Is Experience in Listening the Kind of Experience That Matters?
I assert that Social Media people are the wrong people to be listening. Can they hear what’s really being said? Is a bus driver the right person to be listening for signals from Uranus ? About all a bus driver can do is tell you how big it is! The last time I checked, social media doesn’t have much to do with real world business operations, challenges and frustrations. It has to do with Marketing, PR and other (regrettably) inside-out, and simplistic processes — at least these days. Listening isn’t just about frustrations with your product and negative sentiment. When done in this way, listening is extremely reactive (maybe to the wrong thing) — and not very proactive.
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If your business can’t see a manufacturing, delivery, customer service or customer experience problem before you hear about it on Twitter, I may need to expand this discussion beyond social media. Social media is not going to fix it, let a lone recognize the root cause of these issues.
In many ways, listening is nothing more than validation of what you should already know. If your argument is “it’s a starting point” I would challenge that you may hear a negative sentiment, but you have no clue what to do with it. If the experienced professionals on the line haven’t figured it out at the source, it’s a cultural issue, a leadership issue and/or a business model issue. A small voice from a recent college grad, on the tail end of a process, isn’t going to be heard — if they have anything meaningful to say. Being smart isn’t the same thing as experience — and experienced people know that, because they used to be just smart.
So if you don’t already know it, are you going to count on your social media expert to recognized it?
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve finally sat down with many of my parents friends from the olden days. When I switched to a career in CRM about 16 years ago, I often had to mention that I was becoming quite the programmer. This sparked more than a few conversations about how these guys went from programming (the old kind), or some operations area, to marketing. They loved the switch because they got to see a completely different side of the business, the customer. What stuck with me was that they had made this leap. I didn’t realize how common it was.
Is it easier to learn marketing than it is to teach a school taught marketing graduate 20 years of business experience?
If you look at resumes on Linked In, Social Media is all the craze.
Director of Social Media at
Community Manager at
Social Media Strategy at
Chief Blogger at
Social Business Consultant at
Public Relations at
Marketing Associate at
These are the people you are relying on to hear? What context do they listen in? That’s the problem I’m having these days. To what end are they listening? They certainly don’t seem to have experience in the business of doing business? Do they know the products? Do they know the customers? Do they know the process? Do they understand the business model: key partners, key activities, key resources, cost structure, value proposition, customer relationships, channels, customer segments and revenue streams? It’s not even close to what I hear them talking about.
Agree or disagree? I want your feedback. Remember My Painful Journey from CRM to Social CRM? Well, I’m still on it.