Social Media Marketing Book

Listening is probably one of the most important things you can do when you are implementing engagement tactics in social media communities.  It’s important to remember we were given two ears and just one mouth for a reason.  Listening to the community members can queue you into things that you would not normally be privy too if you were just relying on focus groups or surveys.

Today’s three tips are from Chapter 26 “You Need to be All Ears” in the book Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media. Of course the full chapter digs a lot deeper into aspects of listening as opposed to just “hearing” what’s being said and how listening can even help your company out with problems it may be facing.  Today’s three quick tips are:

1. People Want to Be Heard
2. Learn the Lingo
3. Listening  Helps Avoid Disasters

Full video transcript after the jump…

Chapter 26:  You Need to Be All Ears Video Transcript

Hi I’m Liana Evans and I’m author of Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.  I have another chapter for you today in the book, three high level tips from it and this goes in with the series 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days on the site SMMarketingBook.com which supports the book.  So we’re looking at chapter 26 today, “You Need to be All Ears” and that’s all about listening, so lets get right to it.

We’ve got tip number one “People Want to be Heard“.  They want you to be listening to them.  They want to know that you are actually listening to their stories, listening to what they are sharing with you. They really want to be heard, they don’t want to be  pushed on with your marketing messages.  they want to know that you are listening to them.

Tip number two that we have is “Learn the Lingo“.  Sometimes within your own company you have different types of ways of talking about your products or your services or your brand. Well your customers have these too, so you need to learn that lingo because a lot of times it’s a lot different than your own internal lingo.

Tip number three  is “Listening Helps Avoid Disasters“.  If there’s something that’s going wrong with a product, maybe there’s some type of malfunction with your product or that your services isn’t delivering the way that it should be.  This could be a potentially really big disaster for your company, but if you are out in the communities listening to the people, your customers, talking about your product and this starts cropping up you’re going to be better prepared.  You can get out there and say “Hey, what happened when you did this” or “We’re listening can you tell us a little bit more”.  This can help you avoid disasters of big form instead of ending up on the front page of the New York Times. You’ll be more in tune with your audience and they’ll be better likely to recommend you  down the line because you took the time to listen to them to avoid the disaster that could possibly happen.

So those are your three tips for chapter 26, You Need to be All Ears, in the book Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.  This book will be available June 24th, 2010 on Que Press.  You can find this video and all the other videos at SMMarketingBook.com.  I’m Li Evans and I’ll have another set of video tips for you tomorrow.

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