Who: Speakers: Susan Tenby | TechSoup Global; Janet Fouts; Kira Marchenese

What: An important part of your social media strategy should be listening for people and organizations who are talking about the issues you want to discuss.How do you know which networks will be most effective to reach your goals? Listen first and discover where the conversations are!

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Tools for listening:

Goodbyebuddy – find out when people aren’t listening to you any more. Learn what people want to hear.

Tweetdeck – add columns to listen and track conversations or watch mentions. Not just following mentions but also events – anything with hashtags, etc.

Google Alerts – remember that they aren’t always accurate or enough to find everything.

Mixed Reality events – conference going on in Second Life with a live streamed video into Second Life, it expands the audience exponentially. Conversations take place in both places separately and together.  Multi-channel conversations.

Flickr and YouTube – monitor and subscribe to activity around you, not just your own.

Lessons for Listening:

Don’t be afraid! Hold the reins: if you aren’t listening, paying attention, and diving in then the conversation can get so far away that you aren’t able to join in.  You can only have a real impact and “control” or influence over the public conversation about you, your organization or your programming if you are listening and engaging.

Where are the conversations?

• Blogs
• Linkedin
• Forums
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Communities
• Ning/Yahoo/Google

What to listen for:

• brand
• cxo names
• sponsors and donors
• supporters and evangelists
• industry and local news
• topics of corporate and/or personal interest

Find conversations quickly: check out Radian6, Biz360 and so on – a fairly expensive way to listen but comes with functionality to sort, track, etc.  Not about follower numbers, but about engagement and content.

Lazyfeed: use it for when you don’t have anything to say but want to say something. Set up keyword searches and it brings you relevant tweets and links. Allows you to be a thought-leader because you are on top of the conversations.

Twitter: even if you don’t want to engage on it, you need to be listening there. Set up alerts and so on.

Check out listening tools at: http://janetfouts.com/listen/

Listen, engage, repeat!

Follow #10ntc.listen on Twitter for links and conversation from this session.