So on Tuesday I published a follow up to my original top 10 reasons post, Five more reasons brands should listen to social media. I meant to publish the second half to that post yesterday but alas I misread my time availability after delivering the keynote at the Broadband Services Forum in Halifax on behalf of Radian6 and traveling back home. So, as promised, though a day late, here are yet another five more reasons brands should be listening to social media.

The Mashup
Product and service innovation is key for any business to stay ahead of the curve. And your customers can be a gold mine of information for new and creative ways to use or adapt your product. If you’re paying close attention, you might be fortunate enough to find customers that have taken your product and done something new with it. For example, Ikea Hacker takes out of the box Ikea furniture and shares customers’ improvements, adaptations and fixes for bugs like a perpetually wobbly stool. Monitoring the web can bring your company ideas for new features or even new products, courtesy of your customers.

The Correction
It happens. An employee puts out incorrect information, a customer or vendor oversteps their relationship and represents themselves or their information as “official” when it might not be. Listening to the conversations happening online affords you the opportunity to hear this dialogue as it unfolds, and step in to correct information when needed as well as reestablish guidelines with the representatives working on your behalf. Preserving your brand equity online is critical, and filtering and correcting misinformation is a critical piece of doing so.

The Advocate
When a brand or company talks about their benefits, people might listen, but they also might be skeptical of the message. When an individual talks passionately about their love of a brand or product, or what a fan they are of a particular company, people take notice. That third party opinion is often viewed as more trustworthy, more genuine, or more objective. Tracking your brand across the web will help you and your company find your advocates – the people that may be singing your praises but whom you don’t yet know. Find them, thank them, encourage them, and use them as a resource to understand your true brand value through your customers’ eyes.

The Common Ground
Birds of a feather flock together, and so do brand enthusiasts, or people with common interests overall. If you’re in the travel industry, finding collections and communities of travel enthusiasts across the web makes your outreach and marketing efforts more direct, more personal, and more effective. Reaching customers where they congregate and starting a relationship based on mutual interests can rapidly build your network and create interest in your brand.

The Infringement
No one likes to play the heavy, but there are very real instances where a person or company may be infringing on the brand or intellectual property that you’ve worked so hard to build. Monitoring your brand across social media will allow you to uncover these instances and quickly decide on a path of resolution. Whether it’s a blog scraping your proprietary content or a website republishing your copyrighted information, you can choose how and where best to address the issues and engage the offenders for a quick solution.

Posted in: Influence, Marketing, Technology, social media monitoring.