Social Media Listening Misconceptions
Talk to any executive about starting the transition to an infrastructure that includes social media, and you’ll undoubtedly run into bristling at the mere concept of beginning the effort with a “Listening Phase.” Here are the biggest misconceptions I’ve run into:
Anyone can listen
This is the one I get most often, and it’s also what exposes the problem with calling the first phase listening. What’s happening here is really research. If anyone could listen, you wouldn’t be talking with me about a social media consulting engagement.
Listening is a combination of research methods. First is digging the foundation using automated tools (like Radian6, Socialmention, and the myriad others out there). Second pours the concrete: manually looking through the deeper relationships in areas of interest to the brand, and pulling out pattens that develop between behavior (the times, environments, and relationships people use these systems) and design (how those networks affect interaction with design, and how your audience typically uses customization tools to represent themselves in that context).
Sales feedback counts as listening
Amazing as it is in the age of information, many companies feel like they are listening because they apply cause-effect scenarios around their pricing, direct marketing, and register-ringing cycles. This is a wonderful fantasy world, but it shows nothing about how your audience groups itself into communities that have your brand as a part of their discourse.
Forrester’s Social Technographics is a great place to start thinking about the kind of broad roles that people occupy in the social space around interests. Even more interesting though is how these roles change depending on the digital context. For example, in the real world, your audience may be driven by creators, but in a social networking context, they may be more apt to be critics, or joiners. You won’t find answers to any of these questions through your CRM.
Listening doesn’t lead anywhere valuable
The practice of introspection as a means of diagnosis is now more than a century old. And as anyone who has participated in or run a focus group can tell you, it’s fundamentally flawed. People will only tell you what they think conciously. This is why the medical community has evolved past it (to a certain extent) with tools and technology to test physiological components someone woould never think to mention.
Consider listening the MRI for your audience. They may tell you that their throat is sore, but you need to know what created the environment for that condition to exist.
Social media excels because listening enables you to have a never-ending focus group. Every day people are writing and designing the ways they want you to communicate with them. Ways in which they could probably never articulate in a phone call, focus group, or otherwise.
What are your favorite misconceptions of Listening? Leave yours in the comments below, or on Twitter @mleis.
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