Be a Listener

Yesterday we talked lurker vs listener, which resonated from Twitter to the blogs.  As promised in yesterday’s post; let’s talk about how you, as a community manager, need to be a listener for your corporate social media goals.

In our conversation at Social Media Breakfast everyone was focused on the listener’s that they wanted to reach; the folks who were prospects or community members quietly following the conversation. I wanted to turn that on it’s head during the breakfast, but time ran out, but you must also spend a lot of time being a listener yourself; monitoring blogs, Twitter, Ning, Facebook, etc.  Why?

1. Listening is inspiring. Listening to your prospective community base will be the inspiration for the social media tools you use. Listening to our community on their blogs and microblogs led us to learn Ning and Facebook was of no value, for them, but rather LinkedIn was the key.  Hence why I’ve been spending so much time in that social network.
2. Listen before you jump. You must always listen to people first, for an extended period of time, before you jump into the conversation.  For example; I have hundreds of searches within Twitter sent to me through RSS every morning, based on the pain points of our potential customers.  I end up listening to these people on a daily basis, but often time take no action immediately.  Perhaps they use Twitter mainly as a social avenue and this one remark, out of thousands, should not dictate that I suddenly throw myself into the fray.
3. Often silence makes the loudest noise. What do I mean by that phrase?  A great personal example is a person I listen to through his blog and his LinkedIn updates. Over the past two months I’ve learned about his pain points at work, his background, his skill set and more.  He recently joined our LinkedIn group for network engineers and I could now easily reach out to him, set up a time to connect and listen some more.
4. Listening makes you a better communicator. I learned this one when I was actually in PR when my manager would tell me first to listen to how a reporter answered the phone.  Was the reporter’s greeting a “hello” vs “yeah” or was the tone “speedy” vs “thought out”? I could then adjust my introduction.  The more you listen, in terms of quality of listening and quantity, the more you learn about your potential community and the better you will communicate with them in your efforts.

This list is obviously focused on my experience in building communities in the B2B space, but could easily be used in B2C, PR and your own personal social media efforts.

Question for the Day: How much time do you spend listening versus participating?

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