What's the buzz?
- Kara Holm
- Feb 10, 2017
- 5 min read
Today I wanted to share an important business trend the advisors at All-In have been discussing – “social listening.” Social listening has been around for a while but it is getting more attention from businesses – and the media – as a result of the failure of traditional polling methods correctly to anticipate the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the US Presidential election in 2016.
Are you thinking: “How come we’re not tracking social listening? Let’s get on that!” Good idea, but before you do, please consider a few points.
Companies have long used media monitoring services to learn when the company, or a member of the executive, is mentioned in traditional news media – television, radio or newspapers. Media monitoring provides companies with a means of measuring how impactful their PR efforts have been. It also helps companies become aware of unsolicited press coverage, both positive and negative. Traditional media monitoring tells only a fraction of the story: it does not provide a meaningful assessment of the tone, substance and content of the “mentions.” Nor does it provide insight into how the public receives this information.
Social media platforms provide citizens/consumers with an opportunity to participate in conversations about issues in an unprecedented manner. While there are global thought leaders who have a large presence in the social media realm, there’s more scope for members of the public to discuss their dislikes, likes and loves, relative to social issues, products, services and corporations. Social media tells us what “real people” think. By real people we are referring to the hoi polli, not just the thought leaders and media elite. Social listening is an attempt to capture thoughts, feelings and engagements and convert them through algorithmic alchemy into quantifiable business intelligence.
There is gold to be found through social listening. On its website, Tech Crunch ran a story on November 10, 2016 called: “Analysis of social media did a better job at predicting Trump’s win than the polls.” According to its author, Sarah Perez, the social listening data indicated that there was more activity on social media – described as “engagement” – for Trump and the positive sentiment was also higher for Trump. While traditional polling was predicting a win for Clinton, the social media engagement analysis suggested that Trump already had an advantage. Score one for social listening.
As we have discussed in previous blogs – "Personalized media, polarized world," "Everybody lies & other things I learned from Dr House" and "Polls are Power: the real-world influence of applied research" – polling has flaws. The types of questions asked (which can reflect the bias of the questioner), the geographic areas that are being polled, and the demographics of respondents, all influence the findings of the survey. We also know that people do not always feel comfortable offering truthful responses to questions about some topics. You can count on people deflecting, or giving an expected response when the respondents believe they might be judged for their answers – such as saying they are going to support Trump, vote to leave the EU, or talk how much they're spending on playing games at the local casino.
President Obama's use of social media was credited with his electoral success in 2008. Throughout the 2016 primaries, presidential campaign, and now into his administration, we hear about President Trump's use of Twitter to engage his followers and as a platform to express himself to the world. The traditional media and the public have known social media is important for nearly a decade, but we have been challenged to understand its influence. This is where social listening can help.
Social listening involves more than counting how many times your name is being mentioned; it has the capacity to identify real feelings and emotions.
So, are customers:
Complaining on Facebook about their experiences on Air Canada?
Celebrating an exceptional meal at a new restaurant on Instagram?
Tweeting about wait times in order to talk to live operator at Bell?
Social listening can aggregate mentions and quantify tone.
Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights describes the difference between social listening and the more traditional approach to media monitoring in the following way:
“Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest.”
No wonder we think social listening is great. At All-In Gaming & Hospitality Advisory Group Inc. we say we help our clients see the forest and the trees - follow the link to see our new services for 2017.
Social listening is important because companies need to hear the unfiltered views from the public. I’ve always been a fan of qualitative data that allows you to probe how people feel. Social listening allows you to eavesdrop on unscripted, unmoderated conversations and provides you with a measure of the overall sentiment.
How different the 2016 presidential election predications might have been, had The New York Times or CNN chosen to eavesdrop rather than reinforcing their own inclinations?
There are many firms that have built tools that allow their clients to measure social listening. At All-In, we are interested in what our clients do with that information. We can help our clients to determine how to act on the new insights from social listening and put that information in context with other information, such as financial performance, customer satisfaction surveys, complaints, and more.
If you don’t have a plan to do something with your findings, social listening information becomes just another data point adding to the information clutter that feels intimidating and impossible to unpack. And the investment in social listening is wasted! Unfortunately, we see companies jumping on bandwagons without a plan about how to make their investments work for their businesses. Social listening becomes a box to check off from a long list of “must haves,” without a lot of thought about how to deploy the information. When clients find social listening hasn’t changed their business they think it’s the fault of the service, without considering that they have to make the information work for them.
The advice for today:
Don’t just check a box. Have a plan to activate information. This applies to social listening and any program or activity that your company has invested in.
Don’t just react to information by fixing, recovering or thanking your customers. Determine how to use the insight strategically to drive revenue or manage costs.
Social listening can provide valuable insight that you can use to be more successful. Social listening is more than a trend and it provides an amazing window into the way the world perceives and feels about your company and sector. Take time to connect the dots and make sure you are using this newly found power, actually, to read minds to drive your business forward.
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