Note: This post is part of a series on social media basics. It is derived from the extensive training module that I use for  clients. If you are interested in having a full-fledged social media training workshop for your company, please get in touch here

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894)

Did Mr. Holmes know, a good 116 years ago, the one sacrosanct guiding principle of social media marketing? Seems like it doesn’t it? Marketers and brands jumping into social media are increasingly finding the perks of listening before they talk. Like in life and personal relationships, listening is key in the world of social media.

Why is it important?

Chances are your audience is talking about you or your brand already. If you’re interested in creating a presence on social media and genuinely engaging this audience, then its critical to perk up your ears and listen in to what is already being said about you. Lets say, for example, Shoppers’ Stop wants to create a presence on social media tomorrow. What’s the first step they’ll take? Hopefully they’ll begin by monitoring conversations already happening about their brand. Just for fun, I put some together here:

Do you see what I see here? A hoard of opportunities! PR, crisis management, customer support, brand ambassadorship, REAL engagement, brand awareness, product updates… the list is endless.

How do I go about it?

Brand monitoring has spun into its own industry in the last two years offering a range of sophisticated, expensive tools to very basic, free ones. Which one to deploy depends entirely on how big your brand is, what resources – human and financial – you have at your disposal to carry on your social media efforts and last: how committed are you to learn what customers and the community think about your brand?

But to start from the start, here are some basic tools to kickstart your listening skills with:

Google Alerts:

Feed a query or search term into Google Alerts and you will be notified by email (or feed) whenever this term is crawled by Google’s search engines on the web, news etc.

I also recommend searching on Google search’s cousin Blogsearch for more time-sensitive and relevant monitoring of blog content.

Twitter:

Like Twitter or loathe it, its here to stay. Besides within its millions of 140-character tweets abounds a wealth of information about your brand and the competition too. If you’re a registered user, you can save each search term and it will update itself as and when the term is mentioned anywhere on Twitter.

What Else Can I do?

Get proactive and set up an account on Google Reader. There you can subscribe to all blogs and content that is relevant to your brand and industry. I’m going to dedicate a blog post on RSS feeds and the like as part of this series as well. Soon…

While these tools will get you started, there are a host of tools available – free and paid – that can greatly enhance your listening experience. Here’s  list each of free and paid monitoring tools:

Free: 13 Essential Social Media ‘Listening Tools’ (Marketing Profs’)

Paid: 11 Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Tracking And Analysis (Your’s truly)

In my opinion these basic steps are a good start to initiate the listening bit. The other big part of the strategy entails engagement – what do you do with the discovery of these conversations? What about conversations about your competitor? What if two people are tweeting (and bad-mouthing) your brand? Do you step in? Do you contact them privately?

As they say, let the games begin

Some recent changes that Facebook has announced make me want to share this quote by Osho on the importance of individuality:

You cannot be anybody other than who you are. If you try to be somebody other than who you are, you will never be somebody else, but you will miss being that which you were destined to become. It is almost as if a rose flower wants to become a lotus. His whole energy will be in how to become a lotus; he will forget all about the roses. All his energy will become misdirected. He will never become a lotus because he has no seeds, no potentiality to be a lotus. Only one thing is certain: now he will not become even a flowering bush of roses.

Like humans, if brands and entities try to become like someone else, they dilute their own being and end up pleasing no one. To me Facebook is heading in that direction. Here are my thoughts on why Facebook is killing the very reason it became such a hot social network:

1. Assumptions about user behaviour
   Zuckerberg announced at The Crunchies that the age of privacy is over (the video is here) and in that, he assumed he was speaking on behalf of Facebook’s 350 million user-base. The recent changes in privacy settings are difficult to wrap your head around. I know some not-so-tech-savvy people who have joined facebook, unaware of its public content policies. A quick search on Google shows their profiles, photos, wall posts, profile information – you name it. Are these users willingly making this information available? No. Will they immediately tighten the noose on their privacy settings when they find out the information that’s out there about them? Absolutely they will. I’d venture as far as to say they might even delete the accounts when they find out. Its the reason many people went off MySpace and Orkut
2. Facebook is best when its trying to be….Facebook!
   There is significant speculation that Facebook is going the Twitter way. The last design change incorporated the live-stream. There is a move towards making content public. A week or so ago, the RT equivalent went live. I’m not against change that helps an experience get deeper – the RT (via) feature being an example. But one that dilutes that experience? Hmmm. Twitter and Facebook serve different needs. One is a micro-blogging platform, the other is a social networking platform. Sure they mix around, but their essence is different. On Facebook, 90% of my contacts are friends or family. On Twitter 90% are contacts I have never met. And that’s exactly how I want things to be. Turns out I’m not the only one.