What we learn by being part of the conversation

• The “why”

Why people do or do not like a pattern or product we shared. This helps us with product development.  People aren’t robots and beyond hitting the “like” button, they’ll tell you why they like or do not like your offerings. This information is not the same as the information you get from doing surveys. It’s organic and self motivated.

• Sleeper ideas

We offer yarn, related products, and patterns to use them with. Every once in a while someone will suggest something different than what we are offering and when the community starts raising their hands and indicating that they’ve heard a great idea (not from us) we take notice.

• Content ideas.

The topics people bring up naturally, in response to our posts help us know what associations they have with subjects we bring up. After running a comic about knitting needles used as weapons, we discovered that people had been stopped from bringing their needles into courtrooms.  This gave us an idea for a post about when and where people are stopped from doing their hobby—a very emotional topic.

• Knowing our customer

You understand your customer on a whole different level when you are in conversation with them and care enough to learn to communicate better with them.  We learned what topics turn our customers off (politics!), where they are uncomfortable with technology so we can respect their concerns by providing more information about how to access content, which venues are appropriate for edgier content and which will get you in trouble; the fact that we have really different kinds of people on different social platforms and how to speak to them in their own language.

• Sometimes it’s not about numbers

We recently learned something from listening to our community that surprised us. We didn’t hear it from a lot of people but the fact that it came up a few times and the intensity with which it was said told us that we had to do something about a wrong impression people had.  We intuited that it could be more widespread than we were hearing about.  It’s the kind of information that I can’t share publicly but we do know just what to do about it and we would never have figured it out had we not paid attention to a few voices without counting the “ocurrences” of a word.

That’s the kind of information you’ll hear if you realize that humans do not communicate only in ways that can be analyzed by a machine.

source: http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/why-you-are-ignoring-the-most-important-data/