The topic of listening gets a lot of attention in the context of social interactions and online community. It makes sense - listening should be one of the primary reasons for using social media to engage your audience. Giving your users the power to talk back is an important necessity for any online community and if you’re paying attention, you can learn a lot from them. 

However, listening often focuses only on gathering and presenting interesting information while missing the opportunity to directly impact real users. The big benefit really comes when you take insights gleamed from listening to your community and put them in front of the right people who can take the appropriate action. 

This is the first of two blog posts where we will share the key capabilities of Pluck Listeners and what role they play in a successful community based on your desired outcomes. First, let’s look at what comprises successful listening from the Pluck perspective.

As we built Listeners into Pluck, we focused on the idea of listening as a means to take meaningful action. To achieve this, we identified that successful listening would have three primary components: 

• Identifying - defining and locating content of interest and noting it appropriately
• Routing - getting the content in front of the right internal stakeholders 
• Acting - enabling stakeholders to take the right action for the content, user or both

Since community managers and moderators are on the front lines of listening, we introduced these components into our Moderation Workbench where different types of listeners can be defined, applied to content queues and acted upon. Let’s take a look at each of these components in more detail.

Identifying
To identify content of interest, the Moderation Workbench now supports the ability to define multiple lists of keywords and phrases of interest that can each be named according to their use. For example, a list named “Competition” could contain the names of various competitors while another list named “Defects” could have terms commonly associated with product problems. By creating these Listeners, Pluck will note any new content according to the criteria it matches within Pluck Analytics and also queue it for review.    

Routing
To route identified content to the right stakeholders, the Moderation Workbench also allows for content queues to be dedicated to specific Listeners. Continuing our example, content that matched the “Defects” Listener can be placed into a dedicated “Customer Response” queue and reviewed separately from other content that may be under review for other reasons such as abuse reports or spam suspicion. Dedicating a Listener queue means specific users can be assigned to just that queue to review the content independently from other moderators and community managers. In the case of our “Customer Response” queue, content can be quickly directed to Customer Support representatives instead of front-line moderators. 

Acting
Once the right people are reviewing the identified content, they have the ability to take appropriate action on both the content and user as needed. From within the Moderation Workbench, they can edit the content to remove sensitive portions such as a competitor’s name or a price listing and then approve or remove the content from being displayed on the site. If a second opinion is needed, the item can be escalated to another team with a question or additional information. As needed, action can also be taken to contact the user or even flag their profile. A good example would be a product review that matched the “Defect” Listener and was routed to the “Customer Response” queue where a customer support representative contacted the original contributor of the content to offer assistance or gather more information. 

Regardless of your goals, listening plays a substantial role in any successful community. Pluck Listeners provide the ability to identify conversations of value, put them in front of the right people and take meaningful action. In part 2 we will look at different ways in which listeners can be used to effectively drive the right results for your community.