Archives for posts with tag: Listening

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Let’s face it:

  • It’s hard to reach people on Twitter and Facebook.
  • It’s even harder to get a decent engagement; the platforms are not helping your quest.
  • It’s hard to scale social media and have a decent reach.

Still, there’s immense value for social platforms as simple customer service, community building and listening tools. If you have people that want to connect with your brand, why would you put up barriers to prevent that interaction. There’s a lot of value in talking to 0.98% of your customer base than talking to nobody, and it can make you a lot of money.

Don’t bother doing it part time.

You can’t log-in to Facebook once a day for a few moments and hope to get something out of it for your business. Don’t bother conversing on Twitter for 10 minutes a day and expect any ROI. You will never keep people interested in you or looking for you if you are never there. This means content and persistence. It means having a thick skin and showing a human face for your brand.

It takes a lot of energy and effort to build an online community for your business. We create and manage content for multiple clients. It’s hard work. It’s worth it. We helped brands to extend their reach and awareness dramatically to where now we can actual redirect some of my time to other areas of marketing to grow even bigger.

Social Media is worth it because you get a multitude of value back. Sales. Feedback. Engagement. Customer Loyalty. There’s one caveat:

You have to be all in or not at all.

The good news is there is help. You can learn. It is fun. The resources often are mostly time. But if done right the return on that time can be immense.

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Image: Courtesy of 8.media.tumblr.com

A NY Times article about the art of listening and the constant battle against noise caught my eye last weekend. One paragraph resonated with me:

“We have become insensitive to listening,” he said. “The most important thing you can do to become a better listener is to simply go to a naturally quiet place and allow your senses to open up again. When you become a better listener to nature, you become a better listener to your community, your children, the people you work with.”

I believed for a while that marketers get overpaid for talking and barely reimbursed for listening. It’s time to switch that model around.And, yes, many  companies are talking about listening or Social Listening. Am I the only one that feels this is just another excuse for brands to talk more?

Does anybody ever really listen anymore? Just look around at conferences, especially Social Media conferences. Is there one person really listening? Or are we all too busy talking, creating snarky tweets? How can we as an industry recommend listening as a #1 tactic for all brands to dive into Social Media while we are busy sharing our lunch place on Foursquare? Most often than not, instead of listening to what is being said to us, we are already listening to what we’re going say in response.

I think it’s time for us take a break from all the noise and signals and explore silence again. If you’ve experienced complete silence, you know it has the loudest voice. A voice we need to hear again.