Social Media Marketing

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Influence, refers to this process as active listening. In simple terms, active listening is built
around paying attention to conversations and then responding based on a combination
of strategy and measurement. Active listening is a key to understanding what to do and
why on the Social Web, because it is the almost singular act that says to your customers,
employees (for internal social technology implementations), or other stakeholders (the
larger collection of members, staff, persons served, as with nonprofits or municipal orga-
nizations, for example) that you are truly interested in their ideas and what they have to
say about your brand, product, or service. A listening program, integrated into your busi-
ness practices, provides the intelligence you need to put these conversations to work.
By establishing listening as a core practice, and using what is learned to shape
your response, you invite your customers into the processes that lead to collabora-
tion. Given the opportunity and the tools, your customers will readily work together
to create a better understanding among themselves with regard to what you offer. The
Social Web provides the infrastructure for these conversations: Applications like social
networks and support forums, for example, enable content sharing and similar partici-
pative actions that occur in and around online marketplaces. Ratings, reviews, recom-
mendations, and content showing your product or service in use are among the first
steps that are taken when it comes to sharing information in the marketplace that helps
inform others’ decisions, precisely because these are the things that help consumers
make smarter choices. In the business applications of social media, this is core.
You can tap your customers’ willingness to share information and improve the
choices they make by connecting these conversations to your business. The first step in
this process is active listening, using the information that is being shared for your own
intelligence.
Create a Baseline
Given the relative newness of the Social Web, there generally are no historical metrics
that answer basic questions such as “How much conversation should one expect?” or
“How many negative posts is too many negatives?” Some would say “One negative is too
many” but that’s probably not realistic. In any marketplace for any product or service,
there will always be a range of opinions. It is, therefore, essential to establish your own
baseline—think of this as a starting point—and build your response strategy off of that.
Beyond the practical problem of developing an accepted baseline, the common
or “best” practices that might provide guidance when starting out are likewise just
emerging. But even more, as a brand or organization moves toward a social busi-
ness orientation, the unique differentiators that apply to a specific product or service,
for example, begin to dominate in importance across conversations. Rather than the
generic metrics—like number of units sold—social business is about understanding the
specific ways in which your customers are talking about your products, again making
it mandatory that you dig in, discover the metrics, and govern your business.