So far, we’ve learned how to talk by using blogs, photos, videos, and social networks. Now, let’s learn how to listen. Listening to customers is one of the most important things an organization or business can do.
In this chapter, we’ll look at what online listening entails, some ways for organizations to listen to conversations online, what to listen for, how to respond, and when to respond. Finally, we’ll look at some online listening tools.
Of course we all know what listening is—we do it all the time. I listen to my wife and kids talk; they listen to me. I listen while I’m in a meeting, and other co-workers listen to me.
Online listening, though, requires an intermediate medium to get the message from the customer to the business. When organizations listen, it really means they have set up feeds that send them “mentions”—mentions of themselves, their products, or maybe pertinent keywords about their business.
Chris Brogan is a big proponent of listening as a strategy for organizations. Here’s what he says about listening: “The most powerful tool in social media is listening. I say this because at the same time you’re thinking about how to engage in all this new stuff, people out there are pushing commentary all over the place about what they like and don’t like about your product, your competitor’s product, and their needs. They’re screaming out with opportunities for you to solve, and all you have to do is listen, process what you’ve heard, and engage with them in a reasonable way. It’s the closest thing to printing money that I can tell you about.”1
Here are some examples—some personal, some general—of online listening in action; later sections will talk about the specific tools to use.
I have a number of feeds and searches set up in Technorati, Google Blog Search, Twitter, BackType, and Topix, mainly for davidleeking and david lee king—the two versions of my name I most often find online.
Then, when someone mentions me online, that conversation, or mention, is forwarded to me. Usually, someone is quoting a blog post or magazine article that I wrote, or making a comment about a presentation I gave. Setting up these listening tools helps me see what people are saying about my thoughts and ideas, which helps me improve and learn from others.
I have created similar listening tools for my organization (Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library [TSCPL]). I have Google Blog Searches, Twitter searches, and Topix searches set up for the more popular versions of our organization’s name. That’s tricky because TSCPL has such a long name. People rarely type Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. So I search for that version of the name, plus Topeka Public Library and Topeka Library. These three terms catch almost everything.
Zappos is often mentioned as a great example of a company that knows how to interact with its customers online. Here’s how the company does it: “Listening. We’ve always had a great feedback loop at Zappos.com, through our conversations with you on our 1800 number (1-800-927-7671), Facebook, Twitter, blog comments, surveys and testimonials, we get a pulse of how you are doing and how we are doing. We’re going to continue to listen to your feedback and be actively asking for your input on existing and new site features. Every comment is read, often multiple times, by different people and a lot of the feedback we get from you start discussions and define what we work on. Keep the comments coming because it’s one way to inform the team if we’re on the right track and doing the right things.”2
Zappos doesn’t listen passively. The company actually asks customers for input on website features. Then, it uses that information to start discussions and define what it’s going to work on. In Zappos’s case, a little conversation plus a lot of listening helps improve business.
Book authors have found value in online listening, too. Back in 2007, I read David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous. The book made me think, so I blogged about it—a two-part series of posts (you can find the first here—www.davidleeking.com/2007/07/03/thoughts-on-everything-is-miscellaneous-part-1).
Guess what? David Weinberger commented on both posts. We don’t know each other. He simply had listening feeds set up for his name and probably for the title of his book. I found that pretty darn cool—cooler still that the author not only listened to what readers were saying, but that he would jump into the conversation taking place.
In each of these examples, people/organizations are listening to their customers. In some cases, though, they are going one step further and responding to those customers. That type of listening requires an organization or a person to be in the customer’s space, either directly by subscribing or by setting up alerts for the organization’s name (or product and service names) and listening to what people—their customers—say about them.
This brings us to the question: Why listen? Why in the world would you subject yourselves to listening to customer complaints? Those can be bad enough when the customer is complaining in person. But on the web, they’re not in your face. They might be having a “private” conversation with friends, and you’re just (digitally) eavesdropping!
There are two reasons to listen in to these conversations online:
1) You can’t do anything about it if you don’t listen. Suggestions and criticisms are generally a good thing. Organizations can gather and use them to improve their services and products by acting on what they’ve heard from customers. Good organizations have always done this, but the web just makes it much easier to do. Easy-to-use self-publishing tools enable people to share their thoughts online, and your customers are doing just that. They share about their interactions with your organization, whether or not their perceptions accurately reflect your organization.
If you’re not listening, you can’t respond. You can’t correct bad information, and you can’t thank a customer for good information. You certainly won’t be able to interact with your online customers. You must listen in order to respond.
2) It connects you to your customers. A small business receives comments about products and services all the time from people who walk into their stores or start using their services. At the library, people comment all the time about the library as they’re checking out books or asking a question.
Online, it’s much harder to overhear customers talking about you, even if they’re at your digital store (i.e., visiting your website). Generally, this won’t happen unless you actively seek it out. Setting up listening feeds gives you the opportunity to hear what your customers like about you and your stuff—how they really feel about it. If you’re listening for these types of interactions, you can correct bad information and thank people for liking your products. Use the information you learn to improve your business.
Here are some individual tools useful for online organizational listening. I’ll look in-depth at a couple and then list other useful listening tools toward the end of this chapter.
Twitter is a great listening tool, and there are a few different ways to listen using Twitter. One easy way to see what people are saying about you is to monitor Twitter for comments about company or products, which can happen in two ways: mentions and retweets (RTs). Every time someone mentions you in Twitter and uses your Twitter name (e.g., @topekalibrary), the owner of that Twitter name sees that message in his Twitter reader.
RTs happen when someone reposts someone else’s complete Twitter message. For example, let’s pretend I just posted this to my Twitter account: “I love working at @topekalibrary!” If someone else who loves the library RTs that post, it might look something like this: “@anotherperson I love the library too! RT @davidleeking I love working at @topekalibrary!” The library would be notified of both posts, because its name was mentioned in each one.
This allows you to see what people are finding interesting enough about your organization to actually pass it on to their Twitter followers. It’s a good way to gauge interest in your organization’s offerings and in your staff’s customer service skills. If you get a lot of mentions or RTs on a new product, service, or even a blog post, then you have probably hit a nerve. You should think about doing more with that idea or service because Twitter mentions show interest by your customers.
By far the greatest listening tool in Twitter is Twitter Search. Go to search.twitter.com and experiment. This simple but powerful search box finds keywords in Twitter status updates.
There are a few ways you can set up searches. For example, I have set up searches for topeka library. That phrase catches most iterations of our organization’s name, including Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, Topeka Library, and Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library.
I just checked my saved search for topeka library. Here’s what I see: a group of aspiring filmmakers meeting in our cafe, a couple of media outlets pointing to a blood drive we’re sponsoring next week, someone mentioning our mobile app for a Symbian smartphone, someone mentioning one of my presentations about the library, and someone talking about picking up a horror novel at the library.
This tells me that people are interested in the library’s programs, that they’re successfully using our meeting facilities, and that customers like our genre fiction collection. Good stuff to know.
You can go further with Twitter Search. In this initial search, I was just looking for my organization’s name. With Twitter Search, you can also create searches on topics of interest to your organization, so I’ll stick with the library example here. If I go to Twitter’s Advanced Search, I can search by ZIP code and then narrow those results with keywords.
For the library, I might create a search for the word reading and add Topeka’s ZIP code, which is 66604. This search finds people reading the Bible, mystery novels, and campaign notes. This type of search can be used as a very simplistic market segmentation research tool to show what local Twitter users (which can roughly equal people with easy access to technology tools) like to read. From there, TSCPL can provide more of those types of books.
Facebook is similar to Twitter when you start with the status update box. The main difference between the Twitter and Facebook status update boxes is that comments on a Facebook status update are easier to follow. Facebook status update comments are included below the actual post.
Because of this, Facebook status updates are fun to use. Treat Facebook similarly to Twitter and ask a question. Assuming that your Facebook friends are active Facebook users, you will most likely receive responses to your question. So, ask wisely!
Facebook also allows people to “Like” status updates and the comments left on those status updates. A Like can show that people are interested in the comments or that they appreciate an idea or a new service. At the very least, Likes serve as a rough gauge of interest in the idea.
Facebook Pages include analytics, called Insights, which measure activity on your Facebook Page. Insights measure New Likes, Lifetime Likes, the number of monthly active users of your Page, interactions such as Post Views and Post Feedback, gender and age of your users and where they live, and external referrers.
Insights are a great way to craft your content to meet your customers’ needs. For example, the Gender and Age Insights might show that your average Facebook Page viewer is a 35-year-old female. With that information, you can target your Facebook Page content to that type of persona (your average 35-year-old female customer). What would that person be interested in, relative to your organization? You might find that by tailoring your Facebook content to your predominant user type, you generate more interaction from that user group.
Another great listening tool is Google Alerts. Go to www.google.com/alerts and do a search for your business name. There are a number of options to choose from, including setting an alert for everything or narrowing down to blog posts or news stories, deciding how often alerts should be delivered, and specifying if all search results or just the best search results are delivered to you. Select your favorite delivery method (email or an RSS feed), and you are all set!
Subscribing to these alerts sets up a saved search on that topic. You don’t ever have to do the search again—it’s repeated for you automatically. Whenever the search is updated, the Google Alerts feed sends you the latest search results. Using Google Alerts is a simple way to listen to customers.
The tools we just learned about are forms of what I’ll call direct listening. Someone typed out a comment and left it somewhere—in Twitter or in a comment to someone’s blog—and you received a copy of the conversation. You can also do what I call indirect listening. Indirect listening uses the same tools, but instead of setting up searches for your organization, you set up searches for industry buzzwords. Think of it as business intelligence research, and you’ll get the idea.
Visual listening can be fun, too. It basically involves watching for mentions of your business, products, or services in online photo and video sharing sites like Flickr or YouTube. On these sites, you can watch for people unpacking their new toys that they bought from you—then congratulate them on their purchase. You might watch for a video of someone using your services for the first time or listen for people complaining about your organization via a video or a photo. Set up similar listening alerts, then watch and respond as needed. Flickr lets you subscribe via RSS to tag searches. YouTube has similar capabilities: Do a search in YouTube, and then copy and paste the URL of your search into an RSS Reader (like Google Reader). You are now subscribed to that YouTube search.
So far, we have discussed what online listening is and how to listen in a variety of ways. What exactly should you be listening for?
The most obvious thing to listen for is mentions of your organization’s name or a brand, product, or service related to your organization. Listen for people using your products and services.
Listen for industry buzzwords—and for the competition! Are you a bakery? Listen to what people say about other bakeries and then improve on the things that people don’t like about those bakeries.
When listening, also figure out who is “speaking.” Is it a local or industry influencer? Maybe you should listen a little more closely. Is it a power user who loves what your organization does? Work with that customer to make her happy, because she will share what you did with her online friends and followers.
How about people asking, “Hey, has anyone tried this thing out from so and so company?” These are potential customers. If you hear that question, respond.
Listen for where the conversation is taking place. Is it on a blog? On Twitter? In a specific forum? Maybe you should watch those online places a little more closely. What part of the country or service area are commenters from? You can usually discover this by taking a quick look at a person’s profile.
Find out where the conversation is taking place and then go where those people are gathering. Start talking there.
The next question you should be asking is this: “When should I respond, or should I respond at all?” Usually, a response is great. A customer has asked a question, and what’s not to like about the organization actually answering that question? A response isn’t always necessary, however. Sometimes, it’s good enough to listen and get a feel for activity surrounding your organization.
Explanations, clarifications, and corrections are generally useful responses. While it’s certainly OK to gently correct inaccurate information about your organization, remember to be kind and professional in the response.
Disagreeing with someone is OK, too. Not everyone will like your products, and they will say so. That’s OK. Remember to relax, and don’t take the criticism personally. Above all, remember that you are representing your organization. Put on your best face, and respond with the weight and the persona of the organization behind you, rather than based on how the comment makes you feel.
Thanking customers for using a service, or for buying a product and mentioning it, can also be useful. This type of response shows the customer that the organization listens and cares. Responding helps build those face2face connections and will keep the customer coming back for more.
Now let’s look at some listening tools. We’ve already talked about some basic listening tools, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google Alerts. There are some other handy tools out there that also help in the listening process.
Discussions are happening right now on thousands of online message boards and discussion groups, and these aren’t always picked up in normal search engines. Thankfully, there are a couple of tools that do pick up those conversations. Check out BoardTracker (www.boardtracker.com), BoardReader (www.boardreader.com), Omgili (www.omgili.com), Google Groups (groups.google.com), and Yahoo! Groups (www.groups.yahoo.com). Each of these has a search engine feature that searches across forums and newsgroups.
There are a number of tools that aggregate social media and blog content mentions, provide statistics, and give insights. Some are free, and some have a cost.
BackType (www.backtype.com) allows you to set up alerts for social media mentions, then follow those alerts via either an RSS feed or an email alert. BackType finds some conversations that don’t seem to get picked up in many other places, like discussions happening in FriendFeed. BackType has been acquired by Twitter, so time (and Twitter) will tell how long this service will exist.
Another free aggregator is Postling (www.postling.com), which claims it’s “the easiest way to connect with your customers” (from its website). The site has a basic account that’s free, as well as fee-based accounts for premium services. Postling does a lot of things, including publishing to multiple platforms in one handy place. You can post to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Comments left on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr can all be read and responded to within Postling, which, if you receive a lot of comments, might save you some time. Postling has a dashboard view of recent posts and comments received, so you can view them in one place (and reply to them by simply clicking the Reply button).
Postling notes this about listening: “You’ve told us how important it is to know every time your business is mentioned on the web. With Postling Tracking, we dig through Twitter, blogs, mainstream media, RSS feeds and more to find every time your name comes up. With a single click, you’ll be able to share that tweet or writeup in the local newspaper to your blog, Facebook, or Twitter. Are there certain phrases that you know lead to potential new customers? Want to spy on your competition? Save those phrases within Postling Tracking and we’ll notify you when you’ve got a match.”3
Addictomatic (www.addictomatic.com) is a free aggregator as well. Here’s how it describes itself: “Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.”4
Basically, Addictomatic is a customized start page. When you do a search with Addictomatic’s search engine, you are presented with individual search boxes. Each box represents a search in social tools and search engines like Twitter, Bing, Google, or YouTube. You can move the boxes around on the page, and add or delete boxes from different sources. This offers a great, visual way to stay up-to-date on what people are saying about you. Run the search, bookmark the page, and check it out regularly.
The free aggregator Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) is a “social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.”5
Perform a search in Social Mention, and here’s what happens:
• The middle column represents mentions. These mentions come from all over, unless you have narrowed the results down to individual sites, like Twitter or blogs. Each search result includes a little graphic showing where the search is coming from (Twitter, Ask, Google, etc.).
• The left column includes a set of social media analytics, like sentiment (it measures positive versus negative comments), top keywords, top users, top hashtags, and sources.
• The right-hand column includes alert feeds, so you can subscribe to the search via an RSS feed or an email alert. You can also download a CSV/Excel file of the search and the sentiment, top keywords, top users, and top hashtags data.
TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com), HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com), and Seesmic (www.seesmic.com) are three tools that started out as desktop-based Twitter tools but have turned into multisite social conversation aggregators. Each tool has a multicolumn view, so you can arrange your Twitter followers in different ways, including all followers, mentions, direct messages, specific searches, and lists.
Each of these are handy listening tools, because you can set them up to follow multiple social media accounts. This lets you have one place to go to follow conversations in multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, for example.
Want more stats, more customization? Then you might want to consider a fee-based listening tool. Some popular ones include Spiral16 (www.spiral16.com), Radian6 (www.radian6.com), and Viralheat (www.viralheat.com). These services provide listening and responding tools that multiple users can access, like an organizational site license. They also provide statistics and insights on social media, and some provide customized reports.
I suggest starting with the free tools. Then, if you want more control over comment responses or want analytic reports that can be emailed to management, you might want to consider moving to one of these fee-based monitoring and insight measurement tools.
Remember: By the time you read this, at least one of these tools will have probably changed or closed shop (though I’ll try my darndest to update it as close to printing as possible). In the modern web, changes happen fast, and that’s OK. Don’t limit yourself. Try multiple listening and measuring tools. Find ones that give you what your business needs and adapt as needed.
1. Chris Brogan, “Listen: The Importance of Bigger Ears,” Success Magazine Blog, August 19, 2010, accessed January 24, 2012, blog.success.com/experts/chris brogan/listen-the-importance-of-bigger-ears.
2. Alex Kirmse, “A Conversation With the Customer—Listen, Watch, Learn and Tell,” Zappos Blogs: Technology, January 31, 2011, accessed January 24, 2012, blogs.zappos.com/blogs/technology/2011/01/31/conversation-customer-listen-watch-learn-and-tell.
3. Postling, “Postling Tour: Reach People,” accessed January 24, 2012, www.postling.com/tour_reach.php.
4. Addictomatic, “About Addictomatic,” accessed January 24, 2012, www.addictomatic.com/about.
5. Social Mention, “About Social Mention,” accessed January 24, 2012, www.socialmention.com/about.