ARE YOU LISTENING YET?
To paraphrase Lisa Simpson: is it better for your brand to be thought the fool, than to enter the world of social media and remove all doubt?
Perhaps. Or perhaps you’re missing the point.
Whether your brand is worth knowing about, or is not worth knowing about, it will exist amongst conversations within social networks, such is the scale of Australian audiences in these channels. Given such it is imperative that you begin listening to what these conversations are about.
There are a plethora of online tools that make this task scalable and are available right now ranging from free network-specific (such as Google Trends or Tweetscan) to large enterprise quantitative offerings from the likes of Nielsen Online.
Establishing a ‘heartbeat’ of volume, context and sentiment of conversations about your brand is a vital step that all marketers need to make before embarking on some serious shouting on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. Without this you will lack a reliable benchmark from which to measure your success.
Indeed, not knowing what consumers are talking about could prevent a lot of cringe worthy social media launches (see: Westpac’s ill-fated launch last week). Conversely, gaining insights in social networks through an effective listening strategy would hasten efforts to exploit opportunities or refocus media investment.
Between Publicis Digital and ZenithOptimedia, and the Vikaki Nerve Centre, we work across many varied business categories that is allowing us to create a well-rounded listening service that we believe will be an adaptable market leader. The catch is that gathering data is less of a challenge than making practical sense of it. And this is where the next challenge for agencies lies.
So, how do you listen and what are you doing about it?
Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence from Flickr user ralphbijker
