Listen First: Taking advantage of the conversation.

I’ve always been a big fan of the wisdom of crowds.  While I was COO for a start up search engine company, we build a search engine based on this principle, where we used what people were saying as a means to define relevancy.  Not just who was linking to whom, but also what those people were actually saying to help determine the best search results.   We did the same with the ads that appeared on our search results, lowering the relevancy scores over time for lower performing ads and search terms.  We listened to the conversations being had on the internet, and found truly remarkable results and solutions for people.

In the new world of communication that is springing up, where social media is changing the way people interact with each other, how are companies able to insert them selves into the conversation?  How can they meet the needs of people wanting to interact with each other, and not be obtrusive in their approach?  And while a business is inserting themselves into the conversation, what is the end goal, the business need that is being met by them having direct dialog with the consumer?

To help define what a businesses goals should be in this arena they need to listen.  Not just to the consumers, but to their internal business units.  They need to find out what are the pain points for each and come up with an actionable solution.   The solution should be something actionable and concrete, and should be a strategic directive that could be applied to anything, not just social media and word of mouth marketing.

Companies should not sit and say, hey we need to be on Twitter or hey we need to be on Facebook, until they have listened to what their external customers and their internal stakeholders are saying.   But once companies have listen then they must engage in the conversation, but with a particular business need in mind.

Yes there are times when social can be used purely for brand engagement,. An example of this would be the HBO Facebook app, “Immortalize Yourself,” which enabled fans to produce videos of themselves with real characters and Facebook friends. The app pulled in data from users’ profiles to generate the videos, which could feature random or specific Facebook friends.  It was a fun little app but it was tied to a campaign and this sort of advertising around a product or event will never completely go away.

Listening to the conversations and then inserting yourself in the communication stream with a particular business need will help the companies not only succeed, but innovate in ways they might never have thought about.  Once listening, then it is time to engage your audience and start a true relationship with your customers.