Social Listening: Think Outside Your Brand

Guest Post by Peter Genuardi

I've seen a bunch of presentations and survey research in the last couple of there's been a lot of talk about social listening and search optimization in the NPO space for the last few years.  Search and social media are two realms in which there is a lot of activity by constituents (call them what you want) – service beneficiaries, donors, activists, event participants.  When I say "a lot of activity" I mean a ton.  All of these constituents are out there talking about things, sharing photos and videos, and looking for thing through search engines.  As of this moment, I think most of us have been missing massive untouched potential for what this activity can do to help us engage constituents. 

So What?

In this post, I’ll quickly point out where we’re missing the boat and present some new ideas for how to leverage social to help you come up with better ideas for constituent engagement.

Our Current (Limited) View of Search and Social

We’re limiting social listening to public relations think about how people are using social listening today.  Most that I know monitor the blogs, Facebook, and Twitter for people talking about their brand or organization.  This is a great way to support public relations activity.  By listening for the name of your organization you’re likely to pick up on someone mentioning that they love it or hate it.  Then you can participate in the discussion – growing the positive sentiment or countering the negative. This approach is for the most part a reactive one.  

Where we SHOULD be Looking

We should be exploring social and search data for new ideas broadening your social listening program can help you develop new ideas for your organization’s programs and services as well as marketing activities.  Think about how you might monitor the landscape for discussion about things adjacent to your organization or programs. 

Get More from a Widely Cast Net

Here’s a quick example.  Imagine you work for an organization that provides services to prisoners transitioning from prison back to the community.  Your considers developing a new pen pal program to help people in the community connect with prisoners prior to their release.  This seems like a dicey proposition to some – corresponding with people convicted of crimes is likely to scare some people or turn them off to an organization.  Would a program like this turn people in the community off?  Investing time and energy in the program only to have it fail would be a failure in terms of opportunity cost.

So, your organization wants to figure out whether a program like this would be successful.  Would people be receptive to it? How would you normally do this kind of research?  Web survey, interviews, maybe focus groups?  You can complement these traditional research methods by monitoring the social landscape for conversations about things like “pen pal programs,” “writing to prisoners.”  What people are saying about how these things, what they like, and how they feel will help you develop a better program out of the gate.  This is an oversimplified example, but you get the picture.

Social Listening: Try it now

There are lots of tools available to help you monitor conversation across the social landscape.  Besides looking through standard web site content, they comb through peoples’ conversations on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Youtube, and the list goes on.  The better, more expensive tools – like Radian6 and BuzzMetrics – do a great job at filtering in the conversations you’re really after and filtering out noise.  If you’re an organization that gets people to donate to support breast cancer research, you can imagine how tough it might be to filter in people talking about breast cancer research and filter out people looking for or discussing unsavory material.

Create a Guerilla Social Listening Platform

If you don’t have money to spend on a social listening platform now, try this approach to doing it for free.  I first read about this approach to guerilla social listening here.  Basically boils down to this. 

1.   Develop a list of terms that you want to monitor.  This is probably the hardest and most important part because you want to be sure you’re searching for things using the terms your constituents use to describe them.  Too often we describe things in the terms that our organization or company uses.  A great example of this tension can be observed in the airline industry.  Airlines want to know what people are saying about “low fares” (their term).  In reality we’re all looking for “cheap tickets.”

2.   Create your listening platform using Google reader.  Google reader will allow you to consolidate content from all over the web and let you organize it reasonably well.

3.   Set up monitors on different social networks and web sites.  You can create RSS feeds from search parameters on lots of sites (like Twitter and Craig’s list for instance).  Try it.  Go to search.twitter.com and search for some term.  Then, grab the link to the RSS feed (“Feed for this Query”) that will contain all of these results on an ongoing basis.  You can do this all over the place, like YouTube, Flickr, etc.  Create monitors on the sites relevant to the type of social activity and constituents you’re targeting.

4.   Plug your monitors into Google reader.  Add each of these RSS feeds to Google reader, which will now pull of the content into a dashboard on a regular basis. 

5.   Filter your content for useful ideas.  You can now use the tools on Google reader to find people talking about the things you’re monitoring.

6.   Fine tune your listening. Depending on the terms and social sites you’re monitoring, you’re likely to corral a ton of content. You’ll quickly see which return the most valuable content.  Go back and tune the terms you’re monitoring and places you’re searching for them.  

Stay tuned for Wednesday's Part II on "Search: Don't Just Get Found, Find New Ideas".

Peter is Vice President ofSoapbxx,an online marketing firm serving mission driven people. Follow him on Twitter @petergenuardi