Social Media Marketing

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worse, customers who are nearby—in the social sense, meaning part of the conversa-

tion or closely connected to the person(s) at the center or it —will also notice any lack of

response. Given a comment that warranted attention, they will likely join in and amplify

it, and will themselves draw a similarly negative conclusion if there is no response to

the comment from an appropriate person within the firm or organization cited in the

comment.

Listening is also generally noncontroversial within your organization. Listening

does not itself oblige you to do anything with what is heard. This can play to your

advantage when first starting out. A great use of listening, especially at the start of

your social media and social business programs, is to bring your organization up to

speed on what people are saying about your brand, product, or service before you

actively engage your customers through social technologies. Like not listening, how-

ever, not responding also sends a message to your audience. Plan to participate not-too-

long after you’ve started listening; prioritize and address the conversations that you can

respond to most easily.

Taken together, listening is by far the easiest entry into understanding what the

Social Web is all about. By listening—and in particular when using a dashboard-style

monitoring tool—you can quickly see what is being said about your brand, product,

or service. Moreover, you can do the same for your industry and competition—all of

which is great intelligence, even if it’s qualitative. From that base, you can gain solid

insights into how your audience perceives you, in the context of your industry.

Based on this kind of upfront work and analysis, and with an understanding as

to where these conversations are taking place, you can introduce the rest of your orga-

nization to the Social Web in a way that makes the connection to the business obvious.

This will help you build the internal constituency that you’ll ultimately need.

Consider the Workload

If you’ve ever looked at conversational data pulled from the Social Web—perhaps

you’ve tried Google Alerts, for example—you’re no doubt thinking “Sounds great, but

who’s going to filter through all of this?” If you’ve got a small brand, or you’re in an

industry that isn’t talked about a lot, or you are a professional services consultant, real-

tor, or similar; you may have relatively few conversations that are of interest to you or

require your attention. If you’re Coke or Boeing or Bank of America, and in particular

if your industry is in the news currently or is otherwise talkworthy, you may find your-

self facing hundreds (or orders of magnitude more) of conversations daily. To get an

idea of just how seriously businesses are taking social analytics, use Google to search

for “Gatorade social media mission control.” It’s an amazing installation (myself hav-

ing worked in Mission Control with NASA/JPL) from a technological perspective and

a solid testament to just how important social analytics and understanding what is

happening on the Social Web has become.