“Knew and cared about my pet”Let’s say you have a dog named Franklin. He’s a wonderful black Labrador retriever—a genuinely loved member of your family. One day, while you are giving Franklin a belly rub, you notice some lumps underneath his skin. You take him to your vet and learn that Franklin’s got cancer—canine mast cell tumors. It’s curable, thank goodness, but you need to see a specialist.
You get your vet’s opinion, of course. But you also check around online. What’s going to sway you that one canine oncologist is better than the others?
This is the type of question that came up when we were doing some work with one of the leading chains of animal hospitals.
This particular chain is on the cutting edge of everyday veterinary medicine as well as specialized services in areas including cardiology, neurology, oncology, ophthalmology, and surgery. In fact, the advances in animal care are in many ways as evolved as they are in human medicine.
We were brought in to help this company launch a campaign designed to tout its modern technology and cutting-edge approach in the hopes of extending the company’s reach and bringing clients in to experience such care for themselves. (Or, more specifically, for their pets.)
This client told us that more than 80 percent of their new clients came from word of mouth and recommendations. So, of course, we wanted to know who, why, where, when, and how often people were talking about and recommending veterinarians and animal care. Our expectation, and hope, was that “pet parents,” as owners are affectionately called in the industry, would be impressed with, looking for, and talking about taking their pets to the most advanced care centers available. After careful and intense social study, we found a host of information that surprised both the animal hospital group and the Zócalo team.
We learned that when people talk about their pets and their vets, what they tend to talk about becomes very personal. We heard a lot of “I” language and ownership conversation.
Clearly, the respondents wanted vets who . . .
“Knew and cared about my pet”
“Were knowledgeable about my pet”
“Had a staff that was professional and cared about my pet”
“Listened to my concerns about my pet”
“Created an environment in which my pet and I both felt comfortable”
The research revealed that what was most important to people were the relatively “soft” items as opposed to technology: touchy-feely emotional issues like concern, listening, empathy, and bedside manner.
Way down the list, at numbers 8 and 9, in fact, were concerns about modern technology or veterinarians’ being up to date on the latest surgical procedures, which were, after all, the main concern of our client.
Naturally, the clients were surprised to find that their potential customers weren’t as interested in new technology and cutting-edge procedures as they’d hoped, and so they began a concerted reshifting of the message. Lower down were the references to new technology and procedures, and sooner in the message came discussions of customer care, friendly staff, nurturing environment, and other soft items.
It was a great example and a true education in how every segment in any industry can benefit from social listening—that is, a careful analysis of the target audience before preparing a message to appeal to what it’s really talking about.
Why is it that Google is, according to Alexa.com, the number 1 most visited website on the planet? Do people really value its search results that much? Or is there something else going on here? The answer is that there is a LOT going on here, and Google has worked consciously and relentlessly to manage what people use the Internet for the most: information.
Clearly, there is no shortage of Internet search engines to choose from. From Yahoo! to Bing and everything in between, you can find the same information regardless of which box you type the question into. What Google offers are features that go beyond the search.
Simply put, if you want to know more about what your customers are saying about you, where they are saying it, and how often, Google can help you not only find it but stay abreast of this information on a daily basis.
Website results not graphic enough? Search images.
Need to find the latest news story written about you? Drill down and search specifically in the “News” category.
Need to set up a free blog and capture the latest analytics on where folks are coming from to find it? Google now has Blogger.com at your fingertips.
Want to search just blogs to drill down on which bloggers are praising, or dinging, you? Google lets you do just that.
Need to find the full text of patents your competitors might be filing for? Now you can search for that as well.
You can even set Google Alerts for specific keywords concerning a new product launch, a favorite product, or promotion to get daily, even hourly, reports on who is talking about you, where and when.
Google groups list special interest forums in nearly every industry, topic, interest, or niche known to man, from Dr. Who fans to home brew aficionados to diabetes support groups.
Google has made information its number 1 priority because Google knows it’s yours, and everybody else’s, number 1 priority. Every acquisition, every development, every button on their growing “more” list allows users to drill down deeper and deeper, to search as light or as heavy as they wish and, of course, make Google their one-stop knowledge shop. I guess that’s why, according to SearchEngineLand.com, Google processes a staggering “34,000 searches per second”!
Today’s Internet is truly an embarrassment of riches. With the amount of information at your fingertips, it’s daunting to start the hunt for who, what, when, where, why, and how often people are talking about you and your company.
In the following section, I will introduce you to a variety of free and paid tools to help you sort through the clutter and master the art of social listening as you evolve into a highly recommendable social business.
There are a variety of free tools to help you explore what people are saying about your company, including these:
Google Alerts. Google Alerts are so effective, so simple, and so helpful I’m surprised they are still free. Simply type in a search term, like your company name, your CEO’s name, or a product name, include what sites Google Alerts should look at—like only in blogs, in the news or media, or in graphics or videos — and also include how frequently—like daily or weekly—and Google will deliver the information right to your e-mail address.
Twitter Search. Twitter Search is a great means of hands-on data gathering because the results you get are real time and real specific, and they aren’t sugarcoated. Simply use the search box and type in a term and see what comes up. You may, or may not, be surprised at what you find.
IceRocket blog search. When it comes to social listening, few sources are as rich and bursting with discussion as blogs. IceRocket lets you search not only blogs but also Twitter, Facebook, images, and more to find the latest on who’s talking about you and where.
Compete.com. Your free Compete.com analytics account allows you to see traffic data for over 1 million websites, discover related sites and competitors, and get monthly updates on your site and more.
Technorati. One of the, if not the, first search engines devoted to blogs, Technorati “tracks not only the authority and influence of blogs, but [it is] also the most comprehensive and current index of who and what is most popular in the Blogosphere.”
HootSuite. HootSuite is a great free tool for measuring not just your reach but also a whole lot more. According to the company’s website, “With HootSuite’s integrated, custom social analytics, you’ll be able to measure your campaign performance to help improve your social media communications.”
Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. Helpful for knowing and growing, Yahoo! Small Business Advisor offers a variety of resources like articles, trend watches, columns, and more. In addition, it offers website hosting and a marketing analytics dashboard.
BrandMonitor. When it comes to social listening, monitoring is the name of the game. Simply checking in with Facebook and Twitter every now and again isn’t good enough. BrandMonitor helps you monitor both your social media reputation as well as that of your competitors, which, as we all know by now, can be just as important. Basic (and free) tools include a social media dashboard, brand sentiment analysis, and daily and weekly e-mail alerts so you can “set it and forget it.”
SocialMention. SocialMention 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 in real time what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape. SocialMention monitors over 100 social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, and Google.1
SimplyMeasured. This website has quite a few free reports to download as well.
I am never one for throwing money at a problem when a free service will suffice, but in the field of social listening, it’s important to have a no-stone-unturned approach to what people are saying about you online. While not every paid tool is worth the money, a few that I’ve found extremely useful are as follows:
Radian6. Acquired by Salesforce in 2010, Radian6 is one of the leading social listening platforms available today. The company provides a full “fire hose” of data for more critical and analytics needs.
Crimson Hexagon. Instead of delivering large volumes of conversation for quantitative analysis, Crimson Hexagon’s focus is on identifying qualitative trends through its semiautomated text analysis algorithms. For activities in which capturing every mention matters (for example, crisis monitoring and campaign measuring), an aggregator like Radian6 or Sysomos is best. For activities in which speed-to-insight and trend analysis are concerned, Crimson Hexagon provides a unique solution for brand marketers seeking an automated alternative to hands-on analysis.
Sysomos. Sysomos is another option to consider along the lines of Radian6. Sysomos provides much of the same in terms of data, but it differs from Radian6 in the visual display of information. Both serve the role of data aggregators—behemoth tools with a focus on collecting large volumes of conversation for quantitative analysis.
What’s important to remember in the rush—even “crush”—of tools, data, and analytics offered by the above processes is that nothing can take the place of good old-fashioned human observation. What these tools do is help gather information. Your team needs to actually sift through that info to find the real insights.
Not all of it, of course. What we typically do at Zócalo Group on any given campaign is sift through a statistically significant hand sampling of the data that’s coming in.
What’s critical to understand about social listening and a company’s or brand’s ultimate reach in real conversations that are taking place both online and off is how social media results—Twitter, Facebook, blog, and forum mentions—are turning up as search engine results. We discussed earlier how Google makes it easy to search blog content, as well as other social media avenues, and you can see in the monitoring and analytics tools we just discussed how vital social media conversations are in defining your brand.
What we’re learning through online WOM analysis is how thoroughly social media is blanketing how others hear and find out about you, what they hear and find out about you as well as where.
“Keyword monitoring” becomes critical in these online discussions because those keywords that are actually being used by consumers about consumer brands wind up rising to the top of the search engine results. Through careful monitoring and measurement, brands can master these keywords and use them to drive online discussions rather than merely follow them.
Which, of course, is what knowing is all about.
One of the first companies to recognize and master the art of social listening in a concentrated and even physical way was Dell out of Austin, Texas.
We’ve worked with Dell in a number of capacities and have seen the power of what they call “Ground Control,” which is just what it sounds like: a formal listening command center where expert staffers monitor, measure, and analyze the online chatter concerning the company.
The company launched Ground Control in 2010, and its vice president of social media and community, Manish Mehta, explained: “Ground Control is about tracking the largest number of possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback, good or bad. . . . It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’—those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today but are out there and deserve to be heard.”2
One can immediately see the potential of rich information gathered at such sites and its intrinsic value in determining not just one’s reach but the online perception of a brand and its collaterals. Not just hearing the good but internalizing the bad, working to rectify it with a dedicated team well versed in how to manage negative chatter. The benefits, and ramifications, in this online recommendation age are nearly boundless.
How extensive and rich is the data that Dell’s Ground Control mines? Staffers analyze over 20,000 daily posts mentioning the company, enabling Dell to take social listening to the next level—and beyond. Perhaps as a rallying cry to other businesses or merely to support its theory of the benefits of its own Ground Control, Dell has done additional and important work on the importance of listening. In fact, a Forrester Consulting study commissioned on behalf of Dell shows that “companies that launch listening and digital engagement initiatives are rewarded with improved customer satisfaction scores, loyalty, and brand metrics.”
The study, which surveyed 200 medium and large United States-based marketers across three key industries, apparently paid off. “Nearly all the companies surveyed,” stated the report’s findings, “have specific plans to increase their social media investments, with 73 percent planning to add employees focused on listening and engagement initiatives in the coming year.”
Karen Quintos, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Dell, summarized the groundbreaking findings: “Listening and responding to customers is so basic and fundamental. The emergence of social media elevates how companies can act on the feedback they get from customers.”
Despite Dell’s leading the battle cry for a dedicated force devoted solely to monitoring online chatter and social listening, businesses are still lagging behind their customers, 80 percent of whom use social media:
50 percent of companies surveyed say their social media efforts are serious but not a core function.
16 percent reward customers whose ideas they use.
Only 6 percent claim that their companies’ listening and engagement initiatives are very integrated.
But companies’ investment in listening is on the rise, and the benefits are tangible:
64 percent of respondents are incorporating customer feedback into products or services.
76 percent distribute customer feedback internally.
31 percent are enhancing sales by offering incentive programs for customers who engage online, including deals and discounts.3
At the heart of Dell’s success with its groundbreaking Ground Control center is, of course, the art of listening. I say “art” because many who say they listen don’t, and many companies who want to listen tend to go about it the wrong way. One company who is listening the right way—by making it a top priority—is none other than the tech giant IBM.
One aspect of the company’s social media program is called Listening for Leads. This initiative relies on volunteers they call “seekers” who, according to the Corporate Eye blog, monitor “social media conversations happening on key websites where the company’s target audiences spend time.”
As the program’s name implies, seekers aren’t just on the lookout for online chatter to determine IBM’s “reach” but instead are actively listening to “identify conversations that could generate leads.” Potential leads are passed on to representatives from the company who can then follow up and initiate conversations that will hopefully result in new customers.
IBM’s own Ed Linde, senior marketing manager at IBM Inside Sales, “attributes IBM’s success from its Listening for Leads program to two primary factors”:
1. Using enough employees as seekers who voluntarily spend a couple of hours per week listening to social media conversations to uncover a good amount of credible leads
2. Knowing where to look for conversations (that is, where target audiences spend time on the social web) and what keywords to search for in order to find relevant, actionable discussions4
Well before social media garnered all the attention, focus groups were the name of the game when it came to social listening. While the use of focus groups didn’t really pick up until the 1980s and 1990s, “focus interviews” were used all the way back in the 1950s. They started out as more of an academic pursuit, but they were modified to become more synonymous with market research.
Robert K. Merton is often named as the “father of focus groups.” According to his obituary in the New York Times, Merton’s “adoption of the focused interview to elicit the responses of groups to texts, radio programs, and films led to the ‘focus groups’ that politicians, their handlers, marketers, and hucksters now find indispensable.”
Why did focus groups shift from mere academic exercises in the Mad Men era of 1950s advertising to the marketing tactic du jour of the 1980s and 1990s? For one, it gave companies a “bird’s-eye view” of what their target consumers were saying about their brands, live and in person.
From children playing with the latest toys to people discussing a new toaster pastry or dish soap, researchers could guide healthy discussions through a series of leading questions and provide brands with at least a margin of opinion, for better or worse. Broken down into its simplest form, “the focus group methodology offers the researchers ‘a way of listening to people and learning from them.’”5
Sound familiar? Long before the Internet, focus groups were a way of social listening, of eavesdropping on everyday citizens to get a clearer picture of what your product looked like on the ground and in their hands. Not everyone believed in the power of focus groups, however.
Skilled moderators were often hard to come by, according to the Houston Chronicle, leading to brand or product “cheerleaders” who effectively guided feedback to the positive. It was also hard to find objective focus group participants since many told focus group leaders what they thought they wanted to hear.
Of course, yesterday’s focus groups are today’s “Ground Control” centers and “Listening for Leads” programs. What used to be conducted live and in person, for better or worse, is now conducted online in a hundred different ways.
You may not know it, but those ubiquitous 100-calorie snack packs you see in vending machines, convenience stores, and grocery store shelves were actually the result of Kraft Foods’ tapping into the online “focus groups” built by a company called Communispace, which would build online “communities” tailored and designed for each specific client, be it a community of foodies for Kraft or pet lovers for PetSmart.
Gary Arena, CFO of Communispace, recalls the advent of those snack packs: “One of the things that Kraft did with its community was to study what consumers want when they reach for snacks in vending machines or quick-serve facilities. They discovered that most consumers wanted tasty 100-calorie snacks just to tide them over between meals, and there was little concern over how many of the calories came from fat.”6
Both methods, offline and online focus groups, sought the same know information: the who, what, where, and why of social listening.
At the Zócalo Group we perform what is known as a “Digital Footprint Analysis.” For any brand (and its competitors), we want to know the following:
How much online conversation is there about you and your competitors?
How are your consumers or customers talking about and recommending you versus competitors?
Where are those conversations occurring in relation to competitors?
What are the key themes driving recommendations in your category?
To pinpoint the origins of any social listening exercise, you first want to explore who, specifically, is talking about your brand, your product launch, or your latest promotion or special.
Gender info. This can be hard to find unless people are self-identified, but it can be important to know what sex is talking about you the most.
Demographic information. Knowing the income, housing, and even employment status of who is talking about you can help you target not only where to find them more often but how to talk back when you do.
Personal information. The more information you can glean about people—their beliefs, opinions, and so on—the better you can categorize who is saying what.
The Collective Who. With the above information, it’s important to synthesize and understand how the who behave as a group. Do they meet up with each other in local areas? Do they attend category events together—auto shows, electronics shows, home expositions, and so on? Do they appear likely to WANT to engage with your brand, product, launch, or executives?
After you discover who is talking about you, you next want to explore what they are saying about you:
Keywords. What keywords are they using? Are there keyword clusters, and, if so, are they worth exploring?
Overall volume. Volume refers to social listening for how loud the online chatter is about your company—that is, the more people are talking about you, the more often, the higher the volume.
Brand and/or product attributes. Outside of keywords, how do consumers recognize—or ignore—the attributes that are most critical to a brand or product? To what degree do the actual attributes of your brand, product, or service get discussed, and does this align with your objectives and strategy? Do people talking about the brand or product in online conversations associate the tenets that a brand perceives as critical to be the key decision factors against competitive brands or products?
How people are engaging with that volume. Engaging with volume refers to how content from the brand—or even generated by other individuals—is acted upon by the prospective customers or general consumers. Are certain discussions being shared? How are those discussions being shared? Are reactions short-lived, or is there a long-tail impact of one piece of brand content or one consumer experience? Once the answers to these questions are determined, it’s then important to consider similar characteristics to aid in creating future success. For example, what are the characteristics of content or comments that elicit sharing and enthusiasm, and how can those elements be implemented by the brand to facilitate future engagement?
Tone. Tone is a biggie because your volume can be “loud,” but more damage than benefit can be done if it’s more negative than positive.
Understanding where the social discussion is taking place will enable the brand to determine if brand content—as well as organically developing consumer conversations—are reaching the target audiences and are accessible to those who are searching for information online. The objective in determining where is to make sure that the conversations most relevant to your brand are happening on the channels most relevant to the target audience. Here are some good questions to ask to get that conversation going:
What platforms do your consumers use the most?
Do you have a presence there?
How can you get one?
What Type of Discussion Is Occurring? Is the type of discussion unique to where conversations occur? For example, is there more customer service-oriented discussion on Facebook or Twitter? Is the discussion on forums and communities composed more often of category enthusiasts or brand advocates? Understanding the different types of conversations that occur on different channels representing the determination of where will facilitate how social outreach and content can be tailored to the specific needs of those various channels.
Finally, you want to examine one of the most important Ws: why all of this matters so much. This is a key point for clients and for anyone searching his or her own personal brand. Once you’ve got all this information, what are you going to do with it? We’ll explore more about what to do in our next chapter, where we move from knowing to planning.
Now that you know where to look for these online conversations, what are you looking for? Look for something we call the void. As the name implies, the void is someplace you can fill, a place you belong but also where you can stand out. You can find the void by answering two specific questions:
1. Which brands own what in your particular industry? For instance, if you’re in the running shoe business, you need to know the niche Nike fills, as well as Reebok, New Balance, and Sketchers. Knowing your competition as well as you know yourself is critical when knowing which void to fill. This leads to our next question.
2. Where can you differentiate yourself? Perhaps your running shoes are made from all recyclable materials and 10 percent of each sale goes to improve the lives of the factory workers that make them. This allows you to differentiate yourself from the hardcore athlete that gravitates to the Nike brand as well as the recreational athlete who typically buys New Balance.
Now that you’ve collected all this knowledge, what do you do with it? You plan your strategy on how to keep the positives going, deal with the negatives, and keep consumers on the path to recommendation. But wait, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. That’s what we’ll discover in the next chapter.