There are more means of communication today than ever before. Conversations that were previously restricted to a few key channels now exist in countless places in the digital space. The interactions happening behind our screens are constantly redefining how we think about communication, which in turn, forces brands to rethink the ways in which they’re engaging with consumers and learning from those interactions. The volume of conversations online requires brands to have a strategic approach to how they collect, analyze, respond and learn from the information that’s pouring in. It’s not enough to use social listening to inform social messaging. Today’s brands must also be able to apply what they’re learning to the rest of their marketing funnel. How do these insights affect other channels and the overall health of their brand? How can we use this knowledge to move people through the funnel? Alex Lirtsman, Co-founder & Chief Strategist at Ready Set Rocket, lead this workshop on social listening, social analytics and their impact on the customer journey at Social Media Week NYC and Social Media Week Chicago. In it, he tackled how today’s marketers are mining human insights from data and using that knowledge to effectively communicate with modern consumers, the role of social in driving bottom line ROI, how to effectively structure teams that can generate quality content and how to leverage past data to understand current trends and inform future decisions.

2. Listen, Analyze, Inform: Pulling Human Insights from Interactions

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Misconceptions of Social Listening
Listen, Analyze, Inform
Key Takeaways

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There are more means of communication today than ever before.
Conversations that were previously restricted to a few key channels, now
exist in countless places in the digital space. The interactions happening
behind our screens are constantly redefining how we think about
communication, which in turn, forces brands to rethink the ways in which
they’re engaging with consumers and learning from those interactions.
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WHAT IS SOCIAL LISTENING?

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Social listening allows brands to peer inside people’s lives as
they are being lived, organically.
It enables brands to discover the manifestations and effects of
their actions on consumers – unlocking insights into
consumer mindset, consumption, markets, and cultures.
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WHAT IS SOCIAL LISTENING?

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Social listening is an
exploratory exercise
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MISCONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL LISTENING
Social listening is often used as a precursor to "real research" such as reading
research papers or doing focus groups, etc. – where insights from social listening will
only provide a little more color, but not treated as insightful or having potential to
impact decisions.
In reality, social listening is a way to assess first-hand how consumers perceive and
express their thoughts, providing a raw, unadulterated look at their point of view.
Social listening provides more than directional value and can help brands identify
and hone in on their behavior to inform business decisions.

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Only pay attention to
social conversations
when a corporate
crisis demands it
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MISCONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL LISTENING
Social listening may often come as an afterthought and only looked into when a
corporate crisis demands it. For example, a cosmetics company’s brand manager
may only leverage social listening when they learn that they have been accused of
selling expired make up. Using social listening after the fact defeats one of social
listening's key advantages – discovering negative brand conversations and allowing
the brand to address before they escalate into full crises.

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Keep social listening
insights in one
department
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MISCONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL LISTENING
Social listening is usually a service or capability of the marketing or social
team. However, insights learned from social listening can impact the brand
beyond the marketing or social teams and can drive overall business strategy
and innovation. Social listening insights should be shared across the business
to improve brand efforts.

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Use social listening
data to confirm a
predetermined
viewpoint
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MISCONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL LISTENING
Often, analysts are using social listening data to help confirm or prove a
predetermined viewpoint or hypothesis. However, social listening is not meant
to presuppose anything and instead, the unfiltered quality of these organic
conversations should instead generate opportunities to provide answers to
questions that weren't even asked.

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Brands must be able to apply learnings and insights from
social listening to the rest of their brand efforts to enhance
and optimize all touch points along the customer journey.
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Transform social listening information into meaningful insights
that lead to actionable optimizations by moving data through
the following phases:
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Listen
Analyze
Inform
How to properly pull all the conversations your brand would be interested in
How to synthesize large volumes of conversations into patterns and trends
that we can understand? How do we leverage other social analytics tools to
provide additional context to the conversations?
How can social listening insights inform marketing efforts & customer journey

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ANALYZE
Four key areas to capture in the Listening phase:
LISTEN INFORM
Breadth
Capture a broad but relevant conversations
about your brand across multiple channels.
Competitive Landscape
Understand how your audience is talking about
products and competitors similar to yours.
Influencers
Identify the influential individuals talking
about your brand.
Sentiment
Capture the different emotions tied to the
conversations around your brand.

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ANALYZE
Here is a sample e-commerce retailer and their conversations and how they would appear in your listening columns.
There’s a lot of different types of conversations going on with different context and sentiment.
LISTEN INFORM

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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
NEGATIVE POSITIVE NEUTRAL
Sentiment analysis is a quick way to identify trends and allow us to assess what is resonating with our audience, and
what isn’t.

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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
Qualitative Analysis
Who is speaking about us?
What are the themes in the conversations consumers
are having about our brand?
Are they saying positive or negative things about us?
What do the different themes say about our brand?
How can we better understand the market and
landscape?
Quantitative Analysis
What is the volume of mentions overall?
What is the volume of mentions in a particular sentiment?
What is the volume of mentions in a particular theme?
Are there differences in volume of conversations over time?
What patterns am I seeing from volume of mentions?
This is the most important phase. This is where we turn information into meaning. Our first reaction would be to
quantify the information we receive in order to make it manageable and easy to process, however, it is also
important to understand that social media data is inherently qualitative so the analysis should also represent that.

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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
BRAND REPUTATION CUSTOMER DESIRE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION CUSTOMER SERVICE
By qualitatively assessing the mentions, we can now see that beyond sentiment, there are also these topical
categories:

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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
CUSTOMER DESIRE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION CUSTOMER SERVICEBRAND REPUTATION
To further assess the conversation themes, we will look specifically at “Brand Reputation” conversations and
supplement our analysis with third party tools to gather more information to extract insights.

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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
Most social listening tools are not equipped with robust audience demographics analysis, however, we can extract @handles
and leverage other tools to gain a better understanding. At Ready Set Rocket, we often use third party demographics tools in
conjunction with social listening data to learn more about who is talking about us and get additional insights.
Twitter handles of users leaving brand
reputation mentions of the brand:
@marielen
@DarlingJ
@EMila02
@Kattkuh
@pmaldonado9
@neybeh
@Classy_trry
@marybethshmitt
@jesseRcott
@LevyCom
@jonthankurry
@robert185
@TsleMiami

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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
Reputation Mentions – 3 Year YOY Comparison
0
750
1,500
2,250
3,000
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2014 2015 2016 – 3 Year Trendline
With the qualitative assessment complete, we pivot to a quantitative analysis and discovered that there is a
seasonality factor to the brand reputation conversations. This information can help inform our social media and
product development lifecycle to align launches based on these time periods.

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Product Development
Branding
Marketing Strategy
Content Strategy
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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
Influencers / Partnerships
Editorial Calendar
Customer Service
CRM
Reevaluate brand messaging and ensure all
messaging and communications reflect branding
Reevaluate marketing strategy and overhaul efforts
that are not elevating the brand
Partner with fashion-forward influencers and establish
partnerships with other brands that can elevate the brand
Develop new product styles
Review content and creative strategy and identify
what may be generating negative brand reputation
conversations
Revise editorial calendar & launch brand elevation
campaigns prior & during critical periods
Revamp CRM program to develop stellar brand
experience for customers and build loyalty
Elevate the brand by providing top notch customer
service to promote brand loyalty and affinity
How do we take meaningful insights and use it to inform marketing and business decisions? Brand managers should
communicate insights to all business leaders, whether it’s sales, marketing, or product development.

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ANALYZELISTEN INFORM
AWARENESS CONSIDERATION LOYALTY
How do we tailor / change
awareness channels?
How do we ensure our
brand is being considered
by our audience?
How do we maximize lifetime
value and brand advocacy?
CONVERSION
How do we maximize
conversion potential?
Establish partnerships with
fashion-forward influencers to
drive awareness.
Host unique in-store
experiences
Improve customer service
presence on social and provide
perks to customers such as
private events by invite only.
Understand your converting /
MVP audience and optimize to
their needs
Brand managers can also introduce new tactics and initiatives throughout the customer journey to combat brand
reputation issues.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Leverage the full potential of social listening – do not treat as a secondary or exploratory research tactic.
2. Use both quantitative and qualitative analysis to distill social listening information into meaning.
3. Build a customer-centric and insights-driven culture within your business – allow social listening
insights to bubble up to all key business leaders to inform action.
4. Take social listening beyond social messaging and utilize for all business efforts