How has your organization used listening tools and what have been the results? Need A Few Stories ...

Photo by I Timmy

For the WeAreMedia tactical module on Listening we need a few nuggets, anecdotes, or stories in a few sentences about how your nonprofit has used a listening tool (technorati, google alerts, or RSS readers, or summize/tweetscan to listen).

• Your organization and social media goal/strategy?
• What tool?
• What happened?
• Why was it valuable and not a big waste of time?

I'll make one up for you now. 

The XYZ organization provides phone technical assistance for whatever you fill in the blanks.  The marketing director set up google alerts for its web site url, its name and executive director.   One day, the marketing director got an alert to a blog post that was highly critical of the organization's services -- in particular how the person did not receive good customer service (were left on hold for 15 minutes).    The marketing director read the post and left a comment saying they were gong to investigate and thanking the blogger.  Next, the marketing director facilitated a discussion with customer service reps about how to reduce on-hold wait time.

So, if you have a listening story you'd like to share - drop in the comments or over at the wiki here.

 

Comments

[Jon]

Just minutes before clicking over from Twitter, our Outreach guy dropped by my office to ask me for the link to one of my Skunkworks projects, a drupal-centric site that pulls in RSS feeds from partners and google alerts and republishes their "teaser" stories with community tagging/rating/comments (and a master outbound RSS of course) -- his weekly newsletter to the volunteer service field was light on the stories this week, and he was looking around for anything else.

[Grant Young]

When I was working at WWF-Australia on the inaugural Earth Hour, I spent a lot of time following Google blog search alerts for chatter about the event, as well as reading and responding to comments on MySpace.

We were able to identify key questions about the event, as well as some key negative responses, and then respond in our broader comms and marketing efforts well before those issues became mainstream.

In another case, by following key enviro-blogs as well we were able to pick up a trend in dialogue towards nuclear power about a month before it hit the headlines in Australia.

[Jon Camfield]

Left the URL out of my skunkworks project: http://beta.servicevote.org