Dec
29
Eight Stages of Listening: Which Stage are You?
Tue Dec, 2009 by Digital Bus
If someone is talking about your company online, and you’re not listening, did it ever really make a sound? The short answer is a resounding yes.
Of course the concept of brand monitoring is old hat for anyone working in the digital marketing industry, but a colleague recently brought to my attention a presentation from Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang that broke social media listening down into several discrete phases.
Owyang’s presentation, “Evolution: the Eight Stages of Listening,” analyzes corporate social media customer interaction into stages that range in complexity from nascent to hyper-advanced. Owyang’s phases of listening are as follows:
1. No Goal at All
2. Tracking of Brand Mentions
3. Identifying Market Risks and Opportunities
4. Improving Campaign Efficiency
5. Measuring Customer Satisfaction
6. Responding to Customer Inquiries
7. Improving Customer Understanding
8. Being Proactive and Anticipating Customers
Are you seeing your own company’s strategy in this list? The power of social networking has opened up myriad opportunities for companies to not only speak to but also interact with their core target audiences, to the point of clairvoyance outlined in Stage Eight. But the fact is that most companies are lagging behind the innovation curve in their social media listening activities, preferring to stay stuck in Stage One or Two and leaving the door open for more nimble competitors to weasel their way into customers’ marketing budgets.
This is Marketing 101 here folks – if you don’t serve your customers, someone else will. As Owyang states in his presentation, “Conversations happen with or without your presence. The control over dialogues is no longer yours.” But what you can control is how you participate in and add value to those dialogues. Now is the time to build a solid digital marketing strategy, one that will take full advantage of social media listening to connect with your customers on an authentic level, identify untapped market opportunities before your competitors can and mitigate smaller problems before they blossom into crises.
Check out Owyang’s presentation yourself by clicking on this link or checking out the embedded slides right here.
http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/evolution-the-eight-stages-of-listening
Comments Off