Listen through layers

- Listening at scale requires a technique which I call listening through layers. And there's a couple different ways to unpack this. The first one is active versus passive listening. Active is when you go on to pages where people are really talking about very specific topics. It could be a brand, it could be a company, a topic, on their own Facebook pages, on Twitter pages. So these are direct posts. Passive though, is when you're listening to news stories and RSS feeds, it's a general sense, a collection of publications and content that could be talking about a particular topic. Another layer is around direct versus indirect. And this is where people are saying things that you may be interested, about you. It could be for example, a financial service company that has a Twitter page or a LinkedIn page, and they're following what people are saying directly on those pages. Comments and tweets for example. But the indirect is when people are taking those posts that somebody's creating, and then retweeting it with a particular point of view. Now that's much harder to find, 'cause it's not something that's on your page, it's somewhere else, on somebody else's page. I know that there was one company that I was working with, in particular, who was tracking all the things that was being said about them on their own pages, but missing ten times the volume of the conversation from all the pages that they didn't own. Now one of the best ways to track all of this, is through a tool or a dashboard like Hootsuite. You can put in particular pages that you want to follow, keywords, conversations, publications, and it all comes streaming in to one place, where again you can listen at scale. A great example of this is the shipping company Maersk. Now, they have those bright blue ships that sail all around the world, and they decided that they were going to listen to four sets of audiences. The first one obviously are their customers, what are they saying on their site? What in general around Maersk, and also about shipping? But they also wanted to follow experts and influencers. They wanted to follow employees, and very interestingly they followed a fourth group, their fans. Though, you're thinking probably fans of a shipping company? Well yeah, indeed, people were posting pictures of the ships coming into harbors, going through canals, beautiful pictures on Pinterest and Instagram. And Maersk wanted to see what people are saying about their ships And these were fans, just people who were just fans of big bright, blue ships. And this is great evidence that you never know where these conversations are going to be happening. So I encourage you to think about how you can listen through all the different layers, and the complexity of being able to hear all these different voices in the channels that they're in.