The Art of Strategic Listening by Robert Berkman

by Robert Berkman

Blogs, social networking sites, listservs, news alerts, email alerts, RSS feeds. It's a confusing new world for researchers and marketers who know there must be useful information about their customers buried in those trillions of bits and bytes— but who knows how to find it?

Robert Berkman's 2008  book guides you step-by-step through setting up a system for monitoring information from the Internet. You will learn among other things:

• What you can learn from monitoring customer conversation
• Which companies provide what kinds of services and how much they cost
• The questions to ask before hiring paid services
• Why you may prefer to set up your own monitoring system and how to do it
• How to choose and use a news reader to set up RSS feeds
• How to choose keywords for news alerts
• How to avoid information overload
• How strategic listening fits in with traditional research methods
• The ethics of listening in and some dos and don'ts.

Contents

Part1: The Context of Social Media

Chapter 1  The Opportunity: Blogs, social media, and market intelligence

Chapter 2  The Forms of Social Media

Chapter 3 The Art of Tracking Trends

Chapter 4 Ethics of Strategic Listening

Part II: Contracting Out the Job

Chapter 6  The Blog-Monitoring Industry

Chapter 7 Sentiment Detection: How Accurate?

Chapter 8 Alternative Blog-Monitoring Solutions

Part III Do-it-Yourself Tools and Techniques

Chapter 9 Market Intelligence via Google

Chapter 10 Market Intelligence via Technorati

Chapter 11 Market Intelligence via forums, multimedia, social bookmarking, and social networking sites

Chapter 12 Alerts and RSS: Letting technology do the work

Chapter 13 Buzz Surfacing Tools

Chapter 14 Identifying Trends and Evaluating the Credibility of Social Media

Chapter 15 Evaluating Blog and Social Media Credibiity

Chapter 16 The Big Picture and Future Trends

Appendices include suggested readings, productivity tools, and urls of key sites.

The Art of Strategic Listening is the indispensible guide to finding customer information on the Internet and using it wisely and well.

(ISBN 978-0-9786602-7-7, paperback, 260 pages, 2008)

Reviewed in the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Consumer Marketing

Strategic Listening^® is a registered service mark owned by
Strategic Listening, LLC, and is used under license.

Contact Bob Berkman for information about social media workshops at robertberkman@gmail.com