14 Tips For Active Listening

After talking with my collegeau Geoff Pickering (Digital Czar) and evaluating some "next" practices (as opposed to best practices), the following are 14 practical tips to leverage information from listening to consumer conversations:

1. Track and retool the launch … before the product hits the shelves



2. Ignite your Web site or corporate blog.



3. Prime your search engine. Building on this, most brand search engines, especially in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) category, fail to integrate topics or issues that show up in external consumer conversation



4. Add precision to search engine ad buys. Half the game in buying targeted ads on search engines is to figure out what's relevant, hot, and timely in the long tail of consumer curiosity and conversation.



5. Reprimand, reward, or re-script the call center. A very high percentage of visible CGM directly implicates call-center or feedback collection processes. Call center scripts, FAQs, and e-mail feedback forms are often hopelessly out of touch with consumer discussion and expectations.



6. Tweak your messaging. We recently completed a study for a client suggesting consumers are most viral when they feel betrayed over false ad claims. Use CGM to tweak and optimize messaging to ensure your brand isn't over-positioning, over-promising, or making itself vulnerable to public attack.



7. Focus the focus group. CGM is constantly turning up issues market research doesn't probe or explore in traditional focus groups or studies. Take the key findings from how consumers really talk and make sure your half-million dollar research study isn't missing the obvious.



8. Slap or stroke the supplier. CGM is like a pool of gold stars or black marks to put on the foreheads of suppliers, vendors, or agencies that, through their work, catalyze positive or negative conversation or word of mouth.



9. Use CGM as part of your evaluation process. If the rebate program backfires, package the CGM for reprimanding whoever executed that program.



10. Slice your sponsorship fees. Sponsorships can be really expensive. A spokesperson may cost millions per year to endorse or use your product. Consumers never miss a detail in the CGM space, so use their due diligence on the background or traction of a spokesperson to strengthen your own negotiation leverage. Shoot for saving 10-15 percent off the base.



11. Retool the profiling. Almost all big brand survey or feedback forms fail to profile by influence or depth of "virality." And yet they ask every other demographic question under the sun.



12. Use CGM to motivate the folks designing the surveys to reengineer the questionnaire to better flag the Jeff Jarvis's out there. Are they active online? Where? Do they blog? How often?



13. Scrutinize the spend. Brands waste money all the time. Most new ad models are largely unproven, and CGM analysis is a great way to vet out what's working and what's not based on the buzz's volume, tenor, and virality. Think twice about spending big bucks on sponsorships, or other high-priced events if nobody talks about them.



14. Track your competitors. Consumers are the very best source of competitive intelligence. If your competitor is screwing it up or doing something fabulously well, organize it, package it, and send it everyone in the organization who's losing sleep over their next move.http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3560271

Feel free to comment.

Jeff Fromm

jfromm@adamson-usa.com