Currently we’re merely listening for what we want to hear, thereby restricting the full potential of social listening. As more than merely a tool for monitoring, text mining, analyzing, or customer experience management and intelligence, social listening can determine when and how to actively facilitate buyers, users, and followers through to the desired outcome.

There are 13 steps all buyers or followers – consumers of products as well as services, B2B as well as B2C – take before they finally choose to buy a new solution. The first 10 of these steps include hidden, change management, and buy-in issues that are essential, but not directly related to, a purchase. We’re not tracking or listening for these steps but it’s quite possible to do so: they are hidden in the unstructured data and generally missed by keyword based analytics and sentiment analysis.

With an enhanced understanding of each step along the buying decision journey, we can first apply our powerful analytical and predictive tools, and then follow up with additional facilitation vehicles to guide next steps, such as helping them assemble those whose buy-in is necessary. We wait for them to take these steps anyway: it’s possible to actively enable them.

Let’s not squander the full capability of the powerful social tools we’ve got; let’s begin listening to everything our customers have to tell us.

Let’s chat. Together we can partner with your current tools and technology and add some capability to facilitate the buying journey. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

For more information on Buying Facilitation® go to www.buyingfacilitation.com . To read more about the 13 buying decision steps go to www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com .