Listen up.

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October 25th, 2012

One of the most under appreciated aspects of social media and how it can affect your marketing is how they give you the ability to ‘listen in’ on consumers.

By setting up listening posts online, whether through conversation monitors like Social Mention, keyword tools like Google Alerts or trending topic tools like Twitter hashtags, you can not only get a sense of what the public is saying about you, your products and competitors online. In many cases it can even give you inspiration.

One recent example of this is the case with Samsung and its Galaxy III smart phone.

Samsung’s latest television ads, which mock Apple’s recent release of its new iPhone 5, seem to be striking a chord with consumers, at least judging by its popularity on YouTube (32 million+ views as of this writing). The South Korean electronics maker credits part of its success to the fact that the insight behind its advertising came straight from the consumer’s mouth (or in this case, the consumers keyboard).

According to Samsung, the ads’ scripts were based on “hundreds of thousands” of Tweets the company monitored that complained or poked fun at specific features of the iPhone 5. Here’s on example of the TV campaign.

One of the customers says: “I heard that you have to have an adapter to use the dock on the new one.” Another young man chimes in: “Yeah, yeah but they make the coolest adapters.” Reportedly, those lines and other parts of the ad’s script came straight from Twitter conversations.

This is just one example of how social media are helping marketers shape their ad campaigns, or even their products themselves. Procter & Gamble’s Duracell Battery division used data from social media to help it develop the Duracell Powermat, a portable device that allows smart phone charging on the go. Duracell’s decision to use iconic red and green battery signals came about after social media analytics found that people often referred to the color of their battery signal when they were expressing frustration about losing power.

It’s rare that social media monitoring alone will provide all the marketing answers for you. But it’s one more tool to use to get a “voice of the customer” that just might lead to some inspired executions, whether through ad messaging or product refinement.

Just listen.

Posted by Mickey