Creating a Social Media Listening Dashboard Steve Perry & Karen Hartman April 6, 2011

Why It’s Important to Listen Find out what matters to your audience Expand your influence Engage in conversations Discover misinformation Manage your reputation Note trends Find a potential new audience Develop programming ideas And, find out if they are not talking about you

Where do you listen?

What do you listen for? Conversations - get a handle on the public pulse Themes that are important to your mission Complaints Compliments Misinformation Expressed needs Influencers’ opinions Crisis What your competition is doing

How will this information help? Improve your message Find out who the influential voices are Correct misinformation Develop programs Market and promote events, services and policies better

When do you listen? Regularly, and especially… during Important events and programs Celebrations Elections or important political events Important U.S. speeches Crisis situations

Set Up a Listening Dashboard You can use: Netvibes, http://www.netvibes.com/en Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/ Any RSS reader will work, but we like Netvibes best because of its layout, structure and ease of use.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication Content is syndicated using RSS. RSS feeds allow you to see when there is new content on a Web page. Many Web sites, blogs, podcasts, etc. are available as RSS feeds. You can set up searches in several tools that will feed you results whenever new information is added using the keywords you choose. You can “subscribe” to these feeds by using an RSS reader like Netvibes.

Create Feeds From Diverse Resources Add RSS feeds from sites such as: Twitter Search: http://search.twitter.com Google, Google News, Google Blog Search Social Mention: http://socialmention.com Individual blogs - find influential blogs in your country and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can create feeds for Facebook pages by using Feedburner We have provided cheat sheets for you on how to create these feeds.

Strategies for Listening Set up RSS feeds on keywords such as: Embassy name, Ambassador’s name, relevant issue keywords, important events, mission strategic goal themes, etc. Look for trends and patterns in the feed results. What words or themes appear most often? Where are the sources of the most discussion? What are people excited about? What are people’s concerns?

Listening Management Who will do the listening? Who is empowered to do the responding? What is your policy about responding? How much time will you allocate to listening every day? How will you share the knowledge with your team? How will you organize the team effort? How will you know if listening has been useful?