Listening to act Listening to learn model

This model by Pingitore and Detgen (2012) describes two types of listening in a social media environment, Listening to Act and Listening to learn. Although Both types of ‘listening’ can produce valuable information, they are different in their aims, operations and the skill sets needed to execute each.

Listening to Act mainly looks at customer relationship management and customer retention strategies. Pingitore and Detgen (2012) suggest two important aspects of listening to act, Social Selling and Social Servicing. Social selling is described as leveraging social media to enhance one-to-one marketing strategies for branding, promotion, prospecting and lead generation. Although some still believe that social selling on social media platforms does not work due to consumer resistance, it is suggested that competitions, encouraging user generated content and sweepstakes are good ways to engage consumers on social media platforms. A great example of this can be seen by looking at Subway's strategy of publishing content, sweepstakes and competitions to encourage consumers to purchase their products through interactions.

The second aspect of Listening to Act is the idea that social media has now also become a customer services point. This is often hard for brands to do as consumers now expect this to be applicable over all social media platforms and they expect the same customer services as traditional techniques such as email or call centre customer services. By this they mean that consumers expect empathy, the same response time and problem resolutions. According to research by American Express (2012) customers who received positive customer service on social media would spend 21 per cent more with companies that deliver great social servicing.

Listening to learn proposes that brands can look at consumer posts and interactions to gain valuable information on their beliefs, motivations and behaviours. However, Pingitore and Detgen (2012) look at three different analyst results and find that the results were very inconsistent between researchers due to validity, pragmatically and limited reliability. This makes social media research difficult, for brands intending to use this research method a solid research structure is required to make sure research stays on track and only looks at relevant posts. Deciding on the depth of research is also important, the most common of these include performance tracking, comparative analysis between brands and an overall customer population.

Although social media research is rich in content, it is also unstructured, fluid and constantly changing which usually means data is dirtier than traditional market research data. Therefore, traditional research methods are still more relevant than social media research. Pingitore and Detgen (2012) suggest that problems found through traditional research can be qualitatively improved by social media research and that the two methods used together are more effective than they are individually.