Know and Listen to Your Customers

In my previous posts I talked about the first two steps you should take when creating an effective “best practices” approach to social media:

Before you start, establish clear business objectives and metrics. Refrain from bringing old marketing skills to a new game. And clarify your value proposition.

The next meaningful step of engagement is to identify where conversations are taking place that are relevant to your market community, and who is shaping those conversations.  This can lead to some interesting surprises for marketers who are used to targeting their customers and their influencers based on segmentation and profiling.

Step 3: Know and listen to your customers, their influencers and the market before launching a social media program.

Now that you’ve defined your business objectives and resisted using a traditional “push” marketing strategy, it is time to understand your customers and their influencers.  Knowing what they do online - reading, creating relevant content, commenting or offering reviews, or doing nothing at all - is essential in developing a social media program.  So, just how do you find your customers and community conversations? There are a number of tools, both free and paid: 

• The first, and easiest, step is to use Google search. Type in a phrase or keyword related to your company and see what the results are. To stay informed, set up a Google Alert to send you updated results on a daily basis. Also, Google now has real-time search, meaning you can see what people are saying on Twitter in real-time.
• TweetBeep is a free service that is like a Google Alert specifically for Twitter. Enter in your search terms and you will receive an e-mail any time those terms appear on Twitter.
• BlogPulse is an analytical social marketer’s best friend - it allows you to quickly see the trend in the occurrence of specific words or phrases. For interesting results, search for a product your company recently launched, your company name or that of your fiercest competitor.
• An excellent - and free - profile tool that provides a quick snapshot of your audience with regard to its use of social media can be found at Forrester’s Groundswell Web site:
• BackType is a nice tool for monitoring what is being said in comment sections of blogs and on other social networks.
• Paid tools for social media monitoring include Radian6, ScoutLabs, Buzzlogic, and Trackur.

These are just a few of many tools that can be used to monitor social media. Use them to find out what your stakeholders have to say, how it is relevant to you and your markets and seeing who is saying it.

Some tools, like Buzzlogic, are designed to allow the tracking of keywords and phrases through a complex trail of links through blogs and other social media avenues, in order to identify and rank key conversation influencers on any topic.  The effect of seeing how opinions, attitudes and even rumors are shaped around specific centers of influence is invariably an eye-opening experience for marketers, and often challenges entrenched assumptions about their market.

It is important to recognize that influencers are not always your customer, but their impact on your revenue stream can be significant.  They may be former customers who have become disenchanted, they may be champions of a competing product or brand, or they may simply be agnostics with a strong market perspective that challenges your own. 

Being able to see beyond the scope of your customer base to understand how your market is influenced is one of the most important advantages of a social media program.

The most important point is to listen before you speak.  In any conversation, a smart communicator spends time listening to the dialog before they engage.  It’s not just about knowing what’s being discussed, it’s about getting a feel for tone and style, and getting a sense of the people driving the discussion.  Nothing stands out more than someone spouting off completely out of rhythm with the flow of the conversation. 

Your market community will be distributed across numerous social media channels, and while the members of the community may be the same, the issues and attitudes can take on a very different cast from one blog or forum to the next. Here at Maples Communications, we spend time reading the work of a journalist before pitching them a story.  A good social media approach is not any different, it includes reading the posts on a blog or forum before weighing in-and it requires a sense of timing.

If you steamroll through every blog in your market community posting the same content and just flogging the issues you think are important, you’ll quickly be marked as an outsider.  A better approach is to use the available tools to keep your finger on the pulse of conversation, and work your way into the natural flow.

Tags: B2B public relations, B2B social media, best practices, BlogPulse, blogs, Bob Maples, business objectives, Buzzlogic, google, marketing communications, marketing stratey, public relations, social media, social media metrics, social media plan, Steps