Listen (dot) com

By Graham Grossman, Manager of Social Media Services

For whatever reason, when hearing the words “social media,” few of us think about the need to listen. I took a very informal survey of colleagues and friends recently and found that when asked about what the term “social media” means to them, most people began by using action verbs to describe their perceptions, for example “SENDING,” “POSTING” “TARGETING” and “BLOGGING.”

Some thought of individual social media platforms and some thought of the general features of these platforms. Yet for others the big picture came to mind, including the where, when, how and why of sending a message out using various social media channels. Very few made any mention of what I consider the more passive uses of social media. I didn’t hear anyone mention listening or monitoring.

Granted, this poll was quick and far from formal. Regardless, the results were surprising. Listening really only came up in my test as an afterthought, when it should have been far more prominent a consideration when examining social media use for business purposes. Only by listening at the outset to identify the content, location and participants in digital conversations, can we have any hope of making an impact on the outcomes.

One reason to explain why nobody mentioned listening might be that listening is second nature for many of us in this line of work. As policy wonks and/or political professionals we instinctively know that things move fast and we’ve acclimated to taking it all in without stopping to think twice. Whether monitoring legislation, forecasting regulatory activity or managing policy issues, we naturally understand that our strategy is predicated on the conditions on the ground, and that those can change in an instant. We’ve adapted to this world where the “fish or cut bait” approach gets results. Listening for, and anticipating, movement is the only way to stay ahead of the curve—the very same applies when we consider social media.

We need to know where we stand before we can figure out where we want to go. In these growing digital collaborative workspaces, we have to identify the conversations that are happening so that we can dive in with the right message, in the right format and at the right time and place.

“To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversation.” – Chinese Proverb

Ok, enough WHY, here’s some HOW

There are plenty of advanced strategies that come into play when considering using social media to listen, but there are also some very simple steps you can take to gather some of the low-hanging fruit. Take fifteen minutes today and start to listen online or increase the effectiveness of your current online listening.

1. Signup and Login – it’s incredibly difficult to take part in the conversation without access. The good news is that admission is free on almost all social media platforms; all you’ll need in most cases is a working email address (some choose to use a secondary email address so as to distinguish social media interactions from routine business communications).

For those new to social media, this step means signing up for a few social media services. Start with a few of the most commonly used platforms, like LinkedIn and Facebook. These sites will have the most users that you want to target with your message, and will therefore be the best use of your time.

Track down a handful of users that you are already familiar with. Make the connection on these sites and build from there. Even if you’ve been using these social media platforms already, chances are there are new individuals that have signed up since your last visit that you should be connecting with.

2. Join Groups – to get the real return on the time you’re investing when you join a social media community, join groups related to your primary business interests. These groups act as forums where issues are discussed and ideas are shared between industry leaders. See what your colleagues, competitors, clients or the general public are saying about a handful of issues that you care about.

Keep your search for groups to join broad at first. When you’ve have a chance to review the results, narrow the terms to get a more targeted set of results. Once you’ve started listening to the groups on your social media account(s), branch out into more traditional web groups. Some of the most common include Yahoo and Google groups.

Whichever groups you join, you should set up email alerts so that you’ll get a notice only when new topics of discussion are introduced. That way you don’t have to remember to check back until there is new content worth reading. If it’s an especially active group consider setting up a daily or weekly digest of all of the group’s activity to keep your inbox from getting cluttered.

3. Alerts – setting up alerts from many of the major web search engines and news sites takes only a few seconds. These alerts can be set up very easily to monitor anything that includes a few words or phrases you want to monitor. There are as many specific uses for alerts as you can imagine. Some of the most common uses are: monitoring the news each morning, keeping tabs on what a competitor is saying or doing online, ensuring nothing negative about you or a staffer appears online or seeing what people are saying about a specific product.

Alerts can be tricky to fine-tune depending on the search terms used. If the terms are too broad, you’ll get thousands of results; if too narrow, you won’t get any results at all. After a week or two of seeing results, reevaluate the search terms you choose and adjust appropriately. After some adjusting you’ll begin to receive exactly what you’re looking for. As with social media group notifications, you can choose the frequency and time of the communication you receive so your inbox isn’t flooded.

Listening is especially important for any organization or individual new to the social media world. Ear-to-the-ground is one of the best positions to acclimate yourself to these communication tools and the best way to prepare to eventually participate in the discussions.

One of the most common fears that I hear frequently is that through social media people will make disparaging comments online about a company’s product, issues, brand or employees. The fact is that it is occurring constantly and unless you are listening you will not be in any position to respond. By allowing us to listen to what detractors are saying social media gives its practitioners the ability to account for that additional feedback and correct or change course before it is too late.

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If you begin to use any of these tactics and you see positive results, we’d love to hear about it. You can add me as your first connection on these social networking sites, send me an email at gg@stateside.com, or leave a comment below this article on our blog page.

Social Media as Business Card

By Graham Grossman, Manager, Social Media Services

In The Beginning

Long before I was even born, only one social networking tool existed: the business card.

The contact information contained on a business card was once the only means through which we would know how to communicate with an individual. The business card facilitated communication and collaboration by offering a phone number and an address for people with whom we wanted to connect. In the world of government relations, the same applied; we would collect cards from elected officials and their staffers, lobbyists, businesspeople and prospective clients, trade association members and many others. We wanted to communicate and collaborate with these people and the contact information on their cards gave us the means of doing so.

But times have changed. When was the last time you heard an elected official tell a crowd to stop by his/her regularly scheduled office hours? Office hours? They don’t exist anymore! Officeholders prefer to hold conversations on Facebook and their office is always open on Twitter. The most successful candidates tell their supporters to Like them on Facebook, they regularly give out their website address, they ask supporters to forward their e-newsletters to friends and they count on voters stumbling across their website through a search engine result. Most politicians are savvy to how the game has changed.

What changed?

Well, computers were introduced into the workplace. At first they didn’t offer much in the way of communications functionality. Although early models helped us crunch numbers, handle complex equations and process simple documents, as a communications tool, computers remained relatively useless for many years.

In recent years computers have become exponentially faster and have allowed for the digitization of data. Our interaction with and use of digital information is integrated into our workflow and has completely changed the way we do business. We’ve been able to ignore massive reference volumes and bulky research tomes, and we’ve grown accustomed to sharing hundreds of pages of information over the internet without having to rely on the office mail room clerk to physically deliver them. These clunky office processes and tools haven’t retained their effectiveness and have been phased out.

But the business card is still around. In fact, by the end of my first week working at Stateside Associates, a box of cards had already arrived from the printer. For many reasons, the business card will never die. We will still need a means of representing ourselves to new acquaintances and business contacts that we meet in person. It’s clear that the business card may never be wholly replaced by social media, but it is past its prime in terms of utility.

There are now hundreds of online tools that have emerged in the last decade that have started chipping away at the benefit business cards once offered. These digital platforms have multiple functionalities beyond simply facilitating the rapid exchange of communication—they serve as the channel for the communication. There are social media platforms for file and information sharing, news aggregating and sharing, social and professional networking, geo-locating and so much more.

The point I’m making here is that we no longer rely solely on business cards as the gateway through which we communicate in the workplace. Chances are the people we want to reach are already on LinkedIn, or maybe their name comes up as a search result on Bing. Whatever the case, professionals we collaborate with don’t have to rely exclusively on the stale confines of a 3” x 2” piece of cardstock to represent themselves; and neither should we.

Make the Investment

Many see this shift to communicating in the digital world as an obstacle. Some professionals take the view that investing in social media means adding an additional responsibility to the already crowded org chart. “How can we be expected to do everything we’re already doing and be expected to implement a new set of communications tools?”

Please, stop. I won’t name names, but some of you may have the ‘wisdom and grace’ to remember first-hand when email was first ushered into the workplace. It’s the same tune all over again. Workers were intimidated by email when it first hit the office scene. How would companies use it? How would professionals adapt to using the new medium? In hindsight, how could we ever have competed in the marketplace without it?

Social media is taking hold of how we communicate in much the same way communication shifted to email a decade or two ago. It’s changing the way we do business and we’re being forced to adapt. The tools available on the internet can send information much faster than a mailroom clerk ever could. These changes have made the means of communicating with other professionals apparent and readily available; we just have to have the foresight to invest in the right people to hold the reigns.

Get With It

We don’t need a person’s business card to know how to contact them anymore. Let’s be totally honest, if they’re really important and influential enough, we would already be seeing their Tweets, we’d already be reading their blog posts and we would at the very least be able to find their contact information on the web in few quick keystrokes.

The way we talk about and use social media is much the same as the way we once thought of business cards as granting us access. They were once the chief carriers of contact information which we required if we wanted to build a professional relationship, and by extension they gave us the means to grow our influence and professional reach.

Social media is the new way we influence decision-making, the way we impact the conversation and the means by which we reach colleagues and clients. We as government relations pros should understand it and use it to our benefit.