On February 14th, it’s hard to keep your mind focused on work. If you’re like me, you were wondering if the flowers, candy, and teddy bear you ordered would get delivered to your wife on time, or if the butcher would have any steaks left by the time you made it to the market after work. Frankly the last thing on my mind was the possibilities enabled when we connect people, processes, data and things, also known as the Internet of Everything (#IoE).
This Valentine’s Day, Cisco’s Social Media Marketing team leveraged a broadly engaging topic that very few people would associate with the Internet of Everything through real-time marketing. Read More »
What tools are available to enhance the social listening effort?
Various listening platforms are available, with varying focus areas in metrics and data streams. In a June 2012 report, eMarketer profiles the strengths of industry leading platforms as followed:
Listening is an ongoing process that is a necessary and integral component of your social business strategy. Being present on social channels provides an opportunity to learn from what your customers are saying and gain insights which help drive business results. Listening can also help uncover influencers, identify signs of an impending crisis, and more. Altimeter business analyst, Charlene Li said in a post:
“66% of online Americans are actively using social networking, but only 16% of companies use social media to engage with customers…You can’t have credibility saying you are customer-centric if you ignore your customers in social media channels.”
Executives are consistently investing in listening platforms and processes. A recent December 2012 report from eMarketer indicates executives plan to increase spending in social listening by 14.8% of their social media marketing budget in 2013:
Listening is our “North Star” and here at Cisco we are using insights from social listening to help guide and inform our social media strategy and enable meaningful engagements with our customers.
Thanks to everyone who joined us on October 24th for the launch of our new Social Media Listening Center in the Executive Briefing Center. Here are highlights from that event.
“This is the future of how customers engage with companies
going forward, regardless of your industry”
Blair Christie, CMO
Highlights
We had 60+ attendees that included technology analysts and influencers, 500+ views of the Facebook video stream, and 750+ online conversations related to this event. Attendees learned about the new listening center and how Cisco listens and engages with customers. Read More »
Well, that’s when the good stuff happens! The insights you’ll get from social listening will help you:
Build your social media marketing strategy – you’ll have more insights about your audience, who exactly is participating in social media, in which social channels the conversations are happening, how frequently and actively are they posting, and what they are talking about.
Have a dialogue with customers and prospects – you want to do this carefully, thoughtfully, person-to-person, and with a customer-service mentality, but participating in social media conversations gives you the chance to thank fans, find prospects, help those with problems or questions, discover problem areas you might otherwise have missed, and build better relationships with your community.
Share what you learn with the rest of your organization – product feedback will be useful to your support and development teams, lead opportunities will get sales excited, your executives will want to hear about emerging trends and what kinds of business problems customers are looking for technology to solve, and marketing can see the traction that offers and marketing campaigns are getting.
As an example, here’s a situation where we were getting feedback via social listening from customers about challenges with firmware downloads. We responded to this disgruntled person (who clearly was appreciative of our efforts), but it also led us to put a temporary fix in place to make the experience easier while we worked on the longer-term solution.
Here at Cisco, we have a central Social Media Listening Center where we are continually tracking mentions of the company, key technology areas and events. It functions as a command center to route questions, issues or even potential leads to various teams across Cisco (many of whom are also doing their own ‘deep-live’ listening work for their specific area of expertise). We also can launch listening centers for special events, including our recent listening center in London for the 2012 Olympics.
We’re also eager to share some of our social listening highlights with you, our partners! Read More »
As an example, here’s a situation where we were getting feedback via social listening from customers about challenges with firmware downloads. We responded to this disgruntled person (who clearly was appreciative of our efforts), but it also led us to put a temporary fix in place to make the experience easier while we worked on the longer-term solution.