Evaluate Social Media By Listening, Leveraging and Engaging

It may seem obvious that social media is here to stay, but roughly 20% of marketers feel that social media has no bearing on their businesses whatsoever. Yet an estimated 78% of adults online engage in social media, nearly double just two years ago.

Marketers shouldn’t be asking whether they can turn this information-rich reservoir of insights into fuel to accelerate their business: They should be asking how they can do so. The approach I recommend consists of three core activities: listen, leverage and engage.

Listen
The first step in any social media strategy is to listen. The challenge is making sure what social media monitors are hearing is accurate and relevant. The remedy is not just to listen, but to listen critically.

A key task is categorizing the conversations to align with how marketers run their businesses. Brand managers will want to understand the overall perception of their companies. Quality control executives will hone in on what drives their customers nuts.

Technologies that support listening include web crawlers that systematically download relevant posts from key sites and word taxonomies that map key terms extracted from text data to the topics essential for businesses to track.

Leverage
The next step involves listening – and while what is being said is important, how it is being said is equally critical.

Listening alone might tell a major hotel brand that customers on Priceline.com are talking frequently about their hotels. But brand managers can leverage this knowledge by focusing on what customers are talking about and how they feel. Are they positive about the check-in experience, for example, but negative about room cleanliness?

Marketers using sentiment analysis software will have the opportunity to pinpoint the tone of conversations visually, displaying the ebb and flow of sentiment in a chart. Doing so is similar to tracking the highs and lows of a stock chart day by day, or even minute by minute – except spikes can give managers early indications of opportunities or problems.

Engage
Finally, marketers must have structures in place that allow them to engage with the very customers who are taking the time to speak about their companies. If a problem does pop up in a forum, someone with authority to comment and act should close the loop within that forum and within the company. Remember that follow-up and follow-through are just as appreciated in social media as they are anywhere else – and more likely to get commented on.

Enabling technologies include real-time alerts and workflow tools that route emerging issues to the appropriate departments or employees who in a position to do something about them.

No one should try and attack all three phases of social media analytics at once. Instead, marketers should start with listening, although this does include having a plan of action. Otherwise you’ll be in no better position than the 20% of marketers who still have their heads in the sand.

John Bastone is global product marketing manager for SAS’ Customer Intelligence Solutions.