Here at Marketing Works, enriching our own marketing knowledge and expertise is something we value. We’d like to think we know everything about social media, but because it’s constantly growing and ever-changing it’s challenging to stay ahead of the game. With this being said, our team had the opportunity to sit in on Alistair Wheate’s recent webinar: “Effective social media listening for communications and insights teams.”
We all know social media has grown exponentially since 2011. While it was widely used by organizations a few years ago, it’s now transformed into a standard part of their marketing plans. Although social has been around for a decade and many organizations started exploring with it shortly after its impetus, many still leave out the most important part of the puzzle: the customer. Marketers and organizations are still flushing out best social practices that fit the customer approach.
In his webinar, Wheate presented an acronym to sum up how to manage social from a customer-focused perspective: LOGIC:
- Listen
- Observe
- Generalize
- Identify/Investigate
- Conclude
Listen. This is an issue many organizations struggle with. It’s not a matter of passing out surveys and asking customers what they think about a brand, product or service. Instead, it’s what’s being said unprompted—comments on social media.
Observe: Look for patterns in what is said. Is there anything that stands out or is unexpected? Is something you’re doing ‘rubbing’ them the wrong way?
Generalize: After sorting through your comments, it’s time to hypothesize what’s going wrong (or right) for customers. Are customers inconvenienced by a new policy and are looking to social to vent? If so, jot that down as a generalization.
Identify/Investigate: Segment all of the generalizations into categories, like service complaints or misunderstandings. Doing this will help you not only address customer complaints, but also possibly see what’s wrong in your organization.
Conclude: Make recommendations for all of the categories you’ve discovered. If one issue is in fact customer inconvenience by a new policy, addressing why it was put in to place and how it’s intended benefit them may be a good approach.
Following the LOGIC plan will help you start “listening” to your online audience rather than just “monitoring” it. Social media is a gold mine for hearing customer thoughts in real time. Their comments are genuine, and they want people to read them, including you.
Have you heard that Facebook is considering a ‘dislike’ button on business pages? Many organizations aren’t fans of it because it may hurt their reputation. Next week we’ll look deeper into this topic to demonstrate the importance of companies using LOGIC in their social media strategies.
What do you think of Wheate’s model? Do you think you’re being heard? Tell us in the comments!