Listening in Social Media

Listening is with no doubt one of the most important strategies that companies can use to obtain advantage from Social Media. But, what does listening means? 
 
Listening in social media means observing your customers in their “natural territory”, where they are interacting with each other, your company and competitors. Your customers and prospects are leaving hints about their opinion, positive or negative, and are discussing your brand and products on their communities, with or without you, and it’s all out there for you and for the entire world to see. 
 
According to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, on the book Groundswell, there are two basic listening strategies that companies should follow:
 
1.    Set up your own private community: A private community is like a continuously running, huge, engaged focus group – a natural interaction in a setting where you can listen in.
2.    Begin brand monitoring: Hire a company to listen to the internet – blogs, discussions, forums, YouTube, and everything else – on your behalf. Then have it deliver to your neat summary report about what’s happening to push the results out to departments, like customer service, that can address pressing customer issues.
 
While it can be true that hiring a vendor will help you to obtain more detailed and structured information, you can start now by searching what people are saying about your brand on blogs (e.g. Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Technorati), forums (e.g Boardreader) or on Twitter (Twitter Search). I am certain that you will find out that listening is an important way for you to understand what consumers care about, and get insights to what they think about you.