We work with a lot of different types of marketers at Forrester, and we always customize the recommendations we deliver to different clients based upon their unique situations and needs. But over the past few years there's one piece of advice I've found myself giving nearly every company I work with: "Hire a listening vendor."

I love listening platforms and the social data they create; it's a powerful source of information that, used correctly, can make marketers and their programs more effective. But not enough marketers are taking advantage of these benefits.

No matter what type of company you work for -- indeed, whether you work directly with social media or not -- you should be using social data right now to:

1. Develop your messaging. If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what they care about. Many of our past Forrester Groundswell Award winners have used private listening communities to craft their marketing messages; increasingly, we're seeing companies use data from public social media to guide their messaging as well.
2. Source your creative. We know that consumers trust what they hear from other consumers more than any other source of information -- why not use listening platforms to identify positive social content that can be included in campaign creative? I've even seen a UK bank, First Direct, use social sentiment data in an outdoor advertising campaign.

Many of our clients work at companies that use Net Promoter. I recently had dinner with two of them at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum, 2011. Both are senior people at companies that have been recognized as customer experience leaders in their respective industries.

When a third guest (Forrester’s CEO) asked them why and how they use Net Promoter Score (NPS), they gave remarkably consistent answers. In brief, they use it as a simple, easy-to-understand metric — one number — for aligning the business. Its main appeal is that busy executives don’t need to spend hours studying tables and spreadsheets to get a sense of how their firms are doing. Similarly, frontline employees down to the lowest levels of the organization find that NPS makes intuitive sense.

But there’s a next big (and obvious) question for people like our dinner guests who work to improve the customer experience at their companies: Does improving customer experience raise NPS? Because let’s face it, if your firm ties its overall health back to NPS, then you better be able to connect the dots for what you do, or you won’t seem to matter.

We’ve been wondering about this issue ourselves. So much so that late last year when we ran the big consumer survey that drives our Customer Experience Index, we included the Net Promoter question for two of the 13 industries in our study: banks and retailers. We were looking for a correlation between how people rate the customer experience at a company they do business with and how likely they are to recommend that company to a friend or colleague.

Every year, we look to surface the most creative and effective ways in which companies are using social media and recognize them with our Forrester Groundswell Awards. Since I have a focus on serving B2B marketing leaders, I want to make sure that you are aware that we have an award category just for B2B applications. Many B2B marketers come to me because they struggle to come up with ideas for interesting social marketing applications that target business buyers, which makes for far fewer B2B success stories, so we need your entries.

The entry deadline for the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Awards is August 3rd, so I encourage you to go here if you'd like to nominate one of your own initiatives, or if you are an agency, you can submit something you've done for a client. Josh Bernoff, one of the original authors of Groundswell, wrote a great blog post highlighting the history of the awards that you should read if you're not already familiar with the program. 

Over the past few weeks, Paul Hagen, Kerry Bodine, and I have been posting our takes on Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum, 2011. We’ve included video of moments we like from 10 out of the 11 main-stage sessions (sadly, we don’t have video of the Voice Of The Customer Awards, but at least we have a list of the winners!).

To give attendees and others an easy way to find the moments that matter to them, I’ve assembled this guide to our posts about the event. If you find these posts interesting, you can jump into the discussions that started at the forum in our online Forrester Community For Customer Experience Professionals.

DAY ONE, TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2011

“Customer Experience Is Personal”

Harley Manning, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester Research

Here’s the man-on-the-street video I used in my opening remarks. We took a camera crew to Harvard Square and asked people to describe their best and worst customer experiences. Yikes!
 

 “What Is the Right Customer Experience Strategy For Your Company?”

Paul Hagen, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

What is a customer experience strategy? What is it good for? How can you recognize a good one? Hear Paul’s answer, which sets the theme for the rest of the event.
 

“A Relentless Focus On Members”