Part IV
Listening's New Frontiers
Up until now, lessons from contemporary research and cases provided guidance based on the best of what is known about social media listening. As a young and still emerging field, listening is evolving and pushing boundaries. To understand what lies ahead, we consulted the Lewis and Clarks, experts actively exploring and mapping listening's new frontiers. This part's five chapters bring together 15 contributions from 18 leaders who grapple each day with listening and its business value for companies, their brands, and their products and services.
Rooted in their real-world experiences and presented from their perspectives, the essays of these leaders are remarkable, for their focus on issues central to business building, their specificity, and the strength of their prescriptions. There is, however, one overarching theme and directive that connects them all: Expand your thinking about listening and the ways you can apply it. Future contributions rest upon listening to new signals; diving into deeper levels of analysis and insight; basing decisions on listening data; and reinventing media and marketing as social processes centered on engagement. Companies need to become listening organizations through and through, if they are to achieve listening's goal: to sense, respond, and act in a timely customer-centered manner that mutually benefits their business and the people they serve.
Five winning plays were derived from these essays and each is covered ...
