26 October 2022 Riccardo Buson
Use search engines and social channels as places to listen to people to help companies design better experiences.
Wherever there are interactions with products or services, in physical or digital contexts, people express opinions and share precious experiences. Knowing how to listen, read in depth and analyze them is an invaluable source of value for companies that are planning experiences for those people.
And this can also happen in more traditional digital environments, such as search engines or social networks. Two places where people and companies can move, meet and interact. It is also in these contexts that we at TSW take the field, with technologies and skills, to collect what people, spontaneously and without filters, very often share. A wealth of information that we transform into value for companies, to plan together beautiful experiences to live.
Listening to people through search engines means understanding the information needs they manifest through queries and keywords. We could call it SEO or Search Engine Optimization (and we have been dealing with it for over 25 years) but, for us, it is much more: it is creating the best search experience, gathering the interests and doubts of users through tools and skills.
We are able to read these research experiences but above all to interpret and translate them into projects that aim to respond effectively and in a pleasant way to people’s needs.
An objective that, on the other hand, we share precisely with the main search engine: Google has created a very simple blank page, with a search box, into which all information needs can be merged. The response, generated by the algorithm, gives people back just what they need, in the simplest and clearest way possible, thanks to listening – through tools and technologies – to the needs they manifest every day.
However, creating SEO oriented content and texts does not consist only in satisfying the (implicit) requests of the Google algorithm, to allow these texts to reach the first search results. It also means designing, together with people, a rewarding experience in both content and form, thanks to technical and editorial skills that work in synergy.
Social networks are, today, the virtual square, the digital place where people meet each other or meet companies. Like every square, they welcome exchanges of opinion and discussions that can prove to be of immense value for those who design products or services.
Whether we are talking about a supermarket, a fashion brand or a bank, there are users who at this moment, on their personal channels or on those of the company from which they have just purchased a product or service, are sharing information relating to experience they have lived.
This is why, on a daily basis, we listen to our customers’ customers even in these contexts: on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or any other platform, we help companies to grasp what people express, interpreting it and translating it into data and strategies.
We carry out, in practice, an activity that takes the name of community management or customer care. This is what we do and what we help companies do: we take care of the experiences they make their customers live through listening.
We said it at the beginning of this article: wherever there are people, there are interactions and experiences that can be improved by listening to those who live them. We believe that the true value of every project lies in the ability to put skills, technology and tools at the service of an approach based on the real involvement of people.
Only in this way, whether it is the search engines to which we ask questions or the “virtual squares” in which we share opinions, will we be able to design experiences of real quality together tomorrow.