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Q. What advice would you give to a company starting a social media listening/ 

reputation management initiative?

Kate Webb, Vision Express

: Listen, listen and listen some more. Social media isn’t 

about who shouts the loudest, it’s about engaging in conversation with your customers/

prospective customers and about keeping them informed.

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Part 2  Strategy and applications

There are some free tools which you can use at the very beginning, such as 

Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, but bear in mind these are often limited to either one plat‑

form, or to scheduling outreach messages only.

If you are really serious about social media, and I think companies need to be these 

days, you need to enlist a social media monitoring platform, which will enable you to 

listen to what consumers are saying about your brand across micromedia (Twitter/

Facebook), blogs and forums.

You won’t be able to respond to all consumer mentions, due to forum rules, but 

you can at least listen and feed this back into the business, so you can modify activi‑

ties, or continue doing popular ones!

Start small, don’t overstretch your resources, and be realistic about the amount of 

time/resource and money that social media can take up.

A few key things to remember are that once you start talking, you need to con‑

tinue the commitment to maintain the conversations, and ensure you gain  inter‑ 

 company awareness; there is nothing worse than talking to a customer via Twitter, 

and then having them go into store to be presented with ‘We’re on Twitter? I didn’t 

know that’.

You will also need to get to know your customers; the ideal solution here is to 

integrate social media activities into your core customer database, so you have one 

customer view, but this can take time, money and resource. In the interim, the better 

social media monitoring tools these days are offering engagement platforms, which 

allow you to add notes and assign tasks, so you can build up a reasonable knowledge 

of your social media customers.