Social Media - The value of listening before speaking

MII Cork October event is a hit at The Clarion Hotel

MII Cork’s October event was abuzz on Tuesday night at The Clarion Hotel with an interactive and invaluable presentation from O’Leary Analytics’ Stephen O’ Leary on “Social Media – The Value of Listening before speaking”.

Stephen has been a media analyst at O’Leary Analytics for 3 years. Previously he worked at the Irish Examiner, Meltwater and an Irish sports agency. As well as an Irish and international client list, research and analysis carried out by O’Leary Analytics has been used by major national and international broadcasters, including RTÉ, TV3 and BBC.

Stephen’s presentation to MII Cork members and guests focused on using social media data to analyse the value of what people say about your event online and using that information when planning your next event or campaign. “People tend to be more honest online as opposed to face to face and there is tremendous value in listening first to what people are saying about you, your event or your industry as this probably means that you will then be listened to an awful lot more when you interact with them”, O’Leary explained.

 

Using Arthur’s Day 2011 as a case study, Stephen presented the data for the online conversation from September 1st to 30th reiterating that just because the event is on a certain day does not mean the conversation stops and starts there – you need to look at the build-up and the conversation after the event.

The quantitative results showed 10,918 results were with boards.ie (the most prominent domain accounting for 5% of the conversations) – demonstrating that we must not forget the power of message boards in Ireland. Sentiment was also very positive at 4 to 1 for Arthur’s Day 2011 with over 8,000 conversations around it on Twitter, followed by the message boards and forums, blogs posts, videos, photos and editorial – where users go on to news sites and leave comments underneath. An exercise such as this also allows organisations/brands to test the effectiveness of ad spend offline by measuring online activity and if it has had an impact on conversation, that is, are more people talking? Is it positive?

O’Leary concluded that “when setting up online, look at where the conversation is happening already and then decide on your online media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter etc. Also, be sure to address the negative”.

Adding to O’Leary’s presentation, Chairperson of MII Cork, Jenny O’Flynn added, “Monitoring online conversations (listening) is instrumental to planning and communicating future campaigns not only that but the consensus among marketing specialists seems to be – if it happens online, deal with it online and then take it offline where necessary!”

The next MII Cork event is on Wednesday 21 November at The Metropole Hotel where speaker Edel Russell, Innovation, Consumer & IT Director of Musgrave Retail Partners Ireland will further expand on sentiment with her presentation “Putting insight and the customer at the heart of your business.”

Booking for the November and future events can be made through the MII web site www.mii.ie

Twitter: @miicork
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YouTube: youtube.com/MarketingInstitute1
Events: Download Calendar of Events 2012/2013 in PDF format
MII Cork Page: mii.ie/cork

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