The Art of Listening: The Importance of Social Media Monitoring

In order to effectively take advantage of the goldmine of information available online, you need to be plugged in and listening. In today's digital-driven world, companies and brands have to be sponges for the knowledge being dispersed through online and social media outlets in order to engage with key audiences.

The first step in any online or social media initiative is listening. Just as companies embark on market research before engaging in advertising campaigns, social media requires the same reconnaissance. While online initiatives can sometimes be more cost-effective marketing platforms, this does not automatically mean social media is an easier or simpler medium free of sound, strategic thinking. Social media is a two-way conversation and as any good conversationalist recognizes, listening to your counterparts is just as important as what you have to say.

Companies are already well-versed in monitoring traditional media outlets for mentions of their brand. An article in The Wall Street Journal or a mention on CNBC is closely monitored and catalogued. While print publications and broadcast outlets still carry significant credibility, so do the millions of individual brand ambassadors who discuss companies, brands, products and services through social media channels such as blogs, forums, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. The blog of a key opinion leader that is regularly read by the most influential people in your target audience is just as powerful as that mention in The Wall Street Journal. What are you doing to ensure that you have your finger on the pulse of the online community?

Through listening, a wide variety of things are capable – market research, crisis surveillance, tonality measurement, employee relations, etc. Listening prepares companies to better address their communications needs. As communications professionals, we may think we inherently understand our audiences and feel we might be able to skip listening as a first step and jump straight to the engagement level, where ROI is better analyzed. Those who do this, though, do so at their own peril, as they risk running ineffective campaigns which do not resonate with target audiences.
So how do we listen and what exactly are we listening for? Listening can be achieved through a variety of platforms – the simplest being through the use of Google Alerts and blog search engines like Technorati. More in-depth listening is also available with listening products. Before initiating your listening program it is important to determine what it is you are listening for? Are you interested in competitor intelligence on the other players in your industry? What does your audience think of your product or service? Are you looking for focus groups on your industries direction? These are a couple of the many uses for the social data available via existing communities.

With a system in place for listening, you can begin to monitor the online community for any mention of your brand, product, competitors and/or industry. Variables that are important to identify include praise, criticism, complaints, competition, potential crises, and influencer's. Armed with this knowledge and therefore a clear picture of your audience, you will be better positioned to run successful communications campaigns.

One of the most infamous examples of the value of listening is the “Motrin Moms” case study. In the fall of 2008, during the inaugural International Baby Wearing Week, Motrin unveiled an online ad on its Web site aimed at “baby wearing moms” that used the tagline “We feel your pain.” Launched on Friday, November 14 and read by a 20-something female, the ad said:
“Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s the front baby carrier, sling, schwing, wrap, pouch. And who knows what else they’ve come up with. Wear your baby on your side, your front, go hands free. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body tend to cry less than others. But what about me? Do moms that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t. I sure do! These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean, I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain; it’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. And so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.”

Moms across the country were outraged at the suggestion that they carried their babies in a sling or wrap simply to be in fashion or that carrying their child was somehow a painful burden. Women were also offended by the characterization that moms are “tired” and “crazy.” On Saturday, within one day of the ad’s placement on Motrin.com, the snafu was the most tweeted about subject on Twitter, and by Sunday, there was a nine minute video uploaded to YouTube that displayed a collection of screen shots of the outraged Twitter posts interspersed with pictures of moms carrying babies. The large and vocal community of “mommy bloggers” called for boycotts of Motrin and before long, mainstream media was covering the story in full force.

The ad was eventually removed from Motrin’s Web site and Kathy Widmer, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the maker of Motrin, sent an email to the angry moms who had bombarded Motrin with complaints to offer the company’s apologies.

The Motrin Moms case study easily erases any doubts about the importance of listening. It’s clear that neither McNeil nor its advertising agency were engaged with the target audience prior to the ad’s launch, otherwise both organizations would have better understood the vocal and vibrant community of women, and more specifically females, online. As social media guru Peter Shankman said at the time, “Mommy-Bloggers are not a voice to be messed with, probably because they’re one of the most clearly identifiable voices on the web.”

It’s also evident that in addition to failing to conduct any pre-campaign listening, when the ad launched and there were early rumblings of disapproval, McNeil was still not paying attention and therefore unequipped to alter the marketing strategy for Motrin. McNeil and its ad agency were wildly unprepared to launch this campaign. The New York Times reported that bloggers and Twitter users who were able to get the ad agency on the phone found that the agency “didn’t know a lot about Twitter and didn’t seem to have a clue that there was so much anger piling up online.”

The inability to understand and engage with your audience is the fastest way to sink any new communications platform. Spectrum partnered with Social Radar to demonstrate visually what this looked like for McNeil and their Motrin brand. As the following graph depicts, shortly after the ad’s unveiling, the number of online conversations related to Motrin skyrocketed.

Had McNeil or their agency been listening, it would have quickly been clear that something was afoot. Starting with the massive spike in discussions about Motrin starting the very afternoon the ad was launched. This would have been a first clue that something important was happening around the brand. For those that are in the school of “No such thing as bad publicity” it is interesting to note that in this case the Moms were so outraged they were calling for a boycott of the Motrin product and recommending competitor products such as Advil in its place.




Before the PR crisis, in the months leading up to the November 14 launch, Motrin enjoyed a relatively high positive rating with regard to sentiment (tone) in online conversations. The majority of customers were happy with the brand and product as can be seen in the following sentiment chart (below left). However, in the days that followed the ad’s launch, the sentiment turned extremely negative, as evidenced in the second chart (below right).



























If McNeil had been conducting its’ due diligence by regularly monitoring the online community, the company could have avoided having the anger of those displeased with the ad fester for days and the negative news coverage that followed. Even by reviewing a small sampling of Internet comments, executives at McNeil would have seen that the words being used alongside comments about Motrin were overwhelming negative – bad, problem, upset, hate, stupid, sad, dumb, hurt and annoying. As this chart illustrates, the sentiment trend was overwhelming negative.




McNeil’s lack of listening left the company in a less than desirable position. Motrin ultimately took too long to remove the ad from its’ Web site and what started as a campaign aimed at mothers, turned into one of social media’s biggest crashes.

While the Motrin Moms case study demonstrates some of the consequences of failing to monitor the online community, there are other examples of the power of listening that produced far more positive outcomes.

Spectrum was recently tasked with preparing the 2010 digital communications plan for RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, a non-profit organization focused on helping men and women resolve their infertility issues.

Through a grant it received from the Department of Health and Human Services, RESOLVE was interested in promoting embryo donation as a viable family building option for those struggling to conceive. Spectrum sought to listen to the infertility community online – a massive network of women and couples communicating about their struggles through personal blogs, chat rooms, Twitter accounts, etc., in order to fully understand the issues these individuals face and how we might introduce them to embryo donation. By using Spectrum’s listening products, we learned several insights. The most surprising for everyone the client and the client team was that adoption is by far the runaway leader in family building methods discussed online and all other methods pale by comparison.





Resolve was caught off guard by this news and surprised to learn that adoption so drastically outweighed the other family building options. The client discovered that the space they thought they were operating in – where family building options like infertility treatment and in virtro fertilization were just as popular as adoption – was in fact, significantly different.
Removing adoption from the conversation, we were able to get a clearer picture of the family building conversation.





Keeping in mind this breakdown, we were able to tailor our digital plan to reach the pockets of this population who were struggling to conceive, but still yearned for a traditional pregnancy, making embryo donation a practical solution. Our upfront listening prepared us for what the space really looked like outside of any pre conceptions we may have had. As a result our campaign has been very successful.

Another example of the merits of listening demonstrates how the campaign you start can lead to spin-off campaigns in the social media sector. In October 2009, the Meatless Monday movement received a substantial amount of media attention with the announcement that Baltimore City Public Schools would go meatless in their cafeterias on Mondays and then-CNN host Lou Dobb’s aggressive response to this news on his nightly television program. As way of background, Meatless Monday, a campaign founded by Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, encourages Americans to go meatless one day per week to help reduce the risk of chronic preventable conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity, and also to reduce our carbon footprints and save resources like fresh water and fossil fuel that are required to transport meat. When listening to the Meatless Monday conversation, Spectrum quickly identified a large trend – when influential bloggers, Twitter users, etc. were touting the merits of Meatless Monday, they often did so by providing recipes for meatless dishes. As you can see from the below graph, almost a quarter of all Meatless Monday conversations include mentions of recipes.

While this was not the original goal of the campaign, the most influential online ambassadors in this space were using recipes as a hook to promote healthy and sustainable lifestyles. Out of Meatless Monday’s overarching campaign, grew a community of bloggers who found each other through recipe swapping. Knowing this, it would be in Meatless Monday’s best interest to include recipes in their marketing plan and promote healthy, meatless meals for Americans to prepare and consume on Mondays.

As a final example for this article, we did an analysis of the conversation for a client interested in the hysterectomy space. Prior to the listening project the clients marketing and messaging was based on the lack of scarring from the procedure. By simply reviewing the conversation cloud and the underlying conversation taking place around hysterectomies we discovered that what was really important was the pain involved and recovery time. So by refocusing the messaging around a painless process and speedy recovery the client was in a position to resonate quickly and in a more meaningful way with their community.




An old Turkish proverb says “"If speaking is silver, then listening is gold." Remember this as you prepare to engage in online and social media marketing and communications initiatives. Listening should always be the first step in any online campaign. To best understand your audiences and be effective in your outreach to them, you first have to listen to what they want.