By David Neuman

An important part of any Social Media campaign is listening to what is being said about your brand and your industry.  Google Alerts, TweetAlarm, Radian6 and ViralHeat (among others) are all great tools to help effectively monitor online conversations pertaining to your brand and industry.  While most businesses are well aware on how to track and obtain this data, many are lost on what to do with the data to better their business.  Follow the advice below to help turn your Social Media listening campaign into a success.

Assess Common Themes with Your Target Market: Simply put, what is your target market complaining about? Say, for example, that you sell televisions.  Imagine if you see through your Google Alerts that thousands of individuals on a weekly basis say that they wish they could find a portable high definition television that can fit in their pocket.  That’s priceless marketing research data that you essentially obtained for free (well, minus labor costs).  Now you know that there is a high demand for portable HD televisions, which could be (and likely should be) the next product your company produces.  One example, but can pretty much apply to all businesses.  Find a common theme within your target market and see what you can do to fill that void for your consumers and capture that demand.

Turn a Negative Into a Positive: The worst thing a business can do with their Social Media listening campaign is to completely ignore all the negative pertaining to their brand.  Businesses are run by humans, therefore you are bound to make a mistake here and there.  In the world of Twitter, Facebook, and other Social Networking channels, people now have a voice and aren’t afraid to bash a company the first chance that they get.  If one of your customers has a bad experience, fix it. Reach out to them publicly, apologize for the mistake, and resolve it .  Not only will this be visible to the person complaining, but to everyone else who stumbles across the tweet, post, or whatever it is.  The argument that implementing this strategy will only “add fuel to the fire” is completely untrue if you are making a valid effort to resolve the issue. Understandably, some people complain just to complain and not every negative deserves a reply, but by publicly resolving customer complaints via Twitter, Facebook, and other Social Networking channels it will significantly enhance your brand image.

Leverage Positive Brand Mentions: The best advice I can give related to this comes from a true story I heard from a cosmetic company (whose name I can’t think of at the moment).  They were selling product online, but were trying to expand their reach by getting their product in retail stores around the country.  The company was having little to no success even though people were constantly tweeting to their account how much they loved their brand.  Some tweets even said “when are you going to sell your products in stores?” The company aggregated all of these tweets and sent a message to Target. After doing this a couple of times (and Target seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of tweets asking about the company’s products being sold in retail stores), Target decided to start selling their product.  By simply listening and relaying the right tweets to the right people, an online store effectively was able to place their product in one of the biggest retailers in the world.  Think about which individuals you want to notice your brand (be it a powerful industry leader, retail store, etc.) and leverage your positive tweets to plead your case.  It doesn’t always work, but when it does the impact can be huge.

Don’t Ignore the  Casual Brand References: Ever get a “I love your product”, “you guys are great”, or similar type of tweet? Most companies appreciate this type of casual feedback, but tend to ignore it.  Sending a quick thank you takes two seconds and goes a long way.  Take this one step further and ask these people questions (i.e. “Thanks! What do you like most about our company?”).  You’ll get some valuable customer feedback not to mention the public can view all the reasons why your company is so great.

Use Data to Create Content: Writing blog posts / articles aren’t always easy.  If you’re an active blogger, I’m sure you’ve come across days where you just can’t think of a good topic to write about.  Why not see what your target market wants to know more information about and structure a blog post surrounding this.  If you see hundreds of people saying “I would like to learn more about topic x” and it is something that you are an “expert” on, create  a blog post about that topic.  Not only will it give you something to write about, but it will likely perform better (in terms of traffic and feedback) as you are creating content based on your target market’s preference.

Tags: social media

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.