Q: What is a listening platform
A: A listening platform is a type of software that monitors conversations, blogs and comments (both negative and positive) and just about anything you can type in multiple languages.
For example, business owners may want to monitor the following:
- Product sales leads (especially– it’s the most popular)
- Product mentions
- Employee recruiting
- Competitor Info
And Individuals might want to monitor
- Product Price Drops
- Celebrity Tracking
- News Alerts
- Medical Trial Alerts
- And especially job hunting
And are expanding in some really exciting ways. They’re going beyond information aggregation and delivery and into actual customer motivation analysis. It’s moving past the “where, what and when” and answering the cutting edge questions like “why” and “how” and discernment of customer motivations.
These features are especially important to our customers.
Q: So how does Findable use Listening Platforms for its customers?
A: So for instance,
- We’ve helped a dentist correct the frustrations of former patients reported their bad experiences in social media.
- We’ve helped car dealers find cars to buy and resell from craigslist.
- We’ve worked with a major airline to track oil prices and keep tabs on the conversation around it. To help determining the speed of their daily flights and conserve fuel.
- We’ve helped a major car insurance company pick the best listening platform to engage customer’s complaints on twitter.
Q: Ok, let’s say I’m a business owner and when you started talking about sales leads I was immediately interested. Tell me other uses for listening platforms.
A: Yea, that’s the bottom line, isn’t it, sales leads. I hear that alot.
Ok, for instance, let’s say you need to track the competition on Harvard Business Review and Fast Company magazine whenever they are mentioned there. Listening Platforms excel at that.
Or lets say you’re in a PR department which needs to know immediately when bad press pops up on twitter, linkedin, facebook, Quora and blog postings. Listening Platforms are essential in that situation.
And then there are Advertising agencies. They have to manage multiple ad campaigns for many clients and nothing delivers instant feedback on a campaign like a Listening Platform.
The uses for Listening Platforms are endless. And we specialize building company’s strategies for using these tools. That makes it much easier than going it alone. We can help with their strategies and recommend the best ones for their needs.
Q: Ok, so this a lot of information. If I’m confused about all this technology what should I do?
A: Definitely email us your questions. Or call.
Things are moving so fast that questions and answers can change weekly. So we understand getting confused.
We try to solve our customer’s problems and if we don’t know the answer, we know a lot of people who do.
Some of our customers want just a social media introduction and others want every strategy that we can provide. We listen, research and make recommendations.
Q: Tell me what you see coming next
A: Well, the idea of attention as a currency is interesting to me. It has always been a currency. Ad agencies, marketing and sales departments have always known this.
But the internet has made attention harder to get for long periods of time.
That’s what’s called the “long tail of attention”. And it shows more and more that people are fragmenting their time across many different things that interest them most.
So knowing your audience is more important than ever to get people to spend their attention on you.
Basically, you must spend your attention on them and their interests to make them a customer.
Many people believe that customer engagement and conversation is the future of business.
And listening platforms help you know what the customer wants sometimes before the customer even does.
So I say that to answer your question of what’s coming next. Listening Platforms are just a stepping stone. I see computational linguistics with help from sociologists converging into a system of tools engaging in consumer motivation prediction and action.
But that just the beginning. And it’s probably for another video.