On a whim, I decided to catch Craig Brennan‘s talk about “how do you create an effective multichannel customer listening strategy”. Craig is CEO of Overtone, one of the new breed of outsourced social media monitoring companies.
I have to say two things up front. I fully expected Craig to be pitching. Instead I felt he, in a “Pay It Forward” way, really discussed the purpose and how to as effectively as ANYONE I have heard to date. I was also pleasantly surprised that we all walked way with a tangible “let’s go do it” framework.
So Craig – Thanks! I’d hire you the basis it was more about what I needed than what you had to sell.
So here are my notes (with a bit of my POV) on how to build a better approach to what I call virtual customer listening – and what the industry calls social media monitoring and analytics.
The steps:
1 Identify – What are your critical few business challenges and how will social media customer listening enable you to capture the opportunity or resolve the issues?
2 Focus – Which area are you going to focus on? Improve competitive insight, service innovation, and service performance to name a few. Get really clear about what you want to change or excel at and keep the focus simple to start with.
3 Audit – Where are your customers talking about you? Ask your children and teens, your millennials, and more. If you don’t have multi-generational customer insight listening then get it. As a “boomer” I have listening filters – we collectively need to remove the filters. If you don’t have a customer insight role – watch out?
4 Diagnose – What are the specific perceptions about your Company, Brand, Products, and Services.
- Who is talking about me? Think audiences, personas, and segments.
- What are they saying? Typically these will be the major extremes of emotionally angry and net-bashing or great word-of-mouth (or Tweet) recommendation. Often they are also coalition building good and bad.
- Can you get at the “root cause” event that triggered the conversations and their source?
- How do they feel – positive or negative?
- Why do they feel that way?
- Has the sentiment changed over time?
- So what are they going to do next? These sentiments get amplified via social media. Look for the “I intend to” or “ I will” statements.
- Translate their desires to an opportunity to intervene at an individual level or broader communications level. Before you do, step-back and think along the lines of public relations and crisis planning and have clear communications intervention and channels in place.
- Look for the competitive themes in the same area.
5 Synthesize this into action through a virtual listening feedback approach. This may requires your insights team to analyze, digest, and highlight keep themes. Then ensure they govern the closing of the loop by getting insights back to the right folks in the organization to both govern and take action. However in providing the feedback don’t dilute the emotional context.
6 Incorporate this into key business conversations and if you are the CXO ensure you have a learn-teach-learn process in place.
Have fun!
