Listening 101

Tips to integrate social media

into your day-to-day media monitoring

dna13.com white paper

Take a flying leap
With Web 2.0 here to stay, many companies – small and large – are still coming to
grips with how to take the first critical steps towards active participation in the world
of consumer-driven media.
The prospect of implementing a social media strategy for your company may seem daunting, but it’s not as
difficult as you think. In fact, taking your place in the Web 2.0 universe can be as simple as … listening.

Millions of conversations
Web 2.0 is not a concept anymore; it’s reality. A power shift has taken place. Traditional print and television media
no longer have exclusive control over how and when your message is delivered. Consumer communities using
web-based social media tools are talking about your brand reputation. The evidence speaks for itself – very loudly.

Social networking sites are growing exponentially. Facebook has more than 300 million active users globally,
with each user having an average of 130 friends1 . Earlier this year, YouTube reached 147 million users in the
U.S., and the average number of videos viewed per person reached 1012 . Microblogging sites like Twitter have
anywhere from 3.5 million to 17 million users, depending on which site you look at, and nobody’s even counting
how many blogs exist globally anymore, but there are well over 100 million. To add to all of that, there are
countless discussion forums, where people are offering opinions on just about anything they read, see or hear.

Combine all of this with traditional media – the daily newspaper, network television, and radio – and you have a
dizzying number of channels where conversations impacting your brand reputation are almost certainly taking place.

As your company’s PR professional, you’re responsible for keeping the proverbial ‘ear to the ground’ on what’s
being said about you. Given today’s reality, are you covering all your bases? Are you ready if today’s simple
‘tweet’ becomes tomorrow’s news headline? If not, what’s stopping you?

» Not enough time or resources?

» Can’t get buy-in from senior management?
» Don’t know how or where to begin?

Shhh… listen
It is critical for your company to be plugged into the conversations taking place about your brand.

Stumbling accidentally onto a conversation about your company can make your blood run cold. If the
conversation is positive, you heave a sigh of relief. If it isn’t, you can spiral into full-on panic mode.

1 http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

2 http://youtubereport2009.com/youtube-reache-100-million-us-viewers/

2 Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring
The bottom line for every PR practitioner is control. You plan carefully for
every good headline and every potential disaster. You plant your message, 67% of executive
and manage it through to its natural conclusion. But how do you do it in marketers consider
today’s Web 2.0 environment without taking your organization too far
themselves beginners
outside its comfort zone – impacting time, resources, and brand control?
when it comes to using
The answer is simple: take the first step – start by listening. social media for
When you listen, you learn:
marketing purposes.

» Your brand is out there and people are talking about it Marketing Executives
Networking Group, Nov 2008
» Your competitor is already in the game, or if not, people are talking
about them too
» Some of your employees are already representing you online, and you didn’t know it
» There is a whole new world of opportunity for engaging with and responding to your customers

Listening tools
Listening is something good communicators, PR experts and marketers always do before proposing a course of
action. Traditionally, strategies start with interviews, focus groups, a review of customer-focused literature, a
SWOT analysis or other research that gets a pulse on their company’s reputation.

Listening in on the social media universe is no different.

You can make a low-risk and low-investment start by using free web-based tools to tap into who’s discussing
your brand and why. Using a combination of free and paid tools can become overwhelming due to the volume of
data and the numerous locations in which it's being stored. The end result (media monitoring data points spread
across multiple platforms and Excel spreadsheets) should help provide justification as to why moving to a fully
integrated listening platform is such a worthwhile investment in the longer term.

Why listen?
» There is always someone talking about you somewhere
» Online conversations happen in real-time, and so should your responses
» To get a pulse on your company’s current online reputation and presence
» To help you know how and how much you need to get involved in monitoring social media
» Not knowing is not an option

Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring 3
Making your case
Strategic planning that includes monitoring social media and traditional
channels alike is an investment, but one that will ultimately drive your Your initial investment
company’s costs down, while at the same time providing peace of mind
that you are staying on top of all conversations surrounding your brand. » Research and training
» Initial “listening” exercise
Corporate communications, PR, and marketing – all three are cost
» Meetings and discussions
centers, not profit centers. You know how tough it is to defend every
budget dollar. Equally challenging is building a case for monitoring social » Strategy development
media in a corporate setting that may still have one foot stuck in the past,
and planning
and is concerned only with daily newspaper or television news coverage.

By demonstrating how you and your competitors’ brands are being discussed online, you’ll build your case for
investing in a listening and engagement media strategy. You might discover no one is talking about you yet. That
may not be a bad thing – it means that the power is in your hands to get a conversation started.

In a January 2009 AdMedia Partners survey of marketers worldwide, 77% expected to increase their social
media marketing, with only 11% predicting a decrease. Social media marketing was the highest ranked increase
of any marketing spending, including search and mobile marketing.

Make a plan … make it happen

Once you get buy-in for a social media strategy, the place to begin is the same place you begin for traditional
communication strategies – planning.

1. Research
Free web-based listening tools are a good place to start if you’re just becoming acquainted with the social media
world, but a more sophisticated approach to managing and reporting on the conversations will be needed once
dialogue takes off and becomes more numerous.

There are reputable web-based applications that understand corporate communications, PR and marketing and
will consolidate and present all the news coverage and consumer generated coverage data for you.

What to watch for when analyzing your monitoring data:

» Which channels contain the most buzz?
» What’s being said?
» Does the person talking about your brand have influence over your target audience?
» What data points are most important to you when it comes to reporting on brand conversations?

Ask the same questions for your top competitors.

4 Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring
2. Strategize
With any outreach effort, understanding what moves, motivates and irks your target audience is critical.
Listening helps do this.

Communications outreach planning – including social media engagement planning – also has to contribute to
meeting a company’s bottom line objectives. If your company is not already using its website to engage
stakeholders, the initial strategy can start small.

» Set up a Twitter account – follow individuals or companies with successful social media engagement to
see what they are doing.
» Read the blogs of your thought leaders – figure out who is influential in your space and read what they’re
saying. They will be a great resource for coming up with new content ideas for your own materials when
you begin to engage.

If you have already begun to engage in social media outreach:

» Find ways to provide your blog with more exposure, such as posting useful comments to other’s blogs, and
including links back to your own.
» Integrate technologies onto your blog and website that encourage that sharing of your content, such as
social bookmarking widgets.
» Publish content frequently, so your audience has a reason to keep coming back for more.
» Optimize your blog posts with key phrases related to your topic, to help generate new traffic from search
engines.
» Use social media to drive traffic to your content. Try feeding your blog posts to Twitter via RSS, or using
social media releases to encourage commenting and sharing of your materials.

Change in Online Marketing Spending in 2009 According to Senior Marketing Executives World

Word-of-mouth 77 12 11 Increase (%)

Flat (%)
Search Marketing 76 18 7
Decrease (%)
Mobile Marketing 75 14 11

Behavioral/contextual marketing 70 22 7
Note: numbers may not add up
Lead generation 63 29 9 to 100% due to rounding
CRM/analytics 60 31 9 Source: Ad Media Partners,
Video advertising 60 24 16 January 2009

E-mail marketing 58 31 11

Online gaming/in-game advertising 51 30 18

Online media buying/planning 47 40 13

Affiliate marketing 46 35 19

Web development 39 38 23

Market research 27 50 23

Display advertising 26 29 45
0 150

Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring 5
3. Organize
Most of your company’s effort to move from a mass communication model to a social engagement model is
cultural. The whole company has to get behind how social media contributions will be managed and organized.

Web strategist and social media guru, Jeremiah Owyang, advocates a hub and spoke model, where
representatives from all areas of the business mobilize to manage social media interactions (the ‘hub’)
together3. This cross-functional team shares resources and cross-functional communication (the ‘spokes’) with
those at the edge of the organization (the ‘tire’).

Regardless of the social media engagement model you choose, anyone participating in social media activities –
particularly those who will be posting responses – must be clear on their guidelines for interaction.

4. Prepare
If your company doesn’t already have employee guidelines for its online activities, it should be a priority. Good
models of social media policies include IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines4 and the Red Cross’ Social Media
Handbook5 .

Tips for preparing social engagement guidelines:

» Determine how employees will engage online – do they represent themselves or the company?
» Identify the ‘span of control’ employees will have over what they can say/do to respond to online concerns
» Create a process for sharing corporate messaging to ensure consistency in message delivery
» Develop an escalation process to quickly manage challenging issues

5. Jump in
The key to getting started is with an understanding you don’t have to be everywhere at once. Here are five simple
ways to ease into the vast social media setting:

1. Start tweeting. Set up filters for posts relevant to your company, products, or your competitors, and start
engaging in the conversation. Consider re-tweeting any of the interesting articles and facts that you are
finding from your thought leaders and influencers, and add in anything else that you think people might
find of interest.
2. Read two or three relevant blogs on a regular basis, and leave your own comments on interesting posts.
By commenting regularly, you will establish a profile for yourself with both influential bloggers, and
their followers.

3 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/06/25/report-companies-should-organize-for-social-media-in-hub-and-spoke/

4 http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

5 http://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbook

6 Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring
3. Make your company’s website more ‘social’. Ensure there are sharing options on the relevant pages of your
site. Create a comments section below news releases or posted news items and make your media room
more social and interactive.
4. Start your own blog. As you’re getting started, develop an editorial calendar and a list of ‘bloggable’ ideas.
Planning is important when you are getting started and short for ideas, as a blog is only successful if it
contains information that others find relevant and interesting. Successful blogging tips are easy to find online.

5. Listen every day and stay involved. All it takes is 15 minutes a day.

6. Measure
Which platform will figure into your marketing
Measuring your communication activities is plans the most in the coming months?
critical, yet challenging. Measuring ROI
with social media engagement can also be
Twitter 40.8
a tricky proposition, with no set standard
yet developed. Facebook 26.2

To get started, begin by identifying what’s

LinkedIn 16.5
important to your business:

» Qualitative metrics - Conversations, Other 8.7

corporate reputation or customer
satisfaction 0 12.5 25.0 37.5 50.0
» Quantitative metrics - Online buzz, Percent Source: Anderson Analytics, July 2009
web traffic, or search engine ranking

If the objective is to measure the ROI of conversations, you should model your engagement strategy to be able to
answer questions like:

» Are we proactively contributing to conversations relevant to our business?

» Are we initiating discussions on issues our prospects care about?
» How are we being talked about in comparison to our competitors?
» Are we building better relationships with our customers?
» Are we moving from a providing a running monologue to engaging in meaningful dialogue?

Quantitative metrics are also helpful in identifying the impact of your online engagement efforts.

» Number of blog visitors, both unique and returning

» Number of comments that your blog posts are generating
» Number of Twitter ‘followers’ and ‘friends’ that you have acquired
» Number of social bookmarks generated by your content
» Search engine ranking

Fortunately, there are tools to help accurately track and manage improvements in such metrics. Marketing and
PR professionals now have access to a plethora of web-based applications in their measurement tool box, both
free and paid.

Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring 7
Some of the recommended tools include:

» Media monitoring: dna13 for print, TV, online and social media monitoring, and Google alerts for online
monitoring
» Blog and website analytics: Hubspot.com and Google Analytics
» Twitter management: Salesforce.com to track tweets and assign internally to other departments, and
TweetBeep.com for alerts

Harness the power…

For companies who still only monitor traditional media, listening to what is being said across multiple media
channels will be a revelation – not just for communications and marketing professionals, but for sales and
customer service representatives, and for the c-suite. The numbers don’t lie; a spike in conversation either
means a crisis is looming or your product launch has been successful and the buzz is validating it.

In either case, you will be able to see in real-time, how consumers, influencers, and the media, feel about your
company. This information is something that every communications professional can use to improve the
company’s bottom-line performance on a daily basis.

With the information in your hands, you can plan and develop or adjust strategies based on what ‘real people’
need and want.

Only then will you have harvested the true power of social media.

About dna13
dna13 is the leading SaaS solution for reputation management and
media monitoring. Providing complete visibility into global
reputation, dna13 enables communicators to listen to what is being
© 2009 dna13 Inc.
said about their company in print, major market TV, online and social
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
media, securely align team members to ensure accuracy in
corporate messaging, and engage with stakeholders and influencers dna13.com | info@dna13.com
to develop and nurture valuable relationships. 866.842.1723

8 Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring