The Secret Formula for Social Insights Success

To be effective at social media listening, you need to develop a clear strategy. I am happy to report that I have discovered the secret formula for social insights success. It is: SI = 5W * (C+D)+V+A.

OK so there really isn’t a secret formula. It takes a lot of hard work. But, following the formula will get you started in the right direction. Before you get started, you need to define the strategy, thats where 5W comes in. The W’s are Why, Who, Where, What, and When. Tactics of configure, deliver, validate and adjust follow the strategy.

Why are you doing social listening? Are you trying to ensure the brand is protected? Or perhaps you want faster and more qualitative insights for your CX Voice of the Customer program. You might be looking for themes and influencers to improve word of mouth marketing or to develop better Youtility content. You may want to do social listening to enable social support or social selling. There are as many different approaches to Why as there are organizations doing social listening. You need to determine the top priorities for your organization.

Along with Why is Who. Who are you doing social listening for? Meet with leaders from across the organization to determine their goals and how they measure success. You can then work to ensure social listening is aligned with what they need.

Make the outputs of your social listening strategy inputs into other areas of your organization.

It has often been said that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. How will you determine if your social listening program is having an impact? It is important to set clear metrics. Many of the metrics used by social media programs don’t really provide a clear measure of business impact. Think about what you want to happen and how you might be able to measure it. It could be that you want to have an engaged (and loyal) following on social – so followers and engagement rate could be useful. But, you may want to take the next step to determine if those loyal social fans are also loyal customers who visit the web site and purchase products. You might want to add metrics for click throughs to a web site with a web analytics sales funnel in place. Then, you could attribute sales from social. Another way to think of building loyal customers is to ensure people get help when needed. You might add support measurements like cases solved, time to resolution, and rant to rave conversions.

Where should you listen? Social media isn’t just limited to Twitter and Facebook. It extends to forums you host or other forum communities. It can include blogs and their comments. There are new social apps emerging all the time. You need to determine where the relevant conversations are for your goals. You might be surprised at the different communities that you find. Once you have surveyed them, prioritize where to listen for the most relevant insights.

What will you do with what you find? A first step is to determine if you are just listening or if you plan to engage. The tools you use will be very different for each. You also need to determine how to report what you find. Using the dashboards in the tool itself may be OK for a trained social media user. But, you will likely want to consider creating reports using PowerPoint or analysis dashboards. One thing to consider when using dashboards is if the social insights can be combined with insights from other channels for a more comprehensive view. Think about web, email, search, in-store, or other channel metrics that may be useful to combine.

Finally, when will you deliver. Depending on the goals, you might consider real-time alerts, daily snapshots, weekly updates, or comprehensive monthly & quarterly reporting.

Wow. That is a lot to think about. But working through the strategy for your social listening program is the key to building a successful program. Once you complete that, you can begin working on the tactical details that make the program work. More about that in a future post.

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