Listen to Social Media Conversations

I just read a book “Likeable social media“ by Dave Kerpen

Social media is like the world’s largest cocktail party, where anyone can listen others talking and join the conversation with anyone else about any topic of the choice.

Social Media can and can’t do (by Dave):

• social media cannot make up for a bad product, company –> if you think that presenting your brand, your products via social media will help you with promotion, think again. If your products or service is not good enough – social media users will eat you alive
• social media won’t lead to overnight sales success –> oh so you thought (or even better – your boss thought) that setting a Facebook page and Twitter account will lead to sales success for the next day? e.g. “Hello world. Here I am.”, what social media world might answer is “bite me”. It’s a hard work day by day like everywhere else.
• social media is not free –> stop right there. If you think that only because Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin accounts are for free you won’t have to spend money on social media, think again. First of all you are spending your (or your employees) time. And as we know time is money, right? After few months you will notice that you need to pay for some more advanced applications to manage your social media presence.

Listen…listen…listen but how to listen? You can use some on-line tools for that:
free:

• Google Alerts
• Technorati blog search
• Twitter advance search
• Facebook search
• Youtube search
• TweetBeep –> Twitter alerts by e-mail

you need to pay:

• vocus – on-demand software for public relations management
• sysomo – business intelligence for social media, instant and unlimited access to all social media conversations
• radian6 – listen, measure, and engage with your customers across the social media

I ask myself a question – “and what’s next?” I was listening and using social media tools to monitor on-line conversation. And now what? What can I do to make my products and services more visible and at the end – sell more.

Action:

• negative comments –> If people are talking bad about our products/services I should tell (via Twitter, Linkedin, etc.) that we did important changes (because we are listening to what people have to say).
• positive comments –> promote those comments by publishing them on your social media accounts, blog, company website
• questions –> if your clients/potential clients have some questions – answer, don’t wait too long. People want to know and you are the one who can say a lot about your products/services. If you won’t answer, someone else might and you don’t know what they will say.
• requests –> if your clients/potential clients have some requests regarding your products/services, e.g.: they want some new features, etc. Listen to that, take it under consideration. Maybe there is a chance that you might change something. And of course let people know what you are doing: answer to those request (whether you will change something or not).