rdmey 6 simple steps to start listening to social media

6 simple steps to start listening to social media

By Rebecca | August 10, 2008

categories: social media

I've been reading Groundswell for the last couple of days, and as I've been reading about big-budget social media strategies, I've been thinking about all the simple things a company can do to start to get their bearings in the social media space without dropping tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Starting with some free tools that give you an overview of your company's social media landscape can prepare you to make good decisions when it does come time to start spending money.

One of the key social media strategies that Groundswell identifies is listening; in fact, it's sort of the gateway drug of social media, because once you start listening you'll see all the conversations there are to participate in: conversations about how to improve your product, conversations about what your competitors are doing wrong (or right), conversations among your customers as they define your brand for themselves. There are certainly hosted applications on which you can spend a hefty sum, and they will give you pretty charts and graphs. But if you're just getting started, here are some much simpler -- and free -- tools you can use.

1. Get a Google Reader account. These accounts are free, and if you don't already have one, you can set one up easily by going to reader.google.com. Google Reader lets you organize feeds of information into folders for easy navigation, and also lets you search old posts, share and email posts, and bookmark favorites. Perhaps best of all, it will let you keep track of which feeds you're reading so you can thin the herd over time. Do this before you do anything else; it's an important part of several of the other steps.
2. Create a search strategy. Don't just dive into Google; spend an hour or two writing down what terms you'll search for. This list will include your brand name and products, obviously, but should also include competitor products, generic descriptions of your product, and combinations thereof that include words like "suck" or "awful" or "recommend" or "issue". Having a repeatable search strategy at the outset will help you establish some baseline metrics for your ongoing social media efforts.
3. Search Google using your search strategy. Look for social sites, such as forums or blogs, that have written about your search terms. If you find an interesting site or forum or blog, add its RSS feed to your Google Reader account.
4. Search social bookmarking sites using your search strategy. These sites -- such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit -- can point you to the information that others find interesting about the keywords you've included in your search strategy. Again, add the RSS feed for any interesting sites to your Google Reader account.
5. Search for blogs using your search strategy. Google's Blogsearch is an excellent tool for this; use the same search terms you used in your Google search to see what comes up; you can sort by recency and relevance, and initially relevance will offer you the results you're after. Explore the posts that come up, and then explore the blogs those posts are on and the blogs those posts link to. Don't be afraid to click around to see where you end up; part of the magic of blogs is that they uncover unexpected connections. As you find interesting sites, add their RSS feeds to your Google Reader account.
6. Set up search result feeds to help you discover new contributors. While you're searching for blogs using Google's Blogsearch, switch to a date-based view for your search term and add the resulting feeds to your Google Reader account (there's a link at the bottom of the Google Blogsearch results page to do this). These will alert you as new participants join the conversation.

Once you have the initial tools in place, it's time to start listening. While the steps leading up to this are pretty straightforward, this part is a bit of an art. You'll want to have an eye out for patterns, for early warnings, for opportunities. You'll want to carefully weigh when to respond and when to let sleeping dogs lie. And you'll want to be thinking, gradually, about how all of the information you're gathering will influence your ongoing social media strategy. This isn't a job to be done once -- or once a month. An initial in-depth assessment will give you a good idea of where you stand and which sites you need to keep paying attention to, but after that, you'll need to pay attention at least daily until you get a sense of how frequently new and valuable information will come across your radar.

If all of this sounds a little too overwhelming to fit into your day-to-day duties, it's possible you'll want to bring a social media consultant into the process -- to help you get everything set up, to give you an initial assessment, to do the ongoing monitoring and tell you what it all means, or to help you identify your next steps. A good social media consultant can also advise you if you come across content that portrays your company in a negative light. The point, mostly, is that getting started doesn't need to cost a fortune, and in fact it probably shouldn't. These simple, free steps will help you identify and define your social media goals, and once you've done some initial listening, you can decide whether and how much money to start spending on talking back.