The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media

Chapter 16. Listening Is the New Marketing

Social media provides an unfiltered opportunity to learn at a grassroots level what people really think about your brand, products or services. Indeed, listening to the groundswell of consumer-generated content is the new marketing. It has even given birth to an new industry called Online Reputation Management (ORM).

MONITORING AND MANAGING YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION

Why to Listen

People are talking and they are using the social web—blogs, social networks, wikis, forums, and video—as their mouthpiece. Take, for example, what happened on Twitter following the Super Bowl. There was an outcry, even a backlash, against domain registrar Go Daddy for its controversial advertising. More than a few people went so far as to transfer their domains to other service providers!

While this was barely a blip on Go Daddy's radar in so far as the net effect on its bottom line, the publicity cannot have been good. The effect of word of mouth in social media is not constrained to large companies, either.

Recently, I spoke at a gathering of local hospital marketing directors on the topic of social media. In preparation, I visited a couple of healthcare rating and review sites to see if any of the hospitals represented might be mentioned. Oh boy, were they! One hospital in particular was dealt a number of severe blows in terms of negative reviews. Another experienced ...