Listening is not the same as watching

Digital listening is the unglamorous core of most crisis work now. During a live matter my team reads, twice a day, what is being said about a client in the news, on social platforms, in specialist forums and in the comment sections nobody else reads, and tells the client what matters and what does not.

The tools available for this are extraordinary, and they will tell you almost anything you ask them about anyone who has posted in public. That is precisely why the question of where listening stops deserves more attention than it gets.

What we do and do not do

We listen to public conversation about a client and its situation. We track how a story is travelling and which voices are carrying it, because that tells a client whether a story is growing and where it might go next. We identify the people whose public posts are shaping coverage, because journalists follow them and clients should know who they are.

We do not monitor private accounts or private groups, we do not create accounts to see things that are not public, and we do not track individuals who happen to be talking about a client unless their public role makes them part of the story. A customer complaining about a delayed parcel is not a subject of our work; a campaigner with forty thousand followers who has made the client her cause may be.

A choice to make on purpose

These lines are not set by the technology, which would happily go further. They are set by the client and by us, and they should be written down at the start of every engagement. A client who discovers halfway through a crisis that its advisers have been watching rather than listening has acquired a second crisis, and usually a better story than the first.