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Listening Online with Social Media
by Ashley High You’ve set up a Twitter account, subscribed to Google Alerts, navigated through LinkedIn, and have begun to respond to people’s comments. However, are you actually listening? Dave Fleet, in a Social Media Today blog, lists five types of online listening and responding in order of growing effectiveness.
This is the first level beyond completely ignoring online conversations. It involves searching for key words and only responding to nice comments about your organization. However, this approach does not engage people whose needs are not being met. As Fleet points out, “If you ignore critics, the only place they go away is in your head.”
“Hey, thanks for your feedback!” While this is a fine response to a compliment, people do not want to hear this phrase when they have just made a complaint. Responses like this prove the organization is not listening.
These organizations seem to be listening, except they always must be right when someone has a complaint to make. At this level, arguments rarely end with an agreement because the organization never considers that the other side might have a valid point.
This is the best method many companies where communications are not well represented at a management level can seek to take. Companies at this level engage with positive and negative comments online, and may even be involved in debates that end with a “thanks, we’ll have to think about how we can improve that” message from the organization’s representative. This level is a fairly good place to be at.
Probably only 1% of organizations have reached this level as of now. These organizations do everything those at level 4 accomplish, but there is one important distinction: “their social media listening and engagement team feeds back into the rest of the organization.” This means that when a person submits a concern to the organization, the organization is more likely than others to solve the problem. This does not mean that every little concern will be addressed (that would be too expensive and unfocused), but it does mean that issues will be solved when cost-effective to do so.
For examples of companies that do level 5 listening well, look at Dell (especially their IdeaStorm) and Seesmic.
True listening means “absorbing what people are saying, acting where appropriate and letting people know when you’ve acted.” So, at what level does your organization stand?
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