Listening, What It Means to Participate: 2nd of 6 Posts

What did you say? I didn’t hear you, I was too busy talking, in fact, you’re lucky I realized you were saying anything at all. All too often, this is how companies have treated their customers, prospects, Influencers and everyone else with a stake/interest in their market space. Sad, isn’t it. So much can be learned from listening.

This series of blog posts looks at what is means to participate in the market conversation. True participation requires a company to look at meeting 5 objectives: Listening, Speaking, Caring, Sharing and Building Relationships. (Read 1st of 6-post series for more details.)

Listening
Your current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space have things to say and want to be heard. Listening and internalizing what that information can have a major impact on improving your business, increasing sales and driving product development to meet the real needs and wants of the market. Set your company up for a successful Listening strategy and action plan:

1. Who to listen to: Certainly you want to listen to your current customers and prospects, but to answer this question further, go back and consider what your product or service offers–what need or want does it fulfill? Identifying the Influencers–industry experts, analysts, technology gurus, academics, reporters/publications, industry events, etc. requires a bit of research, but the place to start is with keywords that focus on the need or want and not necessarily the product/service marketing keywords. Whether you use an outside agency like Idiom Strategies, or you look to do the research in-house, you’ll notice Influencers begin to emerge as people your customers and prospects are listening to.
2. Where to Listen: For current customers and people who stumble upon your website, be sure to offer an easy option for them to speak directly to you. Outside of this, consider your ideal customers? What do you know about them and who theylisten to and what can you conclude about where they are talking about their needs/wants? Market conversation locations can be both the physical and online places where Influencers, Participants and Listeners are interacting, such as:
   • Social Media Networks
   • Blogs and other Social Media Outlets
   • Forums
   • Chat rooms
   • Conferences and Tradeshows
   • On and Offline Publications
   • User Groups
   • Industry Trade Organizations
   • Webinars
   • Sponsored Events
   • Podcasts
   • Webcasts
   • Research Reports
3. How to Listen: Wow, this is a big part of the marketing industry’s market conversation right now. There are so many emerging companies offering services for web and social media monitoring, not to mention traditional press monitoring. Check out these sites for links to some of these Conversation Monitoring Tools companies: How to listen in a bad economy- 67 social media/web/reputation management tools and sites and Social Media Monitoring Solutions Wiki.
4. What to Listen for: Certainly monitor for mentions of your brands/products/company and you’ll probably want to listen to what is being said about your top competitors. But if you listen a little deeper, you’ll find terrific data for product improvements, new product offerings, ways to improve your customer relations, opportunities to encourage word of mouth mentions and terrific proofpoints to counter sales objections. Go back to those need/want-focused keywords–people may not mention a specific product or brand, but they’re still talking about their needs and wants and looking for advice and options for fulfilling them.