As a community team, we have a rather methodical approach to how we connect with and engage with our customers online. We refer to all of these conversations as “answering the social phone”, and we approach our engagement with that in mind. There are several pieces to that, including how we organize our process and workflow, and the most important piece: our intent.

The Listening Grid

At Radian6, we have set up what we call a “listening grid”, or a system for capturing, routing, and responding to posts – answering the Social Phone – that helps us scale our engagement across the organization.

Genevieve is our community analyst, and she’s the one that mans the front lines to capture Radian6-related discussions as they occur. Using the Engagement Console, Gen sorts through the posts and for each one, determines:

• Whether or not it requires engagement or response
• If it does, who the appropriate team member is to deal with it
• How we tag, classify, and otherwise add metadata to each post for tracking and reporting

If it’s someone interested in Radian6 or a demo, she’ll make sure they get to the sales folks. A support issue? She’ll make sure our support team gets connected immediately. And if it’s a tweet or a blog post that encourages some conversation and connection from our community team, she’ll send it out to me, David, Lauren, or Katie for comment or engagement.

And all the while, as she classifies and routes posts based on that criteria, she’s entering data into our system that will help us report on and analyze that activity later on to gauge our success. We’re always tweaking and refining this process, and our goal is to serve as a model for how other companies can extend listening and engagement across their organizations.

Scaling Engagement

Our team has a coverage calendar during the day to be sure that someone is always checking our alerts during business hours. We don’t have “official” after hours coverage, but members of our team are usually knocking around online in the evenings so we cover response and engagement on a more ad-hoc basis during those hours (our support channel on Twitter has specific hours posted to avoid confusion).

We can tell who is online in the Engagement Console, and during the day, Gen routes posts to folks based on their a) area of market focus (agency, corporate marcom, CRM/consumer affairs, etc) b) who might be the right personality and interest “fit” for the discussion, and for more generalized discussions, c) a rotation of those who are available and online. Particular topics and mentions get handled by different members of the team, or even sometimes executives or folks in other areas of the business if they’re best suited.

We’ve also assembled a Radian6 Playbook that outlines specifics on things like workflow, procedures and protocol, response guidelines, and the like. That way, our entire team can work from the same sheet music and expectations, and new members of our team have great guiderails within which to learn the ropes and join in seamlessly.

Above Our Brand

We’re also working hard to take our engagement beyond just Radian6-specific discussion, and into the industry topics and verticals that represent the companies we serve.

For example, our team members are doing proactive listening for subjects in and around relevant industries. We’re all listening to the larger social media discussions around monitoring, measurement, metrics, community, engagement, and enterprise applications (including what our customers and competitors are all talking about.)

Katie is paying close attention to how social media is impacting traditional corporate marketing and communication functions. Lauren is listening for conversations around social CRM, consumer affairs, and she’s also working with some higher ed programs that are exploring social media. Teresa is paying attention to how content marketing is impacting business, and what consistent social media topics might make for informative content projects on our end. Our new agency community manager will keep in touch with that community and their conversations. And I’m paying close attention to discussions about integrating social media across businesses beyond just marketing and PR.

Each of us is keeping our finger on the pulse of some broader searches to find conversations each day that we can contribute to and participate in. Our purpose isn’t to sell anything or pitch our product, but to be there to listen, absorb, learn, and contribute expertise when we can. Paying attention to what’s happening around our brand is critical to us understanding how our company and industry fit into the bigger picture.

Attitude and Intent

The most important part of our engagement is the intent, or the approach we take to connecting with our community online. None of the process is worth a fig if we’re not there for the right reasons in the first place.

First of all, we seek to be helpful. Whether it’s a specific Radian6 question or a more general social media discussion, we want to get people the information they need when they need it. That’s why our immediate product questions, troubleshooting, or inquiries are always the first things we address, because that’s what we’re here for, first and foremost.

We’re also here to help educate and empower businesses about social media, which is where the “above our brand” discussions come into play. Whether it’s contributing our expertise in a blog comment or creating content and events to help people expand their knowledge of social media for business, our community team is here to engage and participate and share what we know. We believe it’s critical for us to participate in discussions that are about more than just our company, but about the business challenges and interest areas that are important to our customers and prospects.

And of course, we’re here to learn. We’re eager to always absorb how the social web is changing and challenging businesses as a whole, how our customers and potential customers want and need to take advantage of its potential, and how the community perceives and values Radian6 as a company. We want to demonstrate that we’re invested in the very communities we hope to build.

We believe that Radian6 not only has the opportunity to help companies recognize this shift, but to empower them with the business intelligence, tools, and ideas to make the transition themselves from both a cultural and operational perspective. So when we’re engaging in social media, we’re always keeping these goals in mind, and using them to shape our interactions and priorities.

So that’s a bit about how we approach listening and engagement with our team. What other questions do you have? How are you handling that part of your business? We’d love to chat more with you in the comments.

image credit: Seattle Municipal Archives