Social Listening 101: Part Three — Building A Social Listening Strategy

Got you covered from the campaign brief to the campaign report.

It’s 10.59pm and I’ve just completed an hour of analyzing mentions on Sysomos surrounding the Rugby World Cup. One of the things I love about social listening is that it’s a free pass to “stalk” — and I don’t mean this in a bad way. The things people say online crack me up sometimes and I’ve had instances where ideas for social content or new product recommendations popped in my mind as a result of analyzing the weirdest (and sometimes, profound) things that people say online regarding a brand or product.

Credits: @parkerabyrd

Funny tweets aside, what concerns me is that brands are still underestimating the power of listening to their online consumers. On one hand, I don’t blame them because social listening is still at its infancy in Southeast Asia and truth to be told, there is a measly amount of “social listeners” around. Previously, I wrote about identifying if you need a tool and using social listening data to identify opportunities — but as I was building the listening strategy framework for a recent project, I realized that there is little or insufficient data surrounding the process of laying a strategy for social listening. This post is a guide on everything I’ve learnt on how to build and refine a social listening strategy. I’ll cover sections on identifying the right objective, selecting a tool, defining your framework, structuring a brief report template and cultivating the mindset you need to excel in a social listening campaign.

Begin with setting a clear objective

Social listening is so broad that it can get overwhelming when trying to understand what you want to achieve. For some, social listening is a way to spot and leverage on trends. For others, it may be measuring brand uplift after a campaign or managing crisis communications. Whatever use you may have for social listening, always remember that the overarching goal is to measure earned media. Begin with that as a starting point and make your way to identify the right objectives. This will require lots of conversations and clarifications with clients or internal stakeholders in order to understand the clear objective for social listening.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What am I measuring?
2. Why am I measuring this?
3. How does this tie back to my campaign/business objective?

Have the answers to these questions at the back of your mind when framing your objective. If you’re unclear, ask questions and get as much information as possible. In fact, this brings me to my next point.

Data collection: Read, research, repeat.

If you’re unfamiliar with the brand or campaign, I recommend doing a lot of reading. When I was assigned on the Rugby World Cup campaign, I spent a lot of time reading about the game, understanding the online and offline marketing activation that the client was running, reading and re-reading the campaign brief, researching the brand and writing notes along the way. This process is crucial in identifying the potential queries and keywords you need in order to input into the listening tool so that you are tracking data as accurately as possible. Similarly, when I was assigned to a project with a Cambodian telecommunications company, I spent time understanding the local market’s behaviour on social media, reading up on the development of 5G in Southeast Asia and having frequent conversations with the digital manager in order to understand what the brand wanted to achieve with social listening. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to clarify your points so that you know for sure that you’re on the right page and the right frame of mind to chart your strategy.

The Fun Part: Building the framework for your strategy

I’ve learned the hard way of not having a framework or a structure to social listening. This is because you will be dealing with a lot of data, hence having a framework sets the tone for monitoring and reporting. If you didn’t already know, there is a lot of noise on social media. Start with writing down your objective, and then detailing the steps you need in order to reach the objective. I like drawing my process on paper and tweaking where necessary before moving on to visualizing it on slides. Here’s an example on how I visualized the process for a previous campaign:

Once I had identified that in order to measure brand uplift, I had to monitor what people were saying online, listen and understand why people were saying what they were saying and then measure the volume of mentions and sentiments to identify how these attributed to brand uplift and affinity. If you’re familiar with the basics of social listening, developing a framework to your strategy won’t be as challenging. Be mindful that what worked for one brand may not work with the other because each brand presents unique challenges.

When this process was established, it was important for me to present this framework to the brand so that they understood the process of measuring earned media we were about to receive. You will find yourself educating, clarifying and possibly reworking the framework until it is clear enough. Hence, I would recommend brushing up on your communication and presentation skills so that you are accurately presenting your framework in a way that enables greater understanding to the receiver.

Bear in mind that there is no right or wrong framework here as the objectives you have are unique to your campaign. The example above is merely a top line idea of measuring brand uplift. As long as you have a clear goal or objective and have done your research, you will be able to plan the flow of execution towards achieving the goal.

Identifying the right social listening tool

I previously covered this in an earlier article, so I won’t go too much into detail. Once you have a clear objective and are well read on what you need to listen to, then you may proceed to look into acquiring the right tool. The common mistake that brands make is to look for a social listening tool first, and then build a listening strategy around it. Don’t.

There are a myriad of tools out there with select capabilities. Until you have locked down a clear objective and have a rough idea of the data you are seeking, don’t proceed with just any tool. Business development managers, as well meaning as they may be, are a persistent bunch of people and it is easy to be lured into purchasing a license for a tool that may not be the right fit for the data that you are looking for. In the past, I have used Digimind, Talkwalker, Sysomos and Wisesight. All these tools have varied capabilities that I had to rework my strategy a number of times when I found that the tool that I was using wasn’t the right fit. I am in no position to say which tool is better than the other but I will say that you will need to read about the tool and schedule a demo (be vary of tools that don’t allow a demo). Pro tip: I’m a big fan of crawlers.

Once you’ve secured your tool, log in and play around with it. Ensure that your account manager provides all the training you need, advises on the right keywords and queries to input into the tool (see why point no.2 is so important?) and has a quick look into the tool and the dashboards that you have set up prior to the start of your listening campaign so that you are not stuck with difficulties once your campaign launches. There is a possibility that you might make minor adjustments to your strategy should you be able to acquire more data that will strengthen your listening framework.

I will admit that if you are a first time “social listener”, or a seasoned social listener who is new to a particular tool (e.g. I was so used to Digimind that it took me a while to get up to speed with Sysomos), there will be lots of trial and error. Have foresight in mind as to what could go wrong, so that you are able to cover as much as you can with your account manager. And please, be nice to them ;)

Establish a reporting template

Not all social listening reports are the same. This will depend on your business/campaign objective, the tool you will be using and the frequency of your reports. I won’t go too much into detail with this because each social listening campaign report is unique but I will list out the essential details that your report will need so that it is holistic, insightful and equipped with valuable recommendations.

A good social listening report should have:

1. Executive summary. Unless you are required to provide daily reports, this is essential for bi-weekly or monthly reports because it sets the tone for the rest of the report. Provide topline insights, list out the filters used (e.g. date range and location) and add disclaimers if necessary.
2. MoM or Comparison. Some tools are blessed with excellent data visualization capabilities and some…not so much. However, comparison on share of voice is essential in order to track patterns and trends. I had to use Excel on some occasions when tools failed me:

3. Opportunities or recommendations. A rule of thumb that I have implemented for myself is that “for every insight you provide, always provide an action plan based on the data retrieved”. Or you will be at risk of “weather reporting” — I picked up this term from a former client who was unhappy when report insights were descriptive.

4. Other social listening essentials: sentiments, media breakdown, keyword cloud, engagement, top influencers, etc. Depending on what you need to cover, ensure that all portions are supported with screenshots of actual mentions. This gives your receiver some context to your points and it strengthens your case when you provide recommendations.

5. Next Steps. “A report without next steps is a waste of time and effort” — another rule of thumb I have when it comes to reporting, whether it is for social listening or anything in general. This is especially crucial if you are seeding content, pumping high media budgets on owned channels and investing in influencers. You need to be able to make decisions, tweak your marketing strategy and (maybe) have a contingency plan on product improvements, hence detailing the next steps are vital. It gives you a clear idea of what needs to be acted upon and you know that your next course of action is truly backed by data.

6. Comparison against owned and paid media. This is like, the holy grail of social media reporting because your earned insights will come out really strong when compared against owned and paid insights. You can see how much you are investing and the returns you are receiving in one glance.

Bonus: How to navigate hiccups with building and presenting your social listening strategy

Trust me, you will go through challenging moments. This is especially true if you’re the only one in the room that is equipped with social listening knowledge. It’s okay, just keep these in mind when faced with hurdles:

1. Listen and be open to feedback — just do it, you’ll thank me later.
2. Be flexible where necessary — you never know when you will need an interim/crisis report or if you need to drill down to a local market to capture deeper insights. Have a growth mindset when it comes to your strategy.
3. Educate and consult— if you’re not being heard, chances are you are not communicating in a way that your receiver is able to understand. This is where honing your communication skills come into play.
4. Become an expert with the tool— spend lots of time understanding how the tool works on the front end and back end because you will gain more confidence in battling 1,001 questions from stakeholders.
5. Tie everything back to the objective — sometimes, even brand experts get lost which is why as their consultant, always point your data and insights back to the objective. It shows that you care about the project as much as they do and it just makes life easier for you, honestly :P

Where to go from here

Like I mentioned earlier, there is no set rule of law to crafting a social listening strategy —and that’s the beauty of it. You are dealing with agile, near real-time data combined with factors that you can’t control: social media conversations. Brand managers and marketers spend a lot of time investing in paid and owned channels that they forget about the power of earned media. With a clear social listening strategy, you have the opportunity to pave the way for better marketing activation, be a catalyst to new or improved product developments and redefine your brand’s position in the market. Start honing your analytical skills but don’t forget the power of good communication and presentation skills because you may be the Jedi Master of social listening but if you are unable to present your strategy in a way that will influence your receiver, then you might as well CTRL+ALT+DEL.

• Note: All report illustrations have been modified to show dummy data.

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