Too Much Listening: Where is the Collaboration?
Yes, of course you can glean a lot of valuable data from mechanically analyzing the social stream … as long as your brand or industry happens to be a topic of a lot of conversation.
If you fall into this rarified category, you’re in luck! There are about 250 social media management tools on the market designed to help you do your thing – listen in, engage and counterpunch with a comment or a tweet. If you’re aggressive and swift, you may even shift sentiment a degree or two.
However, since so few organizations generate enough organic chatter to even bother monitoring, and since monitoring has so little value as anything but a starting point for a reactive marketing strategy, we have to ask why tools that do it seem to be the only ones that exist. Why is monitoring and reflexively reacting the priority?
As blogger Joshua Barnes prepares to map social media management platforms, he is nearing an important question. Joshua writes, “The very nature of listening is reactive and defensive, it’s simply not able to ascertain insight. Something above listening, in the hierarchy of data organization, must provide that top-down value. Listening is just a data point.”
So, the question that naturally follows is, “what is above listening in that hierarchy?” Media Logic believes the answer is collaboration – constant collaboration – between client, agency, influencers, customers and prospects on the creation, monitoring and analysis of proactive social media efforts.
Intelligence happens when you collaborate. And no technology can substitute for it.
The tools sure are shiny! But experience tells us there is simply no listening tool so intelligent and no posting tool so swift that they can’t be outpaced (and rather easily) by a small team plugged into the brand and empowered by a good social workflow and reasonable approval process.
What is above listening in the hierarchy of data organization? The answer is shared knowledge and value creation. And it’s made possible by real-time social collaboration managed by professionals through tools like Media Logic’s Zeitgeist and Coffee.
