How establishing an always-on social listening programme grew engagement, visibility, enhanced product development, customer experience - and was crucial in protecting brand reputation.
Wiley, a global academic publisher, wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how its brands and products were being discussed on social media, and to explore how those insights could inform strategy and deliver business value.
Working initially with an experienced strategy analyst, I used specialist listening tools to build precise Boolean queries that captured how people were talking about Wiley’s brands and related topics. This approach was extended to track competitors and other relevant industry conversations.
Analysing the data revealed valuable insights and strategic opportunities including
Optimising campaigns for social
Using customer feedback to improve the experience
Reputation protection
Tracking brand share of voice on priority industry themes
Social listening delivered a range of valuable outcomes across the business. Here are a few illustrative examples:
#TopDownloadedArticle Twitter Campaign: Social listening identified researchers talking positively on Twitter about a Wiley email campaign. I alerted the email team and partnered with them to build on that momentum, adjusting follow on emails to include the hashtag #TopDownloadedArticle, a shareable graphic, and a call to action encouraging researchers to post on social. The results were outstanding: social conversation surged, generating strong organic visibility and advocacy and the campaign was repeated annually. In 2022 alone the campaign achieved 2.9K mentions from 2.5K people and a reach of 4.72M, helping advance Wiley’s mission to support researchers and promote their work.
Social listening played a crucial role during the rollout of a revised training product. We noticed customers were talking in specialist forums with concerns about changes to the product videos. This was escalated to the product team who heard the concerns, validated them and changed the videos to resolve the issue. Customer communications were deployed to acknowledge the issue and update customers on the fix. Ongoing monitoring then allowed the team to respond in real time and track sentiment as updates were rolled out.
In September 2021, Wiley announced the retraction of more than 500 research articles following concerns about research fraud, a disclosure that generated significant social and media attention. This marked the start of a two-year reactive communications initiative. Social listening played a critical role in tracking the evolving themes, volume, and velocity of the conversation, providing insights that directly informed communications strategy and messaging.
Social listening gave Wiley a clear view of its own share of voice within major industry conversations, such as open access. The insights helped teams benchmark Wiley against competitors and assess how communications activity was shaping visibility and influence across core themes.