Future PR Skills 2008: Deploy Live 'Listening Posts'

Part of a series

Running focus groups, sending out surveys are old-school. Today, we need to be actively listening all of the time to our customers, influencers, and communities of people that can impact our client's business. Social media has established a constant flow of conversations and media online. I love that Radian 6 calls one of their widgets "River of News." We're talking Big Muddy - a river as wide and torrid as the Mississippi.

Listening Posts allow us to pay attention to what people are saying in that river. This intelligence plays a different role than the occasional focus group where we ask 10-12 people (9 people if it's a government gig) what they think of a particular message platform or creative campaign. Listening Posts tell us what people are saying now not just about our brand - that's a no brainer (but still more complex than subscribing to a Google Alert). With some creative thinking, they can tell us about issues and ideas that either currently intersect with the brand or could with a little work.

Example: Maglite

Let's say you are working for Maglite. I like their products - very solid, reliable. They produce great light with an appealing form factor. Do people talk about Maglite online? You betcha. Just check out what others are saying in three quick places:

• Google Blogs
• Boardreader
• Flickr (First thing that pops up is a photo comparison of Maglite to Surefire)

But what if you wanted to find the customers you already know buy your brand or more interestingly find new customers? I have never worked for Maglite but I am guessing they do a lot of sales with first responders. They could look for conversations online having to do with equipment and first responders. Are fireman talking about tools? What about people preparing for some type of emergency? While my son seems quite prepared for the zombie hoard - others may be getting ready for some more down to earth danger like flooding and hurricanes. What about first time home owners trying to outfit their house with the essentials? There are a ton of homeowner conversations online. 

What Listening Programs Are Good For

Here's what Listening Programs are really good for (these are from our internal training courses):

• Track perceptions and how messages are being interpreted in the marketplace
• Lead to customer service intervention
• Identify promoters (and prepare to engage them)
• Offer a high-level view of emerging trends and what competitors are doing
• Demonstrate the impact and value of public relations or advertising (i.e. measure WOM)
• Help manage and improve an organization’s reputation

What New PR Pros Need

This is all new expertise for public relations pros. Never before have we had access to a steady stream of insights from simply listening to what people are saying online and offline. Today, it takes some new skills:

• Technological know-how (How do search engines work? What web 2.0 search tools are available and what are they good for? What is a Boolean search?)
• A curiosity about conversations and an insatiable appetite for words. Okay, the real skill here is the same one applied to our SEO skill set - the ability to imagine and observe what people are talking about and then derive the keywords that would help you and the general public to find those conversations. 
• An enduring empathy towards other people whether they be customers, constituents, stakeholders or any other abstract yet important group.
• The ability to sort through a lot of information and find the relevant bits and threads that tell a real story. It's funny there was a NYTimes article yesterday bemoaning the effects of the Internet's different model of "reading" and its affect on book reading habits. This new habit is what we need here.
• A strategic imagination that allows you to discover a conversation between interesting people and then think how you might engage them in some way that provides value for them and the brand.

There's a lot to listen to out there (IMPORTANT TOOL RESOURCE: here are links to a lot of the free, available-now sites courtesy of my crack training team with Ogilvy's 360° Digital Influence team):

Blogs – Use blog search engines and directories (Technorati, Google Blogs, Zuula, Clusty, Tweetscan); social bookmarking tools; blog rolls; search general search engines for lists of blogs

Message Boards – Use BoardReader; social bookmarking tools (e.g., De.licio.us); search general search engines for category-specific message boards (Yahoo Groups & Google Groups)

Wikis – Use wiki search engines; social bookmarking tools; general search engines
Newsgroups & forums – Use Google Groups, social bookmarking tools; general search engines

Directories – Search major directories (e.g., about.com, yahoo, open directory)

Multimedia – Use multimedia search engines, including meta search engines such as metatube.net,YouTube, Flickr, Google Images/Video; general search engines

Social networks – Search Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Bebo, Gather, Eons, etc and so forth...

(photo CC from Zeroin on Flickr)

Comments

[Jeff Woelker]

John - great post. It's been wonderful to see more and more clients and agencies looking to engage with consumers on both a personal and real time basis. Comcast, although they drop the ball quite often, is a great example of how one company can do this.

I've also written about some of the tools to use when listening to online communities. You can view them here:
http://www.jeffwoelker.com/2008/07/07/5-online-reputationpr-management-tools-watch-your-brand-in-real-time/

Best,
Jeff

[Paul L.]

There are so many more ways to get your client’s name out to the media. PR tactics definitely have changed with the times. What was once a phone call is now an e-mail. John this a great posting, and really tells the whole world what smart PR firms have been doing for the past few years. I heard about the agency, 5W Public Relations that use all the tactics you mentioned above. I don’t know much about other older firms, but this one is young, and actually knows the ins and outs in technology, using the internet as a big tool.

[Rob Caldwell]

Nice post. I like how you talk about finding new customers and give good examples of different ways to do this.

[Linda Margaret]

It's interesting in Europe to follow the linguistic versus geographical (country) trends. This even varies according to source; blogs tend to look forward to or target features while forums are more experiential in discussion. Listening posts are very linguistically and culturally nuanced.

[John Bell]

Linda - great comment of language. I have found the same thing. Running a global team, I witnss a few challenges beyond just the language and cultural distinctions. The web is more segmented by language than anything. Our team in Australia for instance is wrestling with communicating via social media when th English-language country is consuming and participating in Internet content and conversations from all over the English-web (similar for the link between Spain and some countries in SA, etc....)

[Adam]

Nowadays, people spend a lot of time searching for a particular image but are not able to find the exact one they need. If you are having such a problem, can check http://rotavacx.com

I hope it will help you. It has fantastic visual search tools that work with just a few keywords.