Social Media Brand Monitoring: Why Traditional Marketers Are Bad Listeners

Conventional marketers are generally not good listeners. So it comes as no surprise that real-time social media brand monitoring is an extremely contentious concept for some established brands.

It challenges what was, until the advent of social media, a predictable closed-loop process.

It used to be simple: Marketers had relatively tight control of the process, and the process worked well. The content, distribution and objective of the brand message were determined by the marketing department and properly directed towards the target consumers. The customers obediently believed what they were told and did what was expected; that was the theory anyway.

Those who did not accept the launch or changed their minds due to a bad experience with the brand had no choice but to contact the brand directly or go quietly into the night and switch products. Unsolicited opinions expressed directly to the brand were often excluded from the formal evaluation. At worst, individual customer feedback was seen as the uninvited rant of an extreme minority.

Market research faithfully posed customer-determined brand recall and value perception questions and delivered the answers in numerically sound reports, often in the custody of the same people who would be judged on its findings.

The problem is that for some time it has not been able to faithfully reflect the reality of the changing place of the consumer.

With the rise of web 2.0 and brand monitoring services on social media, the voice of the consumer has developed its own channels for self-expression. You use those channels to discuss the validity of your brand claims and the quality of your product. Customers are now leaking unsubstantiated claims and comparing marketing rhetoric to their own experience of the brand. When it comes to trademark claims, saying no longer does.

Inconsistencies travel fast.

Social media allows people to express their insights about your brand and distribute them with extraordinary speed and breadth. Peer feedback and referrals now legitimately compete with brand talk and often carry a higher level of trust.

This is a disturbing development for the traditional marketing process, and one that marks a major change. It requires a change in the weight that brands give to consumer opinion. It changes the position of the consumer of the passive receiver of a series of linear communications forced to be in the center of an ongoing cycle.

However, many brands remain in denial. Others aren’t sure how, why, or even if they should bring the consumer back into the picture. The truth, however, is that the customer’s place has changed and that empowered consumer is now an uncomfortable reality. It is equally true that brands that continue to ignore them do so at their peril.

Brands must adjust their thinking to accommodate new ways of listening to their customers and understanding the importance of the new voice of the consumer. Above all, brands need to start listening to the conversation surrounding their brand and become familiar with the voice of this new customer.