Hearing vs. Listening
By: Caroline Fong
Since last Wednesday, I’ve been sick with a sore throat, which slowly morphed into rampant sneezes and a headache. But that didn’t stop me from jumping at the chance to check out the social media conference happening at the waterside hotel.
Lured by the promises of seeing (and smelling) what ‘my man could look like’, my peeps and I attended the tweetup party on Thursday night. I happily tottered away that night with a precious picture with Isaiah Mustafa, along with a blue glitter party hat and dead glow sticks – all signifying a night well done.
Eight hours later, I was back at the hotel, listening to Weber Shandwick’s Natalie Petouhoff, Bank of America’s Kevin Cole, and Sword Ciboodle’s Mitch Lieberman’s experiences and expertise on social media strategy in terms of integrating the voice of the customer beyond the call center (that was the name of the breakout session, by the way).
They discussed the use of live tools for data and research for customer service and social media strategy, instead of reading monthly reports. The timeliness of the former actually helps mobilize the whole organization into acting on the data and feedback they received, as compared to reading a report, putting it down and possibly just forgetting about it – hearing, but not listening.
However, they did warn against the shadows of such speedy communication on platforms, such as Twitter. They asked the audience: “Are we encouraging negativity since people know we’re listening?” If consumers know they’re listening, will they always expect answers in seconds to questions that may take a day to answer? Perhaps that is the time to differentiate between questions that may be answered via Twitter and ones that may be answered via e-mail, they said. So let the customer know what your next actions are.
Caroline Fong is a senior studying Advertising at Boston University. She’s on the board of BU’s Ad Club and is an active volunteer for a non-profit called ASPIRE. Follow her on Twitter
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