Your customers are talking...are you listening?

Every tweet, blog, post about your company or product is available at this moment on the world wide web. Not only are these discussions happening, they are being monitored by your competition. Right now you could be aggregating this information into useful insights in which could help you improve performance and capitalize on the wants and needs of your customers. As a graduate student in the Medill IMC program, I have had the opportunity to become exposed to social monitoring methods and business applications such as Radian6, NetBase and Social Mention that play an integral role in facilitating an effective social presence.


According to the 2011 Nielson Social Media Report, 53% of adults follow a brand on social media. It is apparent that social media is currently impacting your brand whether you want it to or not. Social media is not going away and now is the time to embrace it and get involved in the communities your customers live in. With the help of smart phones and quick access to social platforms, the people advocating your brand are now setting the tone. Read more about the impacts of social influencers.

With social monitoring and analytical tools you can lead the next wave of marketing by communicating to your customers in their environment. If you're not ready to join the conversation just yet, start with listening to customer conversations and you will be surprised at the valuable insights you may find from key influencers, popular discussion topics and overall sentiment of your brand. Compiling the conversations and dissecting the discussions for insights can positively impact your knowledge on the customer perspective and invigorate you to develop a more customer centric product. Listening to the chatter and taking the high profile topics to appropriate teams (ex. product development, sales, marketing) in your company can reverse loses and allow you to better allocate your budget to a suitable facet of the business.

How Do I Start Getting Insights?

1. Research to find the right social monitoring tools.  

There are dozens of tools available to corporations that will gather data and help your team interpret the findings. To get started check out some simple and free applications such as Social Mention, Listorious and Alltop. If you have the bandwidth for more strategic research go straight to the advance tools: Radian6, NetBase, HootSuite, or Sprout Social. 

2. Hire and train your team.

After you've found the right tool, set up a training session with your team to become fluent with it's capabilities. If you do not have available resources to tackle social media monitoring, consider hiring a social media expert to manage the analysis. Learn more about staffing a social media team.

3. Build a Social Marketing Program with ROI.  

It is important to distinguish social marketing from social media. At Northwestern, we effectively apply social monitoring to enhance social marketing efforts. Get started with sharing insights across departments in your company. You too can start conversing with your customers and you may discover a boost in brand sentiment once customers are aware there is a real person listening and responding to what they have to say. Develop recommendations that can take insights to business resolutions and product growth. Now watch for results.

Kim Schick is a graduate student of Northwestern's Medill IMC program. She specializes in digital and email marketing with a passion for social marketing strategies. Follow her on Twitter @KimSchickIMC and connect with her on LinkedIn.

Changing the Social Media Conversation in Your Company

As an integrated marketing graduate student, you get the privilege to experiment with a variety of new marketing tools and no topic is hotter than social media monitoring. Radian6, Social Mention, and Netbase all give you access to a variety of information, including trending topics being discussed and customer sentiment. Another unique tool, NodeXL, visually lays out different segments in a network while allowing you to find the key influencers. As marketers, we understand the benefits of analyzing the conversations taking place in the social sphere, but convincing the rest of the organization of the benefits is a lot more challenging. The best way to answer the question, “how does social drive sales?” is to integrate your social media objectives with those of other departments. Let me now show you how the information generated from social media impacts four departments of an organization.

Customer Service: Ask any marketer that is paying attention to the social media space for an example of which company is doing it best and I have no doubt that the company they mention is utilizing it for its customer service benefits. If a customer is unhappy or has a bad experience with a product, you are not only losing that customer, but most likely potential customers they are tied to. So rather than standing by idle, outside of the conversation, it is important for brands to stop the bleeding before it spreads.  Not only does this have the ability to recapture a lost customer, but actually makes them a stronger brand advocate than before the incident. Everyone loves a personal touch and social media offers that opportunity for a direct connection.

EXAMPLE: Best Buy has over 20 employees dedicated to responding to customer service issues, 3,000 socially trained retail employees, and 26 unpaid super fans that are rewarded in recognition. (www.conversocial.com)

Advertising: Your latest and greatest advertising campaign is just about to saturate the airwaves all over the country. After utilizing focus groups, you are extremely confident the impact will be favorable. The campaign launches and now thanks to the power of social media monitoring, you can immediately gauge the effectiveness and consumer attitude towards this campaign. You now have the ability to adjust or amplify the message to obtain the greatest positive impact.

EXAMPLE: A “Got Milk” campaign meant to last two months was pulled shortly after launching due to an overwhelming negative reaction online claiming the AD to be sexist. (www.adrants.com)

Product Innovation: The most successful products come from customer insights and your research department works tirelessly to observe consumer behaviors in order to generate quality leads. Netnography has been gaining momentum as a new method to evaluate consumer interests and help generate insights that lead to product development.  Who has a better idea of what your customer is talking about on the internet than your existing social media team.

EXAMPLE: In 2010 Gatorade pushed social media to the center of their marketing department, literally, when they developed a social media “mission control” room that monitors a live stream of topics that are relevant to their brand. While it serves multiple purposes, one of their primary goals is to seek out potential product innovation opportunities.  (www.mashable.com)

Sales: Are you looking to answer the ROI question for social media? What better way to do this than to generate leads for your sales department through monitoring for opportunities online. Being able to monitor for key phrases that might lead you to potential customers is a powerful way to drive sales and add substantial credibility to any social media initiative. Once you find the prospect, do not jump in with your sales pitch quite yet. Help them solve their potential dilemma first, then consider the appropriate method by which your company’s needs can be of further assistance.

EXAMPLE: Anchor Bank in Wisconsin focuses on delivering useful information that addresses financial questions and fosters relationships that turn into leads. (www.targetmarketing.com)

While it may not have the exposure of traditional media, social gets you much closer to your customers and gives every company a variety of benefits. While I only chose to highlight these four departments, you will find even more applications for this information source as your social media strategy integrates further into the entire company.  For further information on this topic, I highly recommend reading “The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration.”

by Evan Kroft (@ekroft)

Graduate Student at Northwestern University

How to Achieve Social Media Monitoring?

 Two-thirds of the world’s Internet users are now on social media. The social networking has evolved not only as a new marketing channel but a perfect platform to listen to the customers and unveil the customer’ unmet needs. As marketers, we need to understand what people are saying about us and our competitors through the platform of social media. This is social media monitoring.  

Social media monitoring is to listen to the conversions online and to understand the sentiments. Marketers might like to consider how many mentions of your brands/campaign have been talked on social media, which would be the metric of volume in social media monitoring; how do people like or unlike it, or how customer perceive your brand against your competitors, which would be the content analysis to determine mentions online as positive or negative sentiment. After understanding how customers talk about your brand, measuring effectiveness, through social media monitoring, marketers could further identify the influencers online and tailor a marketing plan to engage customers. 


In the landscape of monitoring tools, Radian6’s social media monitoring software helps businesses listen, discover, measure and engage in conversations across the social networking. Radian6 tracks most of the social networking, including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, news sites, forums, discussion boards, and video and image sharing sites. Through the interactive dashboard, marketers could have quick overview from the monitoring perspective.

On the other hand, Netbase has the strength of sentiment analysis, which allows markets to measure the social media mentions by its basic sentiment coding of emotions and behaviors. Monitoring through Netbase benefits marketers to answer the why question during social media monitoring, accordingly, marketers could discover consumer insights and innovate products and services. 

Here are some tips of social media monitoring. Understand the objective of social media monitoring. The tool alone won’t help you solve the problem. Marketers should have a clear view of what to achieve through social media monitoring. Secondly, always listen first, in the social networking, a smart marketer always knows the best solution is first give and then take. 

Stella Chang, MS Candidate Medill IMC

Follow me on twitter: @imcinsider