How to listen to your target audience

as to make it more engaged?

#listening, #empathy, #cocreation, #UG

In the previous chapters, you learned why to analyse your network as to enhance your social media strategy. You also learned how important your stakeholders are in your community and how relevant it is to get in touch with people. But, to get in touch with people, you need to start a good conversation which is a constant change of listening and telling. And that’s all this chapter will be about: the art of listening.

" To deal with that topic, we will focus on empathy and how you can prove to your audience that you are a good listener. So what does empathy exactly mean? How to increase empathy? And how do you can show your audience that you are listening to them as to make them more engaged with you? Thanks to the team YouPro, you will find answers to this questions in this chapter."

Why is listening so important?

Since the 20th century, there has been a permanent acceleration of communicative processes. Today, thanks to the Social Web, no moment passes in which communication does not take place. Even spatially distant events influence us (like elections in another country), our society and are passed on online in real time. This poses a great challenge for all of us. The pressure to constantly absorb information, to react to it and to put information into the world ourselves is enormous. But still, the role of the listener is constantly being underestimated. Active listening is more important than ever today as we already discussed in the previous chapter, when talking about monitoring. It is the key to successful communication, no matter in which context. Listening is completely linked to empathy. Indeed, you need to show empathy to listen carefully to your target audience and then to show you listened. So first of all, let’s introduce this term.

Why and how to be empathetic?

“Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another” – Alfred Adler (2016)

The term empathy was initially adapted from a German word Einfühlung over a century ago, which originally refers to the tendency of observers to project themselves "into" what they observe, typically some physical object of beauty (Davis, 2018). In today's world, empathy is widely described as understanding another's "state of mind". Empathy enables people to put oneself into another's shoes. Basically, empathy is when you feel what someone else feels or you are aware of other people’s emotion (Ioannidou & Konstantikaki, 2008). It is important for everyone to understand other people emotions, whether he or she is in pain, sad, happy or confused. By doing so you can create a good relationship with others. Moreover, empathy contributes to your well-being, cognitive abilities and social success (Friesem, 2016). In order to be empathetic, you need to think beyond yourself and your own concerns.

Do you have enough empathy?

TEST YOUR EMPATHY SCORE HERE

We strongly believe that showing empathy will lead you, as a young startuper, to create a good relationship with your community. That will helps you to engage better with them. And even more, that will help you to make them engaged with you. Especially in business life, it is really important to understand what your stakeholders want and to make them feel comfortable with you. This will lead to trust and will convince them that you can be reliable. By doing so, you will ultimately create a healthy community.

Now, we think you might want to know how you can make use of empathy with your community. That is what we want to explore with you in the following parts. But first, let's understand what empathy is in the era of the Internet?

Empathy in an online network

You may be wondering “how is empathy working on the internet?” and that is a good question. Empathy can exist through computer-mediated-communication, where people could give emotional support online. This concept is called “virtual empathy”, which refers to the relationship between online communication and the expression of emotions and emotional support (Rosen, 2012). What is really interesting for you to know is that “some research lends support to the hypothesis that people may have an easier time feeling comfortable and less self-conscious about disclosing personal feelings online than via face-to-face communication” (Caplan & Turner; 2007). So, you can be empathetic on the internet and we encourage you to express support and care to your online community, no matter what it is about, as this will improve the relationship with your network.

The effect of social media on empathy

As we are living in an age where almost the entire generation uses social media, there are several studies that examined the effect on the empathy of using social media. One of the studies found that chatting online leads to a better expression of empathy (Rosen, 2012). However, many also report that social media have negative consequences such as deterioration on real-world empathy or loss of self-esteem of the users, due to the fact that technology-based communication has become prevalent. Next to that, displacement of real-world communication by online activities would be expected to negatively impact empathic skills (Small & Vorgan, 2008). On the other hand, Rosen (2012) also found that people who spend more time on social networks and use instant messaging were better at showing what he called virtual empathy.

All of these negative claims were primarily based on the assumption that going online reduces the amount of time spent on real-world communication, hence, reduce the individual’s capacity on empathy. In contrary, the usage of social media could also benefit the users, if being used to foster relationship, which increases the level of empathy. In the latest study of impacts, it is shown that just being online does not reduce empathy among the users (Carrier, Spradlin, Bunce, & Rosen, 2015). And this is quite a good new.

Basically, it is based on your motivations in using social media itself. If your purpose on social media is to share information, listen to other people or to initiate communication with other people, then you are already on the right track. We believe that balance is the key. You should spend time on social media and on real-world communication proportionally as to create a good relationship with your target audience.

How to bring more empathy

Empathy is a skill that you can (and should) learn through practice. The key elements to having more empathy are listening to what other people are saying and acknowledge what has been said, by stating your understanding of what was said and also the feelings that associated with it (Bookbinder). You can practice empathy for your target audience through the following points:

- Actively involved in the community by asking the people some questions, by answering to the comments and so on.

- Showing a positive relationship on social media towards your target audience. We will discuss more of it in the last part of the chapter.

- Engage with your target audience: we will also discuss this in the last part of the chapter.

- Listen deeply to your audience and acknowledge what you understood. You will discover how in the last part of the chapter.

- Keep your opinions to yourself

- Try to feel what is it like from their side

Empathy and affective sharing

Now we can get a little deeper in how empathy is useful for you to connect to your community. There is a correlation with this term and affective sharing. Empathy is about stepping into someone’s shoes, whereas affective sharing is when you experience something that affects you emotionally (Zahavi & Rochat, 2015). Have you ever felt yourself smiling after seeing your friends laughing, or feeling sad after hearing that someone else cries? This emotional “mirroring” phenomenon is called affective sharing (Nicodemo, 2012). In other words, if you listen well to your audience to learn what makes them react, you can easily create affective sharing from your community.

How to show you listened to your audience?

In this chapter and in the previous one you learned how and why to listen to your audience and why showing empathy can be useful for you. Right, it is the first step. Now, you have to understand how you can show your audience that you listened to them. You need to make them contribute, to give them the impression their point of view count. In other words, make them feel they've got a power so they can trust you. But you might want to go do deeper and we totally understand that. That would be the purpose of this part.

Customers & startups: how to make it a “love story”

As an early-stage startup, you really have to keep in mind that your customer is your key to growth. We are even talking about Customer Success (Murphy, 2018) which is the function at a company responsible for managing the relationship between a business and its customer. His goal is to make the customer as successful as possible, which in turn, improve customer lifetime value (CLTV) for the company. So clearly, if you want your startup to be a success, you need to get customer success skills.

To do so, you really need to listen to your target audience to be as specific as possible when publishing content and to be useful for them. You also need to always be asking them questions as to make them engage with you: the more they feel questioned the more they will want to collaborate with you and give you feedbacks (Pienaar, 2017). Those feedbacks are just gold for you because it is from their experience that you can enhance your startup. Furthermore, it permits you to have a closer connection with them.

“70% of companies that deliver outstanding customer experience rely on customer feedback” (Huffington Post, 2016)

So how do you get feedback and how to make them engage with you?

How to show your community’s ideas are valuable?

Co-creation is an intimate form of cooperation with customers (Mulder, 2017) and co-creation is one of the keys. This concept was created and developed by C.K. Prahalad and V. Ramaswamy in 2004. Through co-creation, you give your stakeholders the opportunity to influence part of the production process and involve them by listening to their ideas. Actually, you are working together to produce better ideas, to create value. Also, you can get a better understanding of the wishes and needs of your audience. You create a real dialogue with your audience and that permits you, generally, to create a long-term collaboration or at least relation. However, in order to be fruitful, there must be equivalence, reciprocity, openness and trust (Prahalad, Ramaswamy, 2004). Then, your stakeholders can share their positive experiences with others. Therefore, co-creation is clearly a win-win situation for both parties.

Today’s generation wants to be involved in something bigger than themselves. They seek active participation and want to be heard in a collaborative and interactive space. Co-creation is a real tool to engage your audience, create a personalized and unique experience to drive loyalty, stronger relationships, and even generate word of mouth (see chapter 4).

“Companies spent the 20th-century managing efficiencies. They must spend the 21st-century managing experiences”. (Prahalad, Ramaswamy; 2002)

Co-creation can be very effective for you as a young professional. When you work together with other professionals that have a bigger network, you can see that your network starts rising because you get more people known. It’s a great way for people to get more recognition. But you can also benefit from every people in your network. As to make it easier to understand, we have chosen to give you some good examples of co-creation. It is not an example from startups but you can still be inspired by it:

Customisation or tailoring: you offer a standard product and the consumer is able to customise certain components. Example: During the NIKEiD campaign, Nike started allowing colour and design customisations.

Co-innovation: you ask people to send their ideas or even designs (through a contest for instance). Example: LEGO Ideas is an online community when members can discover cool creations by other fans and submit their own designs for new sets. Fans can vote and if a project gets 100 000 votes, Lego offers to create the idea and sell it worldwide.

With co-creation, we talked a lot about collaboration. Let's see another way to make your audience engaged in a real collaboration and, therefore, show them you listen to them and care for them.

How to show your community its own content is relevant to you?

User Generated Content (UGC) is literally content published by your customers on the social networks about you. It can be different types and formats of posts like videos, blogs, discussion forum posts, digital image, audio files and so on. As a startup, UGC strategy can be really useful as you need less budget and you can get to be known easier. Actually, UGC can nourish your website and your social networks in an original way, with fresh and authentic content. Above all, it permits you to know your stakeholders better as they deliver keys to understanding their behaviour on the internet. It also enables you, of course, to show them how valuable they are for you: they will obviously have the impression to be listened.

“50 per cent of millennials say that peer-created content is more memorable”

(Amerman, 2016)

Of course, the type of UGC content you can use depends on what network you want to post. Let’s see some characteristics, but keep in mind that you always have to think about content that needs to be easily shared (as we already talked about in chapter 4). The content you will take from your users has to create interactions.

Best practice from

the startup Rover

As in the previous chapter, we will not give you best tips from a startup or someone we met but a good example of a startup you can use and learn from Rover.

We want to introduce you to Rover as a best case from a startup which use relevant UGC. This company pairs people in need of pet sitting and in-home kennel services with local sitters. They know, for sure, that their customers love dogs and cats. Their strategy focuses on content producing from individuals who have a connection to the brand.

Instead of asking influencers or ambassadors, they share dogs features photos of the four-legged clients snapped by their sitters. The sitters use the hashtag #roversitterpic as to get referenced and to have a chance to see their pictures on the Rover’s Instagram account. For travelling dog owners who may be worried about leaving their precious pets at home, Rover’s Instagram shows nothing but happy, healthy dogs enjoying their staycation. Not only does Rover give followers what they want—cute photos of dogs—it also encourages potential clients to sign up for the service with the hope that their favourite canine will be featured online.

When you adopt a UGC strategy, you focus on building a sense of community: it brings you the chance to connect with people, to really converse with them. You are actually building credibility and establishing yourself as not just a brand, but also as an authentic place for people with similar interests to connect. But be careful: never take content without asking! As you may have noticed, Rover tagged the persons who took each picture.

The most relevant thing is to always listen to your audience and understand them. Through this chapter, the goal was to make you understand why you can do this and how you can show your community you listened to them. You need to use these new pieces of knowledge to find out what the people in your network feel and make sure you give them what they want and seek. But as we already pointed out in the previous chapter, analysing and listening very carefully to your network can create ethical issues. We will talk about ethics and privacy in the last chapter of our ebook. Let’s read it.

Team YouPro