While it’s vital to create good digital listening posts, there’s little point in knowing what’s going on if you don’t have the means to respond and engage effectively in the new landscape. I call this ‘Engaged Listening’.
Market-leading companies are changing the way they communicate, putting far more effort into creating dynamic, discoverable content that is easy to digest and propagate. More about this in my up-coming ‘Newsroom of the Future’ post. In the meantime, here are some examples of companies putting out news in an engaging media-rich format:
Integrated platforms
There is a trend among leading bluechip companies towards integrated digital platforms. That is, integrating the content-creation tools into the listening tools. This allows everything to be measured and joined-up.
By consolidating content, publication, relationships and results into one Integrated Platform, it not only increases the efficiency of the team’s ability to listen and engage, it also uses measurement as an integral part of our day-to-day activity. Take this scenario;
An organisation responds to an insight by building and deploying some key content. The content is then published and distributed through the same platform. The organisation then uses the same platform to measure all parts of the engagement cycle, not just the end results.
An integrated digital listening platform will measure the number of emails read, images downloaded and links clicked on. In turn, this will get fed back into the CRM database so that we know what lights the fire of our key stakeholders and influencers. Coverage will similarly be linked back to the same database, giving us vital intelligence about interest areas. All of this increases the organisation’s intelligence and improves future targeting accuracy.
Centralised knowledge
Yes, it is possible to do this with separate tools. But separate tools create separate knowledge pools and most organisations now are working hard to centralise and share knowledge, ideas and creativity.
The explosion of data that we are all experiencing, while sometimes intoxicating, causes most of us organisational issues. What do we look at? What don’t we look at? We have to find ways of simplifying our data view and cutting out the chaff.
Large teams, often spread across different locations, also need central repositories where key content, relationships and intelligence can be housed in one place to ensure consistency of message, effective distribution of media assets and up-to-the-minute awareness of brand reputation.
Finally, all of this has to happen fast because the Engaged Web is constantly mutating and evolving. Joined up platforms create joined-up thinking that’s quicker than the step-by-step approach.
Sam
