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Quinnipiac Assignment #6 – Social Listening

A Look at Social Listening

What is social listening?

Quinnipiac Assignment #6 (Social Media Platforms) was all about social listening. So, what better thing to listen to than a rock band looking to hit it big?

Social listening is, essentially, the act of getting onto various social media platforms and just getting the lay of the land, as it were. I think that most people are inclined to just jump into the deep end. The problem with that sort of behavior is that it has no strategy behind it whatsoever. Furthermore, it is a way to commit all sorts of social (media) gaffes.

The truth is, when I first got into Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, I jumped in completely and utterly without thinking. In retrospect, that was rather foolish and impulsive. These days, I spend some time in the attempt to correct and repair some of the damage that that sort of non-strategy did to my online social media reputation.

Getting Stuck by NOT Doing Social Listening

This is not to say that things are so awful online. Not by any stretch of the imagination – the real problem is that I cannot seem to be able to take things to the next level.

Hence, beyond attaining Social Media Certification (and possibly getting my Masters’ Degree in Communications with a Social Media concentration), I also want to learn how to handle myself better on social media. I probably have forums covered. But I could certainly use some help with Twitter and the like.

I had also never really gotten the hang of Google+.  Like a lot of people, the idea of dealing with yet another social network not only mystified me, it downright annoyed me. But social listening helped to get me to realize that there is a purpose to Google+ and that it is a different one from Facebook.

Oh, and here’s Rock ‘n Roll Predator by J-Krak (with much better sound than what I played in my video) –

Over Nine Years Later…

Social listening remains one of the most important things that a social media manager or really any sort of a content marketer can do. For, if we don’t listen to our customers and prospects, they will be more than happy to head on over to our competitors.

Because once they see we’re making that sort of a mistake, they will do everything in their power not to. They will become the company that listens. But that’s what we want to be, yes?

Also, it’s a good thing that I never really got the hang of Google+. It has gone to that great social media machine in the sky. And that was a few years ago already.

So, it proved one huge thing to me. If a platform is hard to justify, then it’s dying. And if you have to be bribed in order to use it, guess what? Then it’s really dying.

Google should have yanked the plug on Google+ a long time before it did. It was, rather early, clearly an experiment that had failed. Yet Google hung in there. Hoping against hope that it would catch on, I suppose.

Marrying your ego to something like that is never a good idea. It will never, ever end well. Google is simply lucky it’s large enough that a failure like that didn’t bury them.

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