Ben Myall, CEO (U.S.) and Co-Founder at Three Whiskey

Now more than ever, the businesses we operate have to deal with tremendous volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). There is constant pressure on communications professionals to keep up with quickly shifting stakeholder demands and sensitivities regarding how companies respond to the concerns of those stakeholders. 

On top of that, our news and social media cycles are constant. By not being in sync with the values and desires of clients, investors, and employees, organizations risk becoming out of tune with important social trends that may affect them or impact their brand’s reputation.  

In order to maintain brand reputation and manage stakeholder expectations, you need to know what those expectations are. One apt way to discover what stakeholders want is to simply listen to online conversations about your company and industry, a brand monitoring practice otherwise known as social listening. 

Smart companies will use the insights that social listening provides to create content and online experiences that build stronger relationships with customers and ultimately lead to greater opportunities to build revenue. Equally, how customer service is approached can be planned around what people say online. For example, if people are talking about your complicated automatic business phone menu then it’s time to reevaluate the design and test it with some customers.  

Three Whiskey recently used social listening to conduct our own research around conversations being had about the Covid-19 vaccine in the U.S.. Through social listening, we were able to identify three groups of people and use the data we collected to determine the type of content that healthcare companies can use to address the concerns of each group.

Given how long social media has been around, one might think that social listening is a widely applied practice. However, this is an opportunity that many companies are still not taking advantage of, despite the obvious benefits and relatively low cost of implementation. But it’s never too late to start.   

Two stakeholder groups are particularly important for the success of any company and thus for any social listening program: prospective clients and potential employees. Let’s take a closer look at both.

Prospective and existing clients

How have your client’s challenges evolved? How have their businesses been impacted by the pandemic? And how do they respond to your brand positioning and marketing campaigns? These are all questions for which social listening will be able to provide answers. Brands know what’s going on within their social platforms and may be using them to address some customer service needs, but how many understand the conversations that are going on outside their four virtual walls?

Social listening allows for an understanding of how your prospective clients perceive the benefits and features of your products, but also the value proposition of your category and any adjacent, broader areas that impact your brand equity. For example, if you are an airline company, you will not only want to monitor how people are talking about your business class services but you will also want to keep a finger on the pulse of how airline companies as a whole are being held accountable for rising CO2 emissions. 

Future employees

Social listening can also help you understand what motivates your future employees. What is important to the people you are looking to hire? No employer brand can be built to last without understanding what motivates or inspires its employees. Future employee concerns are one thing, actual employee attitudes are another. Employees often don’t engage with the brands of their employers on social media, with the exception of Glassdoor (as shown in MIT Sloan research from a few years ago). But sometimes they will express themselves on social media and leave comments about their employers on their own Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

While social listening should never be used to police the conversations of employees, it can instead be used to gather insights on employee satisfaction and on how the brand is perceived by internal stakeholders. These insights can help improve policies affecting people and operations, and ultimately improve the brand’s reputation within its own company. The only exception where it may be important to intervene in an online conversation, is if in a rare instance where somebody's safety or your company's values are compromised.

Setting up social listening

Finally, how should you set up the social listening function? Here are a few considerations to keep in mind:

• Do your research

When using a social listening tool, it is important to tune the filters carefully to make sure that you hone in on the right language and limit your keywords enough to drown out irrelevant conversations. Keyword research is an essential first step in this process. 

• Choose the right time frame

Are there any specific events that could skew your results? Make sure to plan ahead in order to get the most out of your efforts.  

• Consider location 

You can limit location in your listening effort, but be careful as this will only show you people who have their location tagged, which can cause you to miss out on people who are also relevant for you. On the other hand, you might in some instances include comments from people that are outside your target location. 

• Where to look?

Finally, you will have to think about which social media networks to screen, and possibly even forums (yes, they still exist). Consider your audience, be they clients or employees, and find out where they spend most of their time online. 

To listen is to understand and to understand is to have the power to change. If we don’t take the opportunity to hear the needs of our most important stakeholders we cannot build a brand, culture, service or product offering which is most in tune with their needs. 

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About the Author: Ben Myall is CEO (US) and co-founder at Three Whiskey, a digital marketing agency that blends digital expertise, behavioral insight and brand understanding. Three Whiskey has offices in Dallas and the UK.