Deep Listening – The Overview
01 September 2009 | blog,How To | 1 Comment
One of the things that I get asked all the time is how the heck I know so much about the internet space, the companies and people that operate in it. It’s not because I live my life by constantly searching the net for the next would be phenomena or that I know everyone in the industry. It’s because I use an elaborate process that I call Deep Listening.
I have no doubt that Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! will cover a small portion of this but I don’t think even the mighty GV goes into the crazy level of detail that I do. Maybe I’m just a bit more thick headed than he is and am willing to dig that much deeper regarding things or maybe he simply knows when enough is enough.
Over the course of the next few days I hope to explain each of the steps and more importantly why I am doing each of these.
The first thing I do is specify my target. This is typically a business or industry. If it happens to be an individual person or group I’ll find some connecting thread between all the individuals. After I have this I do some keyword brainstorming which will quickly become the key portion of this entire process. These first couple of steps while stated here extremely simply have some great nuances that I’ll get into in the next post.
After I have my keywords, I go blog hunting. As simple as it sounds: I use my keywords and while keeping inside the scope of the business or industry I’m looking to research I find as many blogs as I possibly can that either cover my target. I plug all these into a folder inside my RSS reader (which remains Google Reader, but I am starting to dig Fever as my mass aggregator). Typically I’ll get somewhere between 30-100 blogs in these folders. There’s a very clear hierarchy that describes how often I read a folder. While it may not be blog hunting, this is when I typically decide to read the first 70-100 results in Google for the top 5-10 keywords.
Next up is setting up my sentiment trackers. These are the realtime searches for the subset of keywords that created the most relevant results. Typically I use just Twitter currently but as Facebook is opening up to real time search of status updates I may end up using this as well.
Finally, after all this work, I will begin to look at a corporate website in all it’s iterations. Is there a mobile version? What does the internet wayback machine show was at this address two months ago? Two years ago (or more if it’s been up for a while)? I tear apart the copy, the design, the code and when I really want to know a company inside and out, find which stock photo sites they use for their “corporate images”. This gives me some clear perspective as to who they think they audience is, how that’s changed and the technical aptitude of the company.
My challenge to you, dear reader, is to suggest to me a company or industry that you’d like to see me do this to over the next week or so? Leave your response as a comment below. I’ll chronicle each step in the process so you can learn from me on how to do this for yourself.
1 Comment for this entry
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Very cool stuff my friend. I have a similar approach but not nearly as detailed.
Because of this I would love to see how you break down the craft beer industry. I have no shame in telling you this breakdown request is my selfish way of seeing how much more you can find out than I already have. Sort of a immersion vs system way of comparing notes.
If this interests you I would suggest not to ignore the big boys, but make them a side to your focus. Clearly things they do effect the micro brewers out there, but they are not the focus of my personal interest.
Don’t worry though, if you chose not too focus on craft beer I’ll still follow this closely, haha.
Cheers Kade!
cbjerrisgaard
September 2nd, 2009 on 4:41 am