Every few days, I wander into Twitter Search and Google Blogsearch and type in a few brands and product names. I look around to see who's complaining about these products or companies. Then, I see whether or not there's been any contact (at least out in the open) by the company or product line in question.
The good news is that "more often than before," I see someone come to answer a negative comment or a frustrated blog posting. The bad news is that there are still many companies not responding. Many.
This is baseline customer service. A customer or prospective customer is complaining and no one's taking an action. The excuse? Well, they didn't fill out our official web form or they didn't call our 800 number. Do you think that will hold up for long?
How You Can Jump In and Listen
There are two levels of listening available for your company to take with regards to the social media space. You can start with some free tools cobbled together, and then, as you start to see some value, you can consider upgrading to professional tools. At New Marketing Labs, we help companies implement the professional tools, but more often than not, we start them by pointing out how to use the free stuff.
- Build a free listening station base by getting an account for Google Reader. This is a tool built for gathering up RSS feeds (RSS = Really Simple Syndication), and the way we'll build your free listening station is by plugging RSS feeds to your search results into the reader.
- Go to http:// search.twitter.com and plug in your desired search terms (your company, your product, things like that). There's a syntax to the searching. For instance, if you're searching for our company, I might plug in (in quotes) "New Marketing Labs" OR NML. The "OR" means that it'll return results based on either the name of the company, or our abbreviated name. Repeat this step as often as you want?
- When you get your search results, look for the "Feed for this query" in the upper right hand corner, after an orange RSS graphic. Right-click that link, and copy that link location.
- Go back to Google Reader. Click "Add a Subscription" directly below the Google Reader logo, and paste the search result into that box. Click ADD.
- You've just entered a search result.
- Now, go to http://blogsearch.google.com and type in a search query. When the results pop up, look down to the middle-left part of the screen, to where it says "Subscribe." Right-click the RSS link, select copy link, and then bring it back to Google Reader, where you'll do the "add subscription" and paste step again.
- After a few tweaks, you have yourself a free listening station.
- A few other sources: http://www.icerocket.com , http://twingly.com , http://news.google.com
What To Do With These Results
You will suddenly find lots of information. It might take some tweaking and prodding to make it more accurate. Once you've got the results such that you start seeing actionable information, what do you do with it? We recommend making the results available to both customer service and public relations. There are two reasons for this.
In some cases, someone's tweet or blog post will be an actual customer complaint. In other cases, it will be an opportunity for education, or perhaps conversion. This isn't always readily apparent. Making the results of listening a function of customer service overlooks opportunities for corporate storytelling and relationship opportunities. Making the results of listening a PR function means adding lag to someone's already frustrated customer problem. Besides, having two ears on the track is much better, as it will add to response time, opportunities for interpretation, and spread the work load.
Why Buy the Professional Tools?
The problem with the free tools is that they require a lot more work to interpret the data, and a lot more manual hand-holding, and a lot of holes in where to search. They're good enough for starting (and I'm using them for tracking some of my personal projects), but if you want the full picture, features like "group response options" and more, you'll need a professional tool.
We are friends or friendly with most of the professional tool makers in the listening space. We have the potential for bias. I'll list a few of the professional listening tools we're familiar with here, but know that the list isn't at all exhaustive, nor are we advocating one tool over another:
There are many more. They all have different values, different takes on listening, different mindsets on how to get the job done. I won't break out their values or merits here, but if you're going to evaluate listening tools (or if you want to work with New Marketing Labs and want us to evaluate them), you'd best consider at least these choices above, at the least.
Listening is Table Stakes
These days, using listening tools to field customer concerns as well as to hear potential opportunities for relationship-building is a must. Many companies have adopted at least the free methods, and several are moving into the professional tools. It's a heated space, investing-wise, and many new products are coming out every few months. Not having a listening platform is like not having a customer service function.
What's your experience been so far? Have you used listening tools to augment your other functions? Are there other departments taking advantage of the information? What concerns do you have? We'd love to talk more.
Photo by: Steve Rhodes