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

2. 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

3. Where do you listen?

4. 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

5. 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

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

7. Set Up a Listening Dashboard
You can use:
Netvibes,
Google Reader
Pageflakes
Any RSS reader will work, but we like Netvibes best because of its layout, structure and ease of use.

8. 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.

9. Create Feeds From Diverse Resources
Add RSS feeds from sites such as:
Twitter Search:
Google, Google News, Google Blog Search
Social Mention:
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.

10. 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?

11. 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?