Listen, Learn, Personalise, Engage, Communicate all words used at the Tory party conference. In fact everything I have seen so far not just in politics but business and life in general over the past few weeks/months is pointing towards the need to listen to conversations (I did think we were already doing this!).  If listening is important, understanding how, when, where and on what level to engage is equally as important.

It is no secret that I am an avid follower of politics and have a love/hate relationship with the political establishment.  Indeed not long before I started 6Consulting and throughout its first 12 months I seriously toyed with the idea of giving up business altogether and heading into politics but I still keep my hand in as the Vice Chairman of our area association having regular meetings with District, Local and Parish councilors, property developers and holding a number of public meetings.  For as long as I can remember I have fought for local people to have a voice in shaping their community and for open, honest, transparent dialog from councilors to the public they serve.  It has to be said it is this quest for openness and transparency that perhaps restricted me being appointed as a local parish councilor as the old, somewhat set in their ways hierarchy did not like my idea of being open!

So over the last month or so I have watched with morbid fascination the different political party conferences whilst working (gotta love technology!) from UKIP, Liberal, Labour and now Tory. My days have had a mix of nodding in agreement and shouting at the PC (well live stream actually) saying ‘Is it really that hard to listen?’, is it really that difficult to understand that we live in a different more connected world now.  Social media, the internet and all of the clever, exciting new platforms it has brought us are not a cure all for everything, but what they have given us is the ability to make our voices heard and connect with likeminded communities in a quest to discuss issues, ask questions and proffer advice.  Like I said ‘Online’ is not a cure all and I do have concerns that our youth can only speak in abbreviation and that technology has caused them to have an underdeveloped communication lobe.  However, conversations online have huge, monumental importance to each and every one of us. Conversations in the social sphere have:

1. Influenced my purchasing decisions
2. Accelerated my learning
3. Connected me with a smaller world
4. Recommended solutions
5. Made me money
6. Given me a platform to be heard
7. Amplified my voice.
8. Shaped my business.
9. And much much more

Do we really need to make the case for listening? Surely it is a standard business philosophy? Isn’t it where we get phrases such as ‘Voice of the customer’ and ‘The customer is always right’ from? Surely every business understands the need to listen why else would we have focus groups and market research? So we understand how to listen right? Or have we built a set of rules on listening? If you run a focus group it is on a small cross section, we take the figures and extrapolate them, we do the same with surveys.  We have these things called ‘Think tanks’ or as we like to say ‘Me tanks’ that guide decisions on everything from product packaging to the latest crazy political idea.  Businesses and politicians have become so used to listening to the few and making decisions for the many that the wisdom of crowds has been lost.

At the same time as focus groups and ‘Me Tanks’ started to run out of steam, importance or relevance so Social Media began its rise.  Businesses and Politicians now have an unprecedented never before seen opportunity to really listen, to gauge the mood, feelings and ideas of the crowd.  So it amazes me that people talk of listening but actually do it through ear muffs! Giving us lots of uh huh, ummm, like it, very interesting noises but then do nothing, nothing! with what they have learned.

So it would seem that we DO need to educate business and politics on the art of listening but most importantly once you have listened, dissected, analysed and graphalised (that’s a made up word!) that information you need to engage.  Yes, that’s right join the conversation.  I said join! Not control, manipulate or try to bury. So here are 5 things to get you started.

1. Listen – but listen to more than one person, stop extrapolating so much!
2. Learn – what is being said, why is it being said
3. Analyse – Do your dissecting, putting into boxes and graphalising here.
4. Participate – that’s right, get involved, have a conversation but please try not to control.
5. Co create – why not take a leaf out of lego’s book and co create with your community, it could be fun, save you a ton of cash / make you a ton of cash!

The above is not a complete list, it’s a snapshot, a fraction of the things you need to do, but please, at the very least begin the listening process.

I gave a speech at CaMedia last week on Conversations in the Social Sphere. I say speech it was more of an extended Q&A session where the audience participated rather than just spectated. We discussed what Social Media is, the numbers using it and why businesses should be listening and engaging.  A number of very interesting points were raised about listening namely that Social Media Monitoring can look a little like eaves dropping, snooping or bugging peoples conversations.  One comment was “what concerns me about social media monitoring is the concept of listening to peoples conversations, it’s a bit like sitting in a restaurant talking about Tesco’s and how messy or expensive the products are and turning round to see a Tesco employee with a clip board taking notes”.  I understand the fear people have about being spied on and the very mention of a political party using social media monitoring certainly worried the audience.  However, we all enter into conversations online clear in the knowledge that what we are doing is open, transparent and searchable by anyone.  Indeed the reason many of us engage in social media communities is to gauge opinions and thoughts of others.  We actually want our voices to be heard.  So rather than social media monitoring being big brotherish or Orwellian it is an application we the public should expect big business to have.  We want to use our megaphones and force businesses to meet us at OUR point of need, we are demanding a new channel in customer experience management. I am fed up with pressing 1 for sales, 2 for support and so on.  What I want to do is talk about it with my community and have a customer service rep contact me.

So, let’s see who is listening? I want everyone to reach out via whatever social platform you use, complain about products and services you are unhappy with and praise the ones doing a good job then see who answers the social phone.

I’ll start with BT.  You promised me a new Wireless Hub (the sleek black one 2.1 I think) and all you sent me was the hub phone.  Your customer service is so poor and it takes me on average 20 minutes to actually get through all of the press this or that nonsense that I am reaching out via my blog, please answer this social call.

‘Radian6 - Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Platform’

I am often asked what Social Media Monitoring is.  It is also given other names such as

- Social Media Metrics
- Social Media Measurement
- Social Media Analysis

and so on…

We like to call it ‘Social Media Monitoring AND Engagement’ as the monitoring element is not the end of the story.  If you wish to monitor mentions of your brand, product or service this is relatively simple to do.  A plethora of tools are available that can help you ascertain your ‘Mention Metrics’ but the real question is not just monitoring, it goes further, deeper and wider than that.  Engagement in the conversation is key.

So where do you start with social media monitoring and engagement.

1. Understand what it is you wish to measure

Many agencies will tell you to measure the amount of mentions for your brand and the sentiment towards it.  That’s a great thing to understand but there is more, much more, such as:

- Your competitors - what are they doing and saying, what are people saying about them.

- Your customers - they have a voice, and often want to be heard:

- Compliments
- Complaints
- Concerns
- Suggestions

- Your potential customers - who is your product relevant to? what would they be discussing, what pain does your product/service/application solve.

- Your content - Yes you should be searching for copyright infringement

- Your industry - you are not the only one doing what you do!

2. Select a Social Media Monitoring tool

Lots of tools exist and over a period of time we have reviewed most of them.  This is the part where we become very biased! 6Consulting are a UK focused Radian6 Solutions Partner, with that in mind we are of course going to recommend Radian6 as the platform of choice.  Things to remember when selecting a tool:

- Real time monitoring
Real time analysis of social media interactions is possibly the most important factor.  Social Media never sleeps, it is 24 hours a day 365 days a year.  If someone mentions my business, product. service or industry I want to know about it in real time, not tomorrow.  If using social media monitoring in a customer service capacity what good is finding a complaint made 24 or 48 hours earlier? you need to know immediately, have a process for engagement and a tool to monitor it.

- Feed Farm
How much of the Social Sphere does you social media monitoring tool search? and if it does not pick up something which you know exists you must have the ability to add that source to the system on the spot, not through a support system or by making a telephone call.

- The ability to determine sentiment - not computer generated but with human intervention!
Sentiment analysis has considerable debate surrounding it.  What is important to consider is ‘Context’. I can think of numerous sentences that a computer sentiment engine would determine as negative, but in my native tongue it means the opposite.  Computer generated sentiment analysis is not full proof, you must have the ability to alter it based on human interpretation.  As an example the word ‘BAD’ would be segmented as negative, how often have you heard it used in a positive way?

- Flexibility
Any good system will enable YOU to decide what to monitor, how to monitor it.  If you have a lightbulb moment and want to search on something you need the flexibility to do it, not have to pick up the phone and call your consultant!

- Reporting
It must have a reporting facility, you need to be able to export in PDF, CSV, XML or other.

- Web Based - SAAS (Software As A Service)
Self explanatory, you don’t want a system installed, you want to be able to access it from anywhere and let someone else deal with hosting, reliability, infrastructure.

- Consultancy Independent
Many applications for social media monitoring need a consultancy to do the work, when selecting a platform ensure the system has the potential to be ‘Consultancy Independent’ i.e you have the flexibility to set up and change how the system works and don’t require an outside source to do this.  Of course, some of you may not have the internal bandwidth/manpower/resource to monitor social media and you may decide to work with a consultancy and that’s fine, but have access to the system yourself as well.

That’s enough for you to digest in this post, part two in this series is going to take a look at the rules of engagement, your suggestions and comments are welcome.

The Final Five

After 3 months of tantrums, arguements, evictions, forced removal, drunkeness and general frivolity BB9 on Channel4 draws to an end today.  At our regular management meeting today we took a high level decision to take a look at the online chatter and have a an office flutter based on our results.

So we fired up our Radian6 social media monitoring and engagement platform, built a quick profile to search out and find all mentions of BB9 within social media over the last 30 days.

I’ll show you what we found in a moment, but first it is worth noting what others (the bookies) have been saying.  The Metro (free London paper) said that Mikey and Rex were the favorites to win, click here to see what bettingpro said.

It should be noted that odds are determined by crowd sourced data, what better crowd could there be than the thousands of people discussing BB9 within social media.

Now we could have spent quite a bit of time analyzing the data we have found but as this is just for fun we are working on just simple mentions over the last 30 days, here’s what we found:

Mentions over the last 30 days:

Mentions over the last 7 days:

Mentions over the last 1 day:

Mentions today (September 5th, 08):