Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, SocialFish, LLC

Social media is all the buzz these days. For associations and non-profits are wondering how to get in the game -- or how to figure out whether they should -- listening is the place to start.

While it's relatively easy to dabble in social media, listening is the critical component in developing a social media strategy that is right for both your audience and your objectives.

What does listening mean?

Listening means finding the online social spaces where your audience is already communicating, monitoring the conversations that happen there, and gathering intelligence you can use to better understand your audience. Because social media is open and public by nature, listening is not only welcome -- it's expected.

Five Free Ways to Get Started

1. Set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on keywords you choose. You can set the frequency of the alerts. Start with your organization's name.

2. Set up a few blog searches - you can search sites like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Bloglines and BlogCatalog. As with Google Alerts, you can get updates of relevant results, but targeted to the blogosphere.

3. Set up Twitter searches and see if people are "tweeting" about your organization or industry.

4. Search for your organization's name on LinkedIn. You may find that your name appears because you have several current or former staff members using LinkedIn who have listed you on their profiles. You may even find a LinkedIn group using your organization's name.

5. Sign up for Facebook and search for your organization's name there, too. You can also find people you know on Facebook simply by importing your email list from Outlook. Don't worry. Facebook doesn't automatically spam your email contacts. Instead, you get the chance to see who has a Facebook account so you can choose to connect with them -- or not. If you do this on a regular basis, you are likely to find that every few weeks, more people have signed up.

Bonus Tip: Rather than email alerts, you can use a feed reader like Google Reader to collect all of your listening alerts and searches from Google, blog search engines and Twitter into one place. Google Reader will also suggest more relevant blog posts based on your feed subscriptions, all the better for listening.

Choosing Keywords

Most organizations ramp up their listening efforts in stages. Start easy. You can add more layers as you move beyond the learning curve.

Ego Stage -- you first want to see who's talking about you and what they're saying. Keywords include the names and acronyms for your organization, products, publications and events. You might also search on the names of your speakers, authors, officers and executive director.

Benchmark Stage -- now you're ready to see how you compare. New keywords include the names, products, publications and events of your competitors and other industry leaders. At this stage, you can start benchmarking your online engagement and PR efforts and reporting results to your leadership.

Pulse Stage -- you've identified the most influential talkers and now you're researching and gathering intelligence about the topics that interest them most. New keywords include timely industry issues. At this stage, you can start to identify industry trends and potential revenue opportunities for the organization.

OK, we've set all these up, now what?

Now the fun starts. Make sure you don't rush it -- just read what folks are saying about your organization and your industry.

Patterns will start to emerge. Maybe you've found enough folks on LinkedIn or Facebook to make setting up an official group worthwhile. Maybe folks are discussing your industry on Twitter and you're ready to add your two cents. Maybe a few bloggers are regularly discussing your industry and you're ready to start engaging with them by commenting, setting up your own blog, or even inviting those bloggers to blog for your organization.

What if it's too noisy out there?

Congratulations. People are talking about you and your industry so much that you need a more robust tool for making sense of it all. Several good monitoring services can help, including Radian6 and Nielson's BuzzMetrics.

What if it's too quiet out there?

Don't be discouraged. Your audience may not be ready to create content on social networks, blogs, or Twitter. Keep listening, though, because over time, more and more people from every age group are becoming active participants in online social spaces.

Whether your audience is noisy or quiet, listening is the best way to figure out how your audience engages online. Once you figure out where your online audience is gathering and what they're saying, you can start to develop a strategy for engaging with them.

Make sure any strategy you develop is in line with clear objectives. Do you want to increase your organization's visibility? Attract new members? Provide timely information? Get donations? Be recognized as a leader? Social media can help you achieve all of these objectives and more. But first, you have to open your ears and start swimming in social waters.

Find a bibliography including links to all of the tools mentioned here at http://www.socialfish.org/tag/listening.

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer are Chief Social Media Strategist and Chief Social Media Marketer at SocialFish, LLC.