It all starts with Listening

Listening is one of those skills that takes practice. Organizations have an even harder time in pausing to listen to their customers. Over the past year and a half I have had the good fortune to be directly involved with helping brands and agencies improve their listening skills using social media monitoring. It is my day job. Yes, I do work for a social media monitoring vendor and I’m proud of it! We have evolved Alterian SM2 (Techrigy) based on our customers needs.

Yesterday, Jeremiah Owyang & Ray Wang of the consulting group, Altimeter, released a report on the use cases for Social Customer Relationship Management (social CRM). As Community Managers we all know that the customer is our first priority.Yesterday I presented a five hour workshop on the same topic in the UK. I have been sharing these use cases for quite awhile. I’m in the process of writing white papers on the ROI of social media monitoring. The first is available.

At Alterian we are also starting to quantify the value that advertisers are realizing on the social web. We used Alterian SM2 to measure the conversations around the Super Bowl advertisers and defined a Social Engagement Index that shows the reach and influence of the ads. And we also calculated the Social Sentiment Engagement Index which takes into account how people felt about the ads.

Jeremiah & Ray have put together an awesome report that consolidates interviews with vendors and experts. It’s a must read. They underline that the customers are leading the conversation.

Here’s the whole report. I totally appreciate their sharing their findings in the true spirit of social media. We are fortunate that such talented people (both were at Forrester) are willing to openly share their work! Where is your organization at in this scheme? Are you listening to your customers?

The report highlights:

1. Identifies 18 use cases for Social CRM
2. Captures the best practices of 100 customers in 18 use cases.  More to be added over time.