Being a good conversationalist

Successful brands don’t just talk to their customers, they have conversations with them.

And, just like in any other walk of life, to have a meaningful conversation with an audience brands can’t just talk, they need to listen.

After all, the main point of saying something is to elicit a desired response from the people you’re speaking to. And if you’re not listening to the response, how do you know you’re saying the right things in the first place?

Sure, feedback can be tracked via sales but that’s a delayed metric. By the time you start seeing the results on the bottom line, the conversation may already be over, the battle already lost.

Moral of this particular story? Brands need to be good conversationalists – and they need to fall in love with listening.
 

Controlling the conversation

Bad PR can do untold damage – just ask United Airlines or Pepsi. And if PR disasters can happen to the biggest of us, they can happen to anyone.

Of course, mistakes happen. Bad decisions get made all the time and sometimes they sneak through into the big bad world.

And when they do, you need to know immediately, respond quickly, and limit the damage. Even better, find a way to turn a negative into a positive, just as KFC did with #chickengate.

But how do you go about reversing a negative situation if you don’t even know it’s happening? How do you respond to the voices that matter most – those of your customers – if you can’t even hear them?

“On the battleground of business, those who don’t listen are lost.”

Mark Bower, Woven Client Services Director.
 

The same goes for tracking positive responses. After all, you want to know what you’re doing right, right? You want to know what works, what you should be doing more of.

There’s no better way of working out what’s going wrong or right than by listening and responding to real-time feedback from your customers and clients.

The problem is, conversations are more fragmented than ever. They’ve shifted from face-to-face chinwags and phone calls to social media interactions, blog posts, online forums and product reviews.

And by this, we don’t just mean Twitter and Reddit, which are far from representative in today’s diffuse internet landscape. (Just 15% of Twitter accounts make up 85% of the total number of tweets.) Social listening isn’t just a case of following a trending hashtag or two: you need to understand the full picture, to see the entire landscape.

Basically, you need to need to monitor the entire internet. And that’s no easy task.

Fortunately, that’s where we step in.

How we can help

These days, controlling the conversation means being an integral part of it, and this goes way beyond just updating your RSS feed or following a few influencers on Instagram. It’s something you need to integrate into your entire content marketing and brand strategy & development strategies.

Want to know how many people have shared your latest piece of content? Or who’s talking about you online? Or what impact you’re having in a particular country or place?

What about the competition? Perhaps you want to track their mentions, too, and find out what share of the conversation they have. What are their customers – who you want to turn into your customers – saying about them? Anything negative you can turn to your advantage? Anything positive you can learn from?

A hashtag can’t give you that information. Google Analytics can’t, either.

But we can.

Woven: your social listening agency

Here at Woven we keep our ears firmly to the ground. Utilising powerful, AI-led social listening software, we monitor and crawl over 80 million websites, forums and social networks, and present our findings and recommendations in regular reports.

So that no matter what people are saying about you, and no matter where they’re saying it*, we put you front and centre of your brand conversation.

(*So long as it’s on a public forum, of course. We’re not the NSA…)

We can paint a detailed, real-time picture of who’s talking about you, why they’re talking about you and where they’re talking about you.

We can find out who the most important brand and industry influencers are, and provide you with detailed information about them so you can use their influence to improve your message and reach more people.

We can monitor the success of your content and PR activity through keyword analysis – and suggest keywords to use in future content that you may not have considered.

We can find ways to improve your brand perception by uncovering and countering any negative commentary surrounding your brand, whilst discovering new opportunities for growth that you may not have even considered.

By bringing you the benefits of social listening, we put you in control of your narrative, so you do less of what is wrong and more of what is right.

**

Contact Woven to find out how we can enhance your business through the benefits of social listening.