics is essential to measuring campaign metrics.   

Selecting Specific Business Objectives

• Dialog: The objective is building awareness by engaging in genuine conversations with individuals and responding on behalf of the brand.  Below are three KPIs that you can use to evaluate success.

• Advocacy: The goal is to encourage positive word of mouth from customers by developing and nurturing relationships with individuals with a strong affinity towards the brand.  Below are three KPIs that you can use to measure success.

• Support: The purpose is to resolve service issues through social media channels via direct company response and crowd-sourcing alternatives.  Below are three KPIs that you can use to evaluate success.

• Innovation: The objective is using social media to gather customer insights, market needs and service opportunities and processing this feedback to drive product development and service requests.  Below are three KPIS that you can use to measure success.

Which stage of listening is your company currently involved in and what social media tips do you have for your fellow marketers?

Author: Brian Rice

  This article was written for Business 2 Community by Brian Rice.
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Author: Brian Rice

Brian Rice is a marketing professional with a decade of experience on both the client and agency side of marketing.  He holds a BS, Marketing from Cabrini College and a MBA, Marketing from Saint Joseph’s Haub School of Business.  Currently, Brian is on the Integrated Digital Marketing Team at SAP. … View full profile ›

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