Making Empathy a Habit
by Steve App, Business Development Manager
A few weeks back, I started listening to Atomic Habits, by James Clear, on the recommendation of a friend. Like many of you, I’m trying to drop bad habits—I eat way too much sugar, which probably won’t surprise you—and create new positive habits.
When thinking about habits, Clear writes that many focus on the tactical steps that can break a bad habit or create a good one. But Atomic Habits makes clear that tactical steps won’t help you create or stop habits without first considering the purpose of the desired change.
When thinking of purpose, Clear identifies another mistake: many of us think about goals. “I want to eat less sugar.” Instead, we should be thinking about identity, or the type of person we want to become by creating the habit. “I want to become a healthy person.” The shift from goals to identity helps us view an activity in permanency, instead of something we do only until we reach our destination. It’s the key to turning small habits into radical change.
What does any of this have to do with social listening? Atomic Habits has me reflecting on the goals we collaborate on with clients when implementing social listening. Consider the goal, “I want to understand my campus’s brand and reputation.”
That goal can be accomplished in a matter of weeks by conducting a one-time historical social listening research project that analyzes the past two years of conversation about your campus. Once the project is delivered, you’ve accomplished your goal. Then what?
The problem is we didn’t tie the goal to identity. We didn’t think about the kind of marketer, or the kind of campus, who would want to understand brand and reputation. If we did, we might have swapped out our goal and said, “I want to be a marketing professional that builds and maintains strong relationships with our audiences by understanding their experience with us.”
When we consider social listening through the lens of a goal, it’s a research method. When we consider social listening through the lens of identity, it becomes a habit. If we viewed social listening as a habit, we’d ditch the research project and just start listening to your online conversation.
After a few weeks, you wouldn't have much to show for your efforts. But after two years of building stronger relationships by serving your audience, you’d gain the ability to look back and take stock of your brand and reputation. Of course, the value gap between the two methods would only widen from there. The research project was the research project. It will always analyze the same two years of conversation. But habitual listening creates a dataset that grows exponentially more valuable and influential as it matures.
That’s not to say that historical social listening is subpar. As I recently wrote on the Brain Waves blog, there are several circumstances in which a historical social listening research project makes sense. But I’ve spoken to enough marketers since becoming a Sonarian to understand that while many know social listening is important, fewer have figured out why it’s important to them, or can effectively articulate the importance to their peers.
If you fit into that camp, that’s okay. But I encourage you to reflect on the kind of marketer, or the kind of campus, you want to be. And then consider the daily habits that kind of marketer or campus would commit to.
And if those habits include social listening, I hope you’ll let me know.
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