Learn to Listen in Social Media

There are several ways to start a listening program at your company. Here are some ideas:

• Discover where people are talking about your brand and your industry online. Use free tools such as Google Blog Search and Technorati to identify blogs and other types of social media that talk about you and topics that are important to you.
• Set up a blog/RSS reader. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, which is a format for delivering frequently updated online content such as blog entries, podcasts and news to an RSS reader, such as Bloglines, Netvibes or Google Reader. This allows you to view updates from Web sites you care about, all in one place, rather than visiting multiple sites each day. You can get started in two simple steps:
• Step 1 Create an account with one of the services mentioned above. It’s easy and it’s free.
• Step 2: Subscribe to RSS feeds for relevant blogs, news and other sites. Just look for the internationally-recognized, orange RSS symbol.
• Step 3: Make it a habit to read new posts in your reader every morning
• Share insights and take action. Develop a process for gathering, analyzing and sharing these insights, and importantly, find ways to act on them. For instance, is a customer praising you online? Say thank you by commenting on the customer’s blog or forum post. Is a customer complaining about your company? Reach out and fix the situation.
• Explore advanced listening platforms. The free listening tools suggested above are good, but they each have their limitations. Depending on your company’s specific need, you may also choose to explore more advanced, subscription-based listening platforms such as Radian6. Tell them that Dell suggested you call for a special offer.

Best Practice at Dell
Based on experience at Dell and conversations with small- and medium-size business owners, there are several best practices for listening, such as:

• Assign a team or individual to lead a listening program for the company, but encourage all marketing professionals, as well as your owner or CEO, to engage in active listening in some way.
• Make sure that your corporate communications and IT policies allow employees to access social media Web sites at work. Dell recently opened up social media Web sites to all employees to allow them to listen and engage in conversations online.
• Don’t focus solely on blogs. Your customers may also be talking about you in forums and places like Facebook and YouTube.
• Don’t only listen for conversations about you. Listen for conversations about your competitors, your industry and issues that are important to your customers. It’s easy to set up folders for these categories in your RSS reader.
• Take action based on what you learn, and let your customers know that you’re listening and implementing their ideas. One way to do this is to blog about ideas under review and ideas in action. We’ll discuss corporate blogging in an upcoming guide.