Shut Up for a Minute

Don’t just talk on social media, listen

Even if they tweet every hour, marketers aren’t taking full advantage of social media’s potential—because they don’t stop to really listen.

“Eavesdropping on consumers’ social-media chatter allows marketers to economically and regularly peer inside people’s lives as they are being lived,” write Susan Fournier and two coauthors in Harvard Business Review. In the article, Fournier, senior associate dean, Questrom Professor in Management, and professor of marketing, helps explain the importance of drilling into the data that social media provides to ask questions and make improvements.

Companies usually delegate social media management to analysts or the marketing department—and that’s the problem. “We lose an appreciation of context and with it the ability to extract the meanings that provide insight for our companies and brands,” write Fournier and her coauthors. Marketers, they say, need to think like anthropologists, and focus on the meaning of the messages social media provides. “To get the most out of social media data,” they write, “operations have to go beyond data scientists and the marketing departments that house them. Every executive has to be a listener.”

Fournier says company executives who get it right actively listen to social media commentary—in real time—and avoid the marketing department’s dry reports. “Senior managers across all departments likewise have to get their hands dirty,” the authors write. “Social listening promises the Holy Grail in business: superior understanding of customers.”