Introduction
Nearly anywhere you turn online, people are talking about your products and categories, what they like and dislike, what they want, what pleases them or ticks them off, and what they would like you to do, or stop doing. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, millions of blogs, forums, Web sites, and review sites make most of these conversations public, accessible, and researchable to every company. You also hear individuals talk about the richness and texture of their lives and your role in them. You learn about their aspirations, families, relationships, and homes; music and movies; vacations, hobbies, and sports; finances, jobs, and careers; education and technology; what they had for lunch, what they crave; and much more. By listening in on those conversations, you position yourself to develop powerful insights into people that, coupled with strategy, drive your business forward and create an enduring advantage. Listen First! Turning Social Media Conversations into Business Advantage will show you how.
You might be asking yourself, “How can conversational listening help create a business advantage?” The answer lies in the difference between competitive advantage and business advantage. Competitive advantage usually derives from superiority on some dimension in marketing, execution, or customer service. However, any competitive advantage can be matched or bested, every edge dulled, and any superiority lasting only until the next competing model, price cut, ad campaign, distribution change, or customer service fiasco. Business advantage is less vulnerable and longer-lasting, because it comes from you and your company's abilities to sense, respond to, and quickly adapt your business to changing customers and conditions.
Listening is ideal for sensing and responding because it interprets meaning from signals of change that are embedded in conversations. Listening tunes into what people are saying today, gives their thoughts and comments structure, and, when astutely analyzed, leads to business-building insights.
- Listening is inherently biased toward anticipating, decision making, doing, and making progress all the time, not at one point in time.
- Listening is an emerging discipline that is plainly visible on companies radars. While many are still experimenting and dipping their toes into listening's waters, a good number are moving from the experimental stage to figuring out how to “bake” listening into their business processes. Still smaller groups are already running sophisticated listening operations. Yet each camp has questions. Newcomers want to know the basics; the more experienced want to compare notes and, especially, plan for what's next.
Listen First! is a playbook in the true sense of the word; it combines education with strategy and actions for achieving specific marketing and advertising goals, all based on the best available research and evidence from more than 50 carefully selected case studies, which feature companies of all sizes and states of maturity. You can be confident that the plays and tactics you'll read about “have legs” and provide a supported foundation for your listening initiatives. This book gives you the knowledge necessary to deep-six the hype, misinformation, and anecdotes about listening, and exploit its full potential instead.
Listen First! answers three critical questions:
- What is listening and how is it done?
- How is listening used to help achieve business objectives?
- Where is listening headed?
The book is organized into four parts that answer them:
Part I, Steps to Effective Listening: This part explains how listening research is done, step by step. It begins by defining the initiative and moves on to reporting the results and evaluating the effort. The different types of software solutions available for listening research are given in Chapter 2. The Appendix complements Chapter 2 by furnishing summaries of more than 70 vendor companies and their solutions and services.
Part II, Listening-Led Marketing and Advertising: Applying Listening Insights to Achieve Key Business Objectives: Listening contributes to achieving the full range of marketing and advertising objectives set out by most businesses. Each chapter in this part identifies a single objective—such as understanding consumer mind-sets, developing new products, increasing sales, providing customer service, or managing reputation—and details listening's contribution to its success.
Part III, Listening-Led Marketing and Media Innovations: Listening is more than insight and input into strategy; it is a data source, too. The chapters in this part look at four emerging data-driven applications that will usher changes into traditional business practices, such as social TV ratings, listening-based targeting, achieving share of market goals, and predicting near-term sales.
Part IV, Listening's New Frontiers: In this part, leading listening practitioners and researchers contribute essays on the way forward for listening, its practice, adoption, and contribution to creating business value. We will need to pick up new signals, understand people and culture, change the research paradigm, rethink what we do, and become listening organizations.
In keeping with its description as a playbook, Listen First! is intended as a business tool. Here are just a few of the ways that you can use it to your business advantage:
- Bring your colleagues and clients up to speed on listening research by reading Part I.
- Match a marketing problem you're working on to those in Part II.
- Sharpen your knowledge of what's next by consulting Parts III and IV.
- Jump-start the evaluation of listening solutions by turning to the Appendix, which presents summaries of more than 70 vendors.
- Learn the lingo by consulting the Glossary.
After reading Listen First!, it won't be business as usual. And for many people settled into their careers, that's scary—especially when listening insights challenge the status quo: When you find that the market you think you're serving turns out to be—or is becoming—something else entirely. When you know you've got a great insight and colleagues don't take it seriously. This book presents case studies of exactly these situations, and what was done to address them. You'll also learn about the ways companies recognized and seized the opportunity to build their businesses through listening.
I'm bringing up these points because of what I learned in the year it took me to write Listen First! It's simply this: Understanding and doing listening is essential, but not enough to create business advantage. The most successful listening companies do great work, have the guts to act on compelling insights, let go of the past, and shape their futures. Just imagine what boldness it took for Hennessy's management to transform a centuries-old cognac associated with brandy snifters, genteel surroundings, and after-dinner pleasures into an urban, music-inflected brand, where the beverage is mixed into drinks and enjoyed at parties? Or to persuade an editor who built a career on parenting publications that the readers for a new mom-targeted magazine she has in development don't want that information? There's a related factor, as well: These companies tell convincing stories from the listening research; they connect listening to the business in ways that bring people fully to life; understanding people as they are, not necessarily as a company would like them to be, makes tough decisions easier and sets a path for growth.
Listening is not just another research technique; it furnishes a new platform for business and research, and needs to be recognized as such. This book gives reasons for that recognition. It will provide you with the know-how to listen and turn conversations into enduring business advantage. Above all, listening is about learning through time and engaging with a like-minded community. Visit the Listen First companion Web site: http://listenfirst.thearf.org, for news, updates, viewpoints, and developments and for you to comment and share your knowledge and experiences.