Listen In

This weeks reading in “Measure What Matters,” discusses how businesses can easily listen to the marketplace to see what customers wants and needs are. Listening has become a pretty common aspect of social media, but it seems like many businesses have not quite caught on yet.

Perhaps, this is because listening can seem intimidating because the vast amount of posts daily. It simply can be overwhelming to try to listen to everything from one million tweets to 600 blog posts to 10,000 Facebook discussions. However, the key is a business does not need everything, they just need what matters to the business.

I think this can be very difficult for businesses to figure out. What really does matter? Which is pretty much the premise of the whole book, but there is not one consistent answer. It really depends on the mission and vision of the business. 

For example, an organization on ONU campus is not going to listen to tweets from a random grouping of people in California. The ONU organization is going to focus on only ONU students and maybe even alumni.

The most important part from the chapter I believe is anyone can listen, but in order to have efficient results that matter, all discussions need to be organized and categorized in a way which makes sense to the company.

Without quantifying the results, the listening was a waste of resources because there is nothing to show. Social media can be very tricky to track unlike other aspects of the Internet. It does not need to be tricky if you have a clear goal in mind of what you are after.