Brad Besancon

How many times are companies and brands told or “guided” to Listen to their Audience? What does that mean? Is it plugging keywords into a platform and searching social conversations? Is it analyzing your fans and followers and how they interact with your brand? I think it’s probably some of both, but isn’t there more to Listening to your Audience? It goes beyond analytics and data and maybe it’s time we applied some old fashioned, marketing common sense to our social media.

Listening is critical for social media success in today’s competitive environment. It should be a combination of analytics, data, common sense, and proper brand voice development. For example, is it better to know keywords or understand who your Audience is within the social networks?

What we typically find are companies consistently tweeting, “graming”, and posting on Facebook and Pinterest without any understanding who they’re talking to. In our experience, we find that individuals tend to be different personas within each of their social media platforms. The recipe driven home chef on Pinterest may be a crazed football fan on Facebook. Or the family oriented mom on Facebook who’s extremely professional and uses her Twitter handle for business only. These Audience Members require multiple brand voices and languages that your company has to speak, even to the same persons! That’s why brands must first LISTEN rather than SPEAK. In between is where our company applies the common sense, voice development, of THINK. By following this process brands can create and develop the right #AudienceSpeak.

So what’s the process? It’s actually very simple, but may require removing your “Posting Hat” and replacing it with two steps backwards, and putting in the hearing aids. Your social voice and strategy should derive from your Audience, NOT your marketing department. Sorry marketing departments, but in today’s world, Audience voice and conversations will show you where to go and what path to take. Ultimately, this makes everyone’s goals more obtainable when your Audience is relating to the brand more frequently.

So here’s a few tips:

“No Ties Meeting” – This is a meeting of the minds. A good old fashioned branding session.

Determine who and what you want to be in social media. How does it tie back to the “off-line” brand voice? Remember, you may need several voices to ensure you’re reaching far into your Audience.

What does the brand want to be in each of the social media platforms? Is it Follower Dominant, or more of a Boutique Interactive relationship?

Who is your Audience? Where are they and who are they in the social networks? Are they the “Home Chef” or the “Professional Pinterest Mom”? Each has a different language…now you have to start building the right #AudienceSpeak.

“Map it Out”

What did you learn in the “No Ties Meeting” and how can you now build from that to begin development of the new social voice….the #AudienceSpeak.

“Time for Talk”

This is the final stage in building your language. Here you actually begin to talk to your Audience. Test the language. Are they understanding it, following it, and relating to it? If not, keep testing based on what they’re saying back to you. This and only this, will continually develop your #AudienceSpeak.

 

#AudienceSpeak, the language beyond words for your brand.

 

The high priests of information are dead. RIP. Social media has destroyed the old media gatekeepers.

In a time not so long ago, the broadcast/cable networks decided what out of the countless events in the world should be shown to the public. What the journalists in traditional newsrooms did not report, in effect did not happen. It was a one-way, media-broadcasting message that pushed its way into living rooms.

And then, the Internet. It enabled the sharing of messages and events at the speed of light through a new realm of communication. It wasn’t just up to the networks and newspapers anymore; it placed the power into the hands of the everyday person. And finally, social media came to the forefront and broke the mold of communication, sports, events, and news. It was recently reported by Pew Research Center that 30% of adults get their news from their Facebook feeds. And now, over the last few weeks, anyone can be an “on the spot” news breaker.

The conflict in the Middle East and the Ukraine illustrates how anyone can become an influential media outlet and thereby “break news”. Twitter is the electronic nervous system of breaking news around the globe. Social media has shrunk the world and everything that happens is instantly broadcast and shared through feeds, tweets, and pictures. Instantly. Live. As it happens.

Marshall McLuhan prophetically dubbed electronic media as a “global village” decades before Twitter and other social networks became embedded in the social fabric. When the Arab Spring erupted in Egypt in 2010, it was dubbed the “Twitter Revolution”.

Now consider the shoot down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pointed not to intelligence data, but to a social media post as evidence that Ukraine’s Russian separatists shot down the civilian jetliner. The post on a Russian social network similar to Facebook was taken down when the jumbo jet’s wreckage revealed scores of civilian bodies.

In the minutes after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a surface to air missile, a leader of Ukraine’s Russian separatists boasted they had “downed” a military transport aircraft. He described in in social media as the, “bird fell for waste heap.”  The deadly truth was that it was a civilian jetliner and suddenly the post disappeared.

However, you can’t taking it back once you click post on social media channels.

 

Weeks before the missile strike, both sides in Ukraine have used Twitter and other social media networks to wage a propaganda war. Communication systems including social media are amoral. They’re powerful. They’re also rapid, but not always factual. It used to be the role of traditional media to fact check for half-truths and deliberate lies. Today, they trail behind the “average person” and their social networks. The ubiquitous presence of smart phones means that an unfolding event will reach the world in a simple click of post or tweet.

I think we can all agree that recently we’ve all seen how social media is more than just social. It can be a stream of events or tragedies flowing directly to the world while we watch it unfold on our phones and tablets. It’s become more than a communication tool or sharing your life experiences with your “followers and friends”. It’s become an electronic extension of everyone’s nervous system, which involves us deeply in all other lives.