Social Media Rules: Rule 2 - Listen

First published on the Hyro blog Jan 14 2010.

The previous post in this series [Rule 1 – Don’t’ Believe The Hype], made the case that Online Social Media represents ‘effect’ more than ‘cause’. In social media opinions are aired, shared and confirmed, but not originated. Social media is the water cooler conversation of the digital age, and even though brands and celebrities are allowed to overhear, and even join the conversation, the reputations of these brands and celebrities come largely pre-formed.

Social media does not represent the uniquely powerful new means of manipulating opinion promised by some*.

However, Social Media is a great place to simply listen.

There are many ways to ‘listen’. You can measure aggregate sentiment, gauge the success or failure of targeted marketing and communications activities,  gather feedback from individual customers on products and features, find out what your competitors are doing right and wrong.

The good news: the data is rich, high volume, real-time and 100% free.

 The even better news: the opinions of social media users seem to be a very accurate measure of the opinions of the general population.

Previously, I poked fun at those drawing a very long [and very wrong] bow based on research data. But in doing so, I found that the same research data showed the responses of active social media users did not materially vary from the responses of the general population, including infrequent users. In other words – what active social media users think and say is very close to what everyone is thinking and saying.

Brands can use social media as a real-time, unprompted focus group, tracking actual, intimate, and detailed conversations about their products, price and service.
Brands can measure sentiment, and derive Net Promoter Scores, across large populations, and track how these measures change over time.

Brands can collect immediate feedback on a product launch or marketing activity, and react rapidly.

These possibilities, and the appetite for analytics tools they will create, have not gone un-noticed by the global technology giants. I have seen a few sneak previews of Social Media Monitoring software to be released in 2010 – including Microsoft’s LookingGlass.

Access to these tools will result in an increasing sophistication and subtlety in the way that marketers address social media.

In the next post, I’ll consider whether the best way respond to social media is by using social media, and discuss the pros and cons of active participation.

*Nor is any new medium likely to deliver on this promise. Ever again. The 20th century, one-to-many model of media is in decline, and will continue to decline as long as large numbers of individuals can easily produce content of good-enough presentation quality and access distribution networks like the internet.