Needless to say, listening to Social Media (or, more specifically, Social Media users) is turning out to be an essential business practice. In essence, there are many ways to listen to Social Media and Social Media users. For one, you can simply search your brand’s name together with other keywords (such as “complaint,” “awesome,” “awful,” “great”) to see individual sentiments of involved people. You can check out tags on del-icio.us and other websites to see what people are saying about your brand. You can do a quick browse on discussion forums to see the general sentiment of people. But while these are effective ways to listen, these would not help you get real insight. To get real insight that can help your brand, you need to use professional tools. Information is useless, after all, if not properly categorized and analyzed.

First, if you want to properly listen to Social Media users, you can set up your own private community. Communispace is one of primary supplier of private communities, although you can also get similar products from the likes of MarketTools and Networked Insights. A private community is like getting an engaged focus group that provides simultaneous and continuous output, putting them in a setting where you can listen to what they have to say. The setting is natural, perhaps even more natural than the setting of focus groups. Although similar to a focus group, the nature of private communities is obviously different. Due to its size, which is significantly larger than a focus group, you can easily get valuable insight from critical members of the community. Quality of content is one of the limitations of getting a focus group. While you can ask anything to the members of the group, the quality of their response varies, making it a hit-or-miss process. With private communities, however, the chance to attract critical individuals is ongoing, since this is an ongoing and continuous process. You may not get valuable insight now, but you will sooner or later thanks to the nature of private communities.

Of course, you can also listen to the content found in blogs, forums, and YouTube, among others. But you will need someone to interpret the data for you. Therefore, you will need to hire or get a group who can do this for you. This is called brand monitoring. However, contrary to popular opinion, brand monitoring is best done by a separate entity, a company who specialize in analyzing such data. This company will do the listening for you; they will collect all the information found in various Social Media outlets and send you the report. However, instead of a collection of raw data (raw data being the information collected online), the company will deliver summary reports containing what’s happening online.

Hiring the services of such companies is essential, due to the nature of information you can get online. Information through listening can be overwhelming in volume, and anyone without experience will have difficult time segregating valuable information from trash. In order to make sense of this information, in order to make it useful, you need to get the essence of the information. Brand monitoring companies can do this for you. Services such as Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics or TNS’s Cynfony can monitor Social Media for you, giving you a concise idea of what you can do to improve your brand and your organization.

Of course, the most important part of listening is implementation. Listening is important, something that you probably should do, no questions asked. But listening per se will not help you improve your brand and your business. You need to act on what you learned through listening. Listening is a barren act if all the information you garnered through listening simply lay on your desk, collecting dust. Hence, this is another point why you should get someone to monitor your brand (the likes of Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, for example). Services such pinpoint problem or concerned areas according to what was garnered online through Social Media networks.

These listening strategies are critical for a number of reasons. For one, these strategies enable you to properly listen to Social Media users. With the use of private communities, you know you are listening to the right source and the right people. With hiring brand monitoring companies, you relieve yourself of the responsibility of listening; the only thing you have to do is implement. As in any type of strategy, these have to be implemented in small scale first, to see how it would work given real life scenarios.