One of the more informative and substantive panels that I got to attend while at Blogworld was hosted by Jeremiah Owyang, partner at the Altimeter Group. The topic of the discussion was about the future of social media and its relationship to business. One particular element that I’d like to highlight in this post is this whole concept of listening. For businesses, it’s really important for them to listen to the conversations without jumping right in and trying to sell their wares. Here are eight objectives from Owyang to help define a listening policy:

Don’t have any objectives at all.

I would imagine this to be a pretty good objective to keep in mind. The best way to actually understand what’s being said is to just not have any distraction. Don’t set any goals or accomplishments in mind when having conversations with your customers and partners. Just listen to them talk and that’s it.

Tracking of brand mentions.

With social media, the purpose of listening is to understand what others are saying about you and your brand. The objective of listening is to make sure you’re tracking each of those mentions. Through tools such as Radian6, ScoutLabs, Mighty Brands and others, you’re going to be able to do a pretty good job understanding what’s being said – the good AND the bad.

Identifying market risks and opportunities.

If you’re always talking, how are you going to be aware of what the risks are when foraying into a new demographic or market? The same will go for the opportunities as well. Will you be letting all of this pass you by?

Improving campaign efficiency.

Once you’ve launched a campaign, isn’t it important to measure whether you’re on the mark with your marketing efforts or would you rather just spray and pray that you’ve achieved the maximum amount of attention? Listen to your audience and you’ll be able to do practically real-time updates to your performance.

Measuring support efforts.

Like with improving campaign efficiency, by listening to the crowd and the customers, you’re going to want to pay attention to how you’re reacting to them from a customer service standpoint. Just because you’ve reached out and your customers are convinced that they really want to buy your product, don’t make it seem like the service stops there. It doesn’t. Monitor the wave of sentiment towards your product even after the sale.

Responding to customer inquiry.

This probably can go without saying. If your customer has any complaints, feedback or suggestions, make sure that they feel appreciated. Social media has become customer service. It’s about the people. And their voices can be heard much clearer than yours.

Better understand customers.

Social media has become market research 2.0. It’s allowed businesses to better understand their customers in a more targeted way. No longer are people just numbers on a table or chart. The human side of research will appear and give you personalities and traits that can go a longer way to make your company a success.

Being proactive and anticipating customers.

If you think you know your customers, then get out there and anticipate their every move, complaint, suggestion, feedback and even idea. If you know that a customer’s anniversary is coming up, make a proactive choice to reach out via social media to congratulate them. If it’s another special occasion or perhaps just something important in their lives, use it to have a positive connection.

Still think that there isn’t enough reason for you to listen to your customers using social media? The objectives given above by Jeremiah Owyang are pretty powerful individually and combined, all eight can really carry some weight with customers. Show them that you care by not talking…and listen to THEIR needs.

The following is a summary recollection of what happened at BlogWorld 2009 in Las Vegas. In this post, I will look at the activities that took place in the last days of BlogWorld.

A lot of activity took place during the first day of BlogWorld, but the next couple of days really picked up as there were several more keynotes that took the form of panel discussions and brought out a few well-known celebrities to talk about why they are embracing social media and blogging.

The second day kicked off with the CEO of Technorati, Richard Jalichandra, giving a spirited talk about the state of the blogosphere which typically gives people an idea on where things stand in terms of adoption and the overall industry. After Jalichandra spoke, the keynote continued with an invigorating panel discussion on the future of journalism, moderated by Brian Solis and featured CNN anchor Don Lemon, NYU Journalism Department professor Jay Rosen, the chief operating officer of Current TV, Joanna Drake Earl and radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt. This was a rather spirited discussion with all on the panelists pretty much supporting social media & blogging and basically stating that old school journalism needs to evolve in order to survive.

Breaking news from this keynote came from Don Lemon who announced that throughout the conference, they were going to try and break the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest viral message across any social network and at the same time help to beat cancer. The plan was simple…attendees needed to simply add the hashtag #beatcancer to all their tweets, blog posts, videos, etc and then through monitoring done by Radian6, we would know before the end of the conference whether or not #beatcancer had become a world record. Well…it did…and it raised some money for cancer research as well.

The rest of the day was filled with panel discussions on a variety of topics, including assessing ROI in social media, how to build and market an iPhone application, the good and the bad about social media, the ethics of mommy blogging, etc. What really was inspiring was the fact that BlogWorld had adapted to the growing changes in the industry so that they had tracks specifically for mommy bloggers and for military bloggers as well – which have grown remarkably over the past few years. It all wrapped up with perhaps a rather ecstatic keynote given by podcaster and host of TWiT.tv, Leo Laporte.

The third day began again with Brian Solis moderating yet another panel…this time he had quite a few celebrities with him including, actor Anthony Edwards (“ER”, “Top Gun” and “Revenge of the Nerds”), Robin Antin from the Pussycat Dolls, DJ Matt Goss, and successful record producer and artist Jermaine Dupri. The talk was all about how being a celebrity has changed with the world of social media. For Anthony Edwards, it has helped him make a difference with people in another country as he is trying to build a hospital or a school for children in Africa. Matt Goss has embraced social media in a way that allows him to get fan feedback on his records and also to help be more charitable back in England. This is also the same way with Jermaine Dupri, but he also has a affinity for looking online and potentially scouting out new talent for his record label.

After the keynote panel, attendees were dispersed throughout the convention center looking for yet more sessions to go to and some were really interesting including one about listening by Jeremiah Owyang and even a panel on influence with Tristan Harris and Micah Baldwin. If you were interested as well, a travel-related path was available on the last day talking about the relevancy of social media with tourism and hospitality.

It all wrapped up with the closing keynote given by AllTop founder and author of Reality Check, Guy Kawasaki who brought on stage Chad Vadar and some other people in what could have been one of the funniest things to see at BlogWorld this year.

All in all, I really enjoyed being at BlogWorld. It’s a great place to network and meet old and new friends while getting some insights into how blogging & social media should be done.

Photo Credit: All photos shown here were taken by Kenneth Yeung.

The following is a summary recollection of what happened at BlogWorld 2009 in Las Vegas. In this post, I will look at the activities in Day 1.

The bloggers have invaded Las Vegas. There was no stopping it. For the third straight year, thousands of bloggers, twitterers, and affecianados converged on sin city to hear from some of the best and brightest in the industry and learn from their experiences.

This was my first year at Blogworld and I must say that it lived up to its hype of one of the largest conferences in the technology and social media scene. It was also the first year of Blogworld ever since it merged with the New Media Expo. You wouldn’t think that the conference was that large since there were only about 10 rooms and a giant exhibition hall, but most of the time it was packed.

To my dismay, I thought there would be more empirical data and facts that I could take away. However, when I’m listening to the panelists and even some of the keynotes, I don’t think that I got anything like that to write about – but there was more valuable information that would be useful from a personal level.

The 2009 conference kicked off with Laura Fitton talking about how to be awesome that had a close tie-in with Gary Vaynerchuk’s upcoming book “Crush It”. Her address helped provide a good impression on what to look forward to during this three day conference and also motivated the audience to be better than they are and to strive to be rockstars. But, of course, she couldn’t get away without mentioning Twitter during her keynote…more than a few times.

Then panel discussions were had until the lunch keynote that featured Wall Street Journal writer Kara Swisher interviewing Scott Monty about the social media work that he does for Ford Motor Company. While a great value, the dismal audio system made it hard to hear and, combined with, the incessant noise of chatter by people interested in networking instead of learning, made the whole affair rather meaningless.

More panels were held until the NEXT keynote – stay with me here…we’re only on the third keynote of the day. This time it was a panel discussion with Altimeter Group’s own Jeremiah Owyang leading the talk on whether sponsored conversations were any good. It was a bit of a lively debate and what helped this panel was the fact a genuine lawyer was on the dais to help explain the recent FTC disclosure guideline to everyone. Still, I had hoped to see more of a combative nature to the topic which would have made it more entertaining to observe.

Day 1 ended with the comedic and marketing stylings of Chris Brogan who left us with the message that bloggers need to get out of our own way and to be more helpful to others. Nothing really mind-blowing but always good to have a reminder of the potential we have to make a change in our community. I found it a great way to end the day especially since it was very much like a reality check.

To me, day 1 seemed very much like a source of inspiration. There was a lot of information passed through and that’s what people were expecting. Panelists shared their experiences and success stories, not necessarily facts and figures that you can take back to work and share it with your boss. This is probably one of the biggest things that I’ve enjoyed about Blogworld…it adds a very different feel to it and lets you just sit there and absorb the knowledge and then you can write your own success.

Photo Credit: All photos shown here were taken by Kenneth Yeung.