If you’re just tuning in, so far we’ve been talking about some of the aspects of building a social media team, including assembling the team, and outlining roles and responsibilities.

At this point, it’s critical that you equip your team with the tools that will allow them to integrate social media into their work. This was turning into a mammoth post, so I’m going to break it up into two, the listening and the participating.

Listening Tools

Let’s start right off the bat with some super clear disclosure: I work for Radian6 as their Director of Community, and I use our listening platform exclusively for my work. That means that I am unequivocally biased in favor of our tool and its capabilities for listening and engagement in social media.

If you can pay for a monitoring solution, it’s the one I’m going to recommend because I think it’s the best on the market and one of many reasons I work for them.

Clear enough? Fully disclosed now, are we? So now that that’s out of the way…

Building a Listening Platform

You need some assembly of listening tools in order to monitor the conversation as we’ve discussed in earlier posts. This to me is probably THE most important tool in your arsenal, no matter what. If a paid solution is within your reach (ours starts at about $600/month), please consider investing in one. From an efficiency and streamlining perspective alone, it’s worthwhile, and can make this part of your process so much more comprehensive.

But if a paid solution is still out of your league , consider building yourself a dashboard of your own that aggregates RSS feeds from several search tools.

I’ve noodled with several methods, and so far, I like NetVibes as an aggregator, pulling in search feeds from:

This method won’t have the real value of paid tools – things like workflow tracking, sentiment analysis, and deep data analytics and reporting – but you’ll at least be able to aggregate the information to give yourself a starting point for analysis.

At a basic level, you’ll want to listen for:

  • Your brand/company name (don’t forget to look for common misspellings or derivatives of that brand)
  • Your competitors
  • Stakeholder mentions: If you have people or representatives on your team that are active online, you might be listening for their specific names
  • Industry/Opportunity phrases: if you’re selling insurance, you might look for phrases like “need insurance coverage” or “shopping for car insurance”

Manpower

Ideally, each person on your team is set up on any listening system you put together. But if that’s not financially or logistically possible, make your assignments for listening based on the complexity of your team.

For a smaller company without large, independent departments, you can probably have one or two people act as your information gatherers through your listening tools, and report back to the rest of the team on a regular basis about what’s happening. (More on that later).

For more complex organizations where you’re building a team across departments, it’s ideal to have at least one person from each department  – front line OR backstage – manning the listening posts relative to their area of the business. If that’s not possible, try to at least have one communications, one or two sales, and one or two customer service people that can share the responsibility and distribute learnings.

Keeping Tabs

If you’re listening and not yet participating actively on social networks as a company, you can probably have your team members checking in on sites two or three times a day, just to keep abreast of any emerging issues or time-sensitive intelligence to report to the team.

If you’re actively participating and engaging with your customers, those plugged into the listening systems need to be integrating that as continually as possible into their daily work. That means peeking at your dashboard every 30 minutes or so (yes, really), and ideally if you’re using a great tool like Tweetdeck for Twitter participation, you can have it set up with some redundant searches right in the window so you can catch brand mentions in real time on your desktop.

Again, paid tools like Radian6 offer capabilities to help with this part of the process, including the ability to build and implement a workflow for your engagement efforts right in the platform, track your responses, and get alerted to new posts in near-real time through email or IM (so you don’t have to remember to refresh a dashboard).

I know it sounds like a plug, but I can’t tell you how much these capabilities make a difference when the volume of mentions about your brand gets to more than a few a day. When considering how you scale social media, scaling the listening and workflow aspects needs to be one of the first things you address. Serious participation, tracking, and analysis of your social media efforts is eventually going to require a tool that goes far beyond what you can build for free.

We’ll talk more about sharing information and insights and reporting on your listening and engagement in a couple of posts. For now, that’s my top level rundown of equipping your team with social media listening tools. What have I missed, and what other questions can I try and answer?

Next up, we’ll talk team tools for actual participation and information sharing internally. Stay Tuned….

Photo credit: jonboy mitchell