# Social Listening Social listening is the systematic observation of public conversations, recurring themes, questions, sentiment, and behavioral signals across networked channels. It can inform customer service, public communication, research, crisis response, and narrative analysis. Listening differs from surveillance when it respects lawful access, proportionality, privacy, and the limits of inference. Public posts do not make every form of profiling ethical, and aggregate patterns should not be converted into unsupported claims about individuals. Related: [[wiki/Audience Analytics|Audience Analytics]], [[wiki/Narrative Detection|Narrative Detection]], [[wiki/Behavioral Signal|Behavioral Signal]], [[wiki/Crisis Communications|Crisis Communications]].