A few weeks ago I described the various stages of the online customer funnel or as I like to call it the customer ladder. I mentioned that the acquisition phase, the first phase of the customer ladder, has 3 main steps. The first of these 3 steps is listening to existing conversation.

This is a very hard lesson for traditional brand marketers and their clients to learn. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love these folks. The last brand marketing organization I worked in was filled with people who were passionate about the products they were marketing.

Unfortunately the marketing as well as the product development folks were significantly removed from the customers and so the company got less than optimal results.

The results

1. a product that met the company’s ideas of the customer needs rather than the customer’s real needs
2. marketing that was an exercise of putting spins on what product development was creating. Here’s a great cartoon from the One by One media blog that brings these points home:

3. marketing that is ostentatious and mass broadcasted and interrupts customers as they go about their business. It is not relevant, customized, or even permitted by the customer!

Look this new Social Media thing, lets broadcast and interrupt there too!

When brands joined social media they took their interuptive obstentatious broadcast mentality there too, not leveraging the rich social conversation these channels allow. It is one thing to see a brand do this, but it pains me even more to see startups do this.

Unfortunately, most startups think of social media as a cheap method of marketing. Here is an example. This entrepreneur is continuously using twitter to broadcast his content without engaging with his audience. At most he is mentioning people but it seems like he isn’t reading their content and may not even be logging into twitter at all as his content is fed from a twitter feed. DON’T DO THIS!

Listening is the prerequisite to learning

As Joshua-Michele has said on his interesting blog post titled “listening beats talking” listening is the prerequisite to learning. I’d add that in social media way before you and your brand enter, there is already a discussion going on. Just like you would in a face to face conversation when entering this existing conversation you should:

• listen first, don’t interrupt. If you do people think you are rude and annoying and likely to ignore what you say. On the other hand if you listen first others are more open to what you eventually say.
• practice reflective listening. This helps you build a brand image and product as something really meant to help solve customer problems. Both the language you will use and the concerns you will echo and solve will ring true to customers and improve their lives, and they will love you for it.
• use both hard data points and qualitative data to listen and learn. The purpose is to gain insight about the customer be that hard numbers on market size or soft data on behaviors. Using both will allow you to resonate with them when you speak.

In a future post I will explain in more detail the steps to developing an effective listening strategy.

Did you recently begin a social media listening strategy? What are the benefits you have gained from it?

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• What to listen for with your social media listening strategy
• Launching a startup entirely via social media, lessons from Tweetphoto
• Marketing and product development strategy through the customer funnel
• Helping your startup standout in social media
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