Most people in the communications industry are probably familiar with social listening by now, but many are limiting its usefulness.

Many companies only use social listening for monitoring, which basically means turning on a listening tool and waiting for something bad to happen.

That’s smart to do. Many PR pros who have been burned before can attest to the damage one moment in time can cause when an issue blows up and they’re not there to throw water on it. Monitoring allows us to inform our clients of an issue and react to it before it spins into a full-blown crisis.

However, social listening offers significant value in several other areas that a growing number of our clients are benefitting from and getting a leg up on the competition by doing so. Some of these include measurement, influencer identification and research to inform strategy.

My favorite part of my job is that last one. It’s where the magic happens. Where thoughtful research informs impactful insight and is leveraged to drive smart strategy and breakthrough creative.

In this case, social listening becomes affordable consumer research. Whereas in the past, our only choice was focus groups or surveys, which I do recommend in the proper situations where budget permits, social listening now allows us a window into the consumer psyche in “the wild,” so to speak, where they’re sharing their honest opinions with their friends and families.

My team loves conducting these social listening audits for our clients, and our clients love the results. As we analyze all of these posts – often looking back a year or more – we’re identifying the key topics that are driving the conversation and then overlaying those topics with sentiment. In this way, we’re able to determine what proportion of conversation is driven by each topic, as well as which topics are driving the greatest positive sentiment and which are driving the most negative.

This is powerful stuff because even though one topic might drive the majority of discussion, it may also be the most dispassionate area of discussion. By identifying the most passionate conversations, we can advise our clients to increase the focus of their creative to amplify the positive aspects and potentially correct the misconceptions that are driving the negative (or in some cases, stay away from the most hot-button issues).

While this is valuable when looking at our clients on their own, it becomes even more powerful when we do the same with conversation about their competitors. By comparing and contrasting, we are able to identify areas of greatest opportunity as well as areas where competitors may already be entrenched and therefore not worth our effort to focus on.

Finally, when we analyze unbranded industry conversation – where consumers are talking but brands aren’t mentioned – we add an extremely important layer where we can learn where consumers’ heads are, the emerging trends where no brand has yet set claim. This is the all-important white space opportunity where we can get a jump on competitors and look to own an area on the forward edge of the industry.

With all of these components in place, we can effectively map a landscape of the industry that we can use on behalf of our clients to establish smart strategy to build creative programming around.

And because we’ve compiled all of this data going back historically, we are now able to establish benchmarks and set goals for future performance based on the forward-thinking strategy we’ve created, which allows us to measure and improve, measure and improve.

I get riled up just thinking about it. How can you not get excited about this stuff?!