Social media are gradually changing people's behaviour, from sharing personal photos to spurring political change. Without any doubt, they are transforming how companies do business with customers.
According to a recent survey by a media company, every day there are 4.5 billion Facebook likes, 400 million tweets, 40 million photos posted on Instagram and 5,000 hours of video uploaded on YouTube. This unstructured customer information proclaims tremendous opportunities for companies to leverage these resources for their business needs.
The holistic process, from listening to conversations across social media channels to deriving timely and actionable business insights, is called social intelligence. This intelligence might sound simple but the critical challenge doesn't lie in finding the discussions but in making sense of the context, trends, influencers and, most importantly, people's motivations and expression of unmet needs.
Two pitfalls are commonly found in companies trying to start social intelligence campaigns.
First, a typical company only looks for who is saying what. Instead they should try to understand why they are saying it and what type of behaviour does it reflect or drive. With the right information, a company can better manage and engage customers.
The second pitfall is that a company's scope of uses for social intelligence only focus on reputation management by monitoring social media for conversations around the brand, including risks and threats. However, there are other possibilities that offer far more benefit to the organisation beyond the brand such as:
1. Marketing use: social media can help intellectual capital development, including research, white papers and events;
2. Business development: glean insights from social intelligence to quickly provide information for client pursuits or develop new service offerings;
3. Relationship management: use social listening to gain insight into clients and their competitors, increasing the possibility for new work.
Microsoft's use of social intelligence helped in the adoption of Windows 7. Microsoft had problems selling its new software to the mass market due to insufficient communication resources. The solution was to rely on IT professionals to be the main spokespersons but there are tens of millions of IT professional communities around the world with thousands of potentially relevant blog posts and forum comments generated every day.
Microsoft decided to endorse social intelligence using Visible Technologies to find and engage the most influential voices from within the community and high-profile bloggers to respond to questions, concerns and criticisms. They also incorporated the rapidly evolving needs and interests of the community into their next launch of Windows. As a result, Microsoft scaled its community engagements from dozens to hundreds each week and identified 250 influential subject experts in 29 countries while increasing its brand perception among IT practitioners.
Gatorade, an energy drink company, is another example of a company that used social intelligence to change customers' brand perception. Gatorade developed a social intelligence command centre called Mission Control to listen to, learn from and engage in real-time online conversations. It discovered that 70 % of brand conversations were either about flavours or hangover cures.
By actively listening, learning and engaging, Gatorade eventually turned 70% of the conversation around the brand to sports performance, its main business. Sales increased and customers got a better understanding of brand positioning. This wouldn't have been achieved without social intelligence initiatives.
So, how to start listening? There are a number of options to listen and analyse social information. The most basic way is built-in analytics within social media platforms _ for example, Facebook insights that help you manage your fan page, YouTube analytics that help you understand your audience, or Google analytics that help monitor online activities.
More advanced monitoring platforms, which gather online discussions from all social media channels, can identify key metrics such as influencers and respond directly to them. However, software alone isn't capable of separating the real information from the noise. Human analysis is always needed, so leading companies prefer to use third parties such as consultants or media agencies to provide analytics and monitor the company's social activities.
In summary, information in social media can provide your company with substantial benefits exceeding your expectations. It can create new offerings and enhance existing offerings, improve the quality of products, enhance your business strategy and operations, and improve brand perception.
But you will need the appropriate tools to mine the data across all channels and develop an approach to analyse the unstructured data into real business insights.
Vilaiporn Taweelappontong is a partner and Patchara Passpachee is an associate consultant in PwC Consulting Thailand. For more information, contact leadingtheway@th.pwc.com