Brands do a lot of talking social media: posts, hashtags, likes, etc. The platforms are great for getting your message out.

The killer app from social is listening to your audience, not just talking at them. What you hear may surprise you and help spot trends or problems before they get out of control.

One of Friday’s breakout sessions will breakdown how you can use social listening to build brand love and shape critical decisions. Ali Winkle, president and founder of Just Drive Media, will use real world examples to showcase what strategic social listening looks like.

There’s so much out there. What should brands be listening for?

That all depends on the brand. There’s so much that you CAN pick up on that you really have to go into it knowing what you SHOULD pick up on. When we start with a new client or project, we define very specific goals and design our listening process around those. Some clients want to gain an overall understanding of brand perception – but many more want ground level insight on specific aspects of their business – product releases, campaigns, executive spokespeople, etc.

For a larger brand like LinkedIn or eBay, they know how they’re perceived overall – that’s well-established if you’re regularly benchmarking. What they then want to know is, how can they improve? And that isn’t done overnight. It’s done by launching many disparate initiatives and then listening/measuring their efficacy one by one.

The biggest mistake any brand makes is to measure sentiment conventionally. Most tools measure sentiment as Positive, Negative and Neutral (and are highly inaccurate at that). This provides very little insight. What matters is what’s driving that sentiment. And who’s driving those conversations? That’s why you have to go deeper.

How do you sort through the noise?

If you know exactly what you’re listening for, and you have a mastery of your listening tools, you should get very little noise. Creating smart keyword groups is more art than science – and it takes some experimentation. If you can do that really well it saves time on the analysis.

Once in a while, you have something that brings in noise that you just can’t get around. For example, we have a client with a product called Beam. Beam is used in so many different contexts, that narrowing the keyword groups to just that name is pretty much impossible.  In those cases, you have to make tradeoffs – do you want to keep the group extremely narrow and risk missing some important mentions or spend a little more time reading through irrelevant posts to get to the meat of the conversation? For us, accuracy is most important, so we opt for the latter, but it’s a time consuming process and not all companies can afford to do it correctly, so you have to make a call.

This is another reason why relying on automated tools doesn’t work so well. If there are irrelevant posts in your data set, the automated sentiment is going to be even more skewed.

What are some of the best listening tools available?

There are so many tools out there, and most of them only do one or two things well. We use a plethora of tools to get the data we need for our clients. We find we get the most robust Twitter data from a tool that doesn’t provide much in the way of Facebook or Instagram data, so we have to go to other tools for that. This is on the listening side. We use different tools for influencer identification, audience analysis, owned channel metrics, publishing, etc.

They vary greatly in price and price does not always correlate to quality. There are different needs for different brands so I’d say, unfortunately, most brands will have to take the time to evaluate which tools are best for them. And the big questions to ask are: Am I getting accurate data? And am I getting all of the data?

We’re also a bit of a contrarian agency. When others zig, we zag. The modern convention is that tools and A.I. can do all of this work – the truth is very far from that – at least today. Human analysis continues to be the most important aspect of listening for us. A.I. can’t tell you why people like Siri better than Alexa. We can (and will, in my presentation).

Who in an organization should be part of the listening team?

People with imagination. Anyone can pull data, look at it, put it into a chart. But taking that data and turning it into a story – one that’s relevant to all of the different internal constituents – that’s more difficult. We tell our clients why things are happening and what they can do to change the outcomes. The data is just the first chapter of that story.

What can conference attendees expect to learn from your presentation?

Attendees will learn about how valuable listening can be to all parts of an organization – Brand, Social, Comms, Product, Customer and even the leadership team – and how to do it well.

So much of modern marketing – and modern business – has been compartmentalized so that one group doesn’t know what another group is doing. Social listening can help tie all of the different programs and priorities together, and help make sure that an organization is presenting itself in a cohesive way.

The PRSA Southeast District Conference takes place April 18-20, 2018, in Raleigh, N.C. For more information or to register, visit prsasummit.org.

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