Expert A

3.1.1 Survey interview

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(Expert A, 2014)

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3.1.2 Transcription of telephone interview with Expert A

Further explanations on 3) which companies should use Social Listening?

…especially in terms of whether you're using Social Listening to kind of get engaged of how you reach your target audiences, brand reception and awareness sentiment, how your brand is doing, it's more common. Where if you are B2C the consumers you are reaching…most likely they are active on social and hopefully talk about your brand on social so you likely get a lot more data to take a look at. Whereas if you are B2B - like for instance we were working on a project for this company Medtronic & Covidien - they focus on health care and (..) because more of their business is B2B and a lot of the dis-cussion is about how they feel about each other they don't really make public through Social Media. And it's also the people that meet the stakeholders and involved with those companies are probably likely to not be on Social Media and talking about their perceptions about a certain brand. I guess to put it in concrete examples: if you are - and I keep saying Coca Cola as an example - but say you are Coca Cola and you want to know how your brand is perceived - because Coca Cola’s target audience is mostly regular consumers and have different segments of teens, moms etc. it's likely that those people are using Social Media and have reasons to talk with the brands on So-cial Media. So you have a lot more data to work with to actually see some trends and get a really good analysis versus if you are a health care company that provides prod-ucts to hospitals and clinics and stuff like that, just because of the nature of the busi-ness it's unlikely that you are going to see a man during the hospital using twitter to talk about how awesome his shipment and product was this month. So that's the most con-crete example I can give because it's more about how likely it is your audiences are us-ing social to communicate with your brand. I think that's the most important indicator.

Would your target audience or the people you are trying to reach be active on social?

Social Listening for SME?

I think what's nice is, there are different options for listening - i.e. people aren't even thinking about it as being listening - like Topsy - a business tool that I used to use pri-marily for getting an idea of how often a hash-tag was used. But you can also use it as a listening tool - even if it is just for twitter. There is that vs. something like (company name) which is much more expensive because you are getting a bigger picture on what's happening on social across also different platforms and blogs and forums. So I think that SME can still implement Social Listening as a practice but you might need to think of different options to invest in. So they can't probably do a full blown (company name) suite but they can probably use smaller tools that are a little more cost-effective to measure social conversations.

2) Difference between Social Listening and Social Media Monitoring?

My background is more…social and digital agencies. So I think of it very much as: what are the different roles required to do those things? So I think of Social Media Monitoring more as something a community manager might be doing - actively monitoring feeds in real-time on a day-to-day (basis). So they are more focused on what is happening at this current moment and what conversations are happening right now.

And then me, it's more like…conversations versus actually reporting. Even though you might have someone doing Social Media Monitoring who is able to say today we inter-acted with this many people or this hash-tag was used this many times or we got this sort of reach happening, but the way Social Listening is used is far more of a planning strategic perspective where it doesn't lead to immediate action. A simple way to think about that is when you are using Social Media Monitoring you can take action right away because you are in real-time so you can see what's happening and you can

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make decisions more quickly. With Social Listening it takes time especially with the amount of data you might be looking at to really come through and organize data and come up with the analysis, find some insights and it takes more time. If you just want to narrow it down to a timing perspective Social Listening is something you don't take ac-tion right away it's probably used to plan something that might happen a few months from now.

Success story about successful implementation of Social Listening?

The example I can come up with was unfortunately not from (company name) but it was something we came up with in research. Capital One actually leveraged Social Listening to come up with the name of the hash-tag they used in their new campaign and they used Social Listening to determine which word they should select to be the hash-tag based on what was mostly used with their audiences, which was pretty cool.

That's the only concrete example I can think of but I think it's a good example of how Social Listening is used such as from a reporting standpoint because actually it's to in-form creative.

Further comments:

I think the one thing that is really interesting about Social Listening is that: I have heard more discussions about it in the last year as a marketer and I think that overall people hear Social Listening and they think they understand it because it's a very basic lan-guage, like Social Listening - oh, listening to Social Media conversations - but I think there is lot of confusion on how Social Listening is actually conducted and what it can actually measure. Kind of the touch point in my answer that I see a lot from clients is that there is a confusion between what Social Listening can provide and social analyt-ics. So from Social Listening you can't say how many likes a brand's post got. You would just see overall people talking about the post and it's really hard to see...clients will ask us all the time "I want to see how my posts perform" to drive these listening re-sults and you can't really do that because it's taking different data sets and you can't really correlate them. And I think that's one thing that's definitely a confusion and I think it's also that a lot of brands are just getting on board with doing social analytics, period.

So actually measuring their social presences in terms of community size, engagement

& reach and I think that brands are now just starting to think about measuring the con-versation outside of their own properties which is really only possible because of the technology that (company name) and other companies can provide. So there is just a lot of education that can be done about that of what listening can actually achieve.

On the difference between Social Listening and Social Media Monitoring

Just think of the Capital One example how they used Social Listening to inform their creative for the campaign idea. Think of all the brands who hop into the real time con-tent train - Oreo with the Super Bowl blackout tweet or brands that tweet during the Su-per Bowl or things like that - like that you are given an example of Social Media Moni-toring. It's something they are taking a look at an event that they are monitoring that is happening at the same exact time and they are hoping to do a real-time action against.

To think that could be those tweets example you can use as a side-by-side comparison of Social Media Monitoring and Social Listening.

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