Turning Insight Into Action:

The Journey to Social Media Intelligence

An organizations ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
JACK WELCH, FORMER CEO OF GENERAL ELECTRIC

Turning Insight Into Action:

The Journey to Social Media Intelligence

From Data to Decisions

Social media generates an enormous amount of data, relentlessly and in real-time. Every day, social media users produce an additional 500 million tweets on Twitter, create 4.5 billion more Likes on Facebook, and share 55 million new photos on Instagram. Still more data flows from Google+, Youtube, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Behind these staggering numbers is an ongoing and very public conversation about your enterprise and its competitors. With every passing minute, your customers reveal more information about their motivations, loyalties, preferences and dislikes. It is an unprecedented opportunity to improve sales, customer service, marketing campaigns, and product development but only if your organization knows how to listen and routinely apply what it learns to business decisions. The key challenge for enterprises is not just to capture social media data, but to transform it into actionable insights at both the strategic and dayto-day levels. Therefore, it must be aggregated, filtered for relevance and made visible in regular decision-making contexts for people throughout your organization. The ultimate goal is social media intelligence, when social media data is shared openly across departments and fully integrated into business processes. This white paper will define the three stages of the enterprise journey to social media intelligence and highlight how integrating social media across the enterprise with a social relationship platform (SRP) is crucial to success at every stage.

SOCIAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE STAGES

LISTENING
Tap into social media to gain awareness about customers, competitors and campaigns.

ENGAGING
Engage with customers in real-time and apply insights to team activities.

INTELLIGENCE
Empower decision-making with social media insights across the organization.

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The Social Media Intelligence Journey

Enterprises typically progress through three stages of maturity (Listening, Engaging and Intelligence) as they learn how to capture social media data and maximize its business impact. They improve customer experience by responding in real time to inbound messages and proactively participate in discussions to identify potential sales leads. Opening two-way conversations produces additional customer data, which can be analyzed regularly to improve social media practices and departmental operations.

Stage one: Listening

Listening involves the measurement of basic social media metrics such as brand mentions, likes and shares, as well as the tracking of keywords related to customers, campaigns and competitors. An SRP may be used to conduct sentiment analysis of data from social media, blogs, forums and other sites. The organization learns where conversations are occurring, what is being discussed, and who the influencers are.

Stage three: Intelligence

An enterprise in the Intelligence stage routinely transforms social media data into actionable insights about customers, competitors and their company strategy. Information from social media flows fluidly between departments and teams, through integrated technologies and business processes. Social media data is synthesized into leadership decision-making across the organization, and the entire workforce is drawn closer to the customer.

Stage two: Engaging

During the Engaging stage, departmental social media teams start to build relationships with customers, influencers and sales prospects.

THE MATURITY PROCESS

LISTENING

ENGAGING

INTELLIGENCE

Communication Visibility of Insights Social Media Data Infrastructure Mindset Outcome

One-way Individuals or small teams Siloed Passive Greater Awareness

Two-way Departments Siloed Tactical Optimization

Multi-directional Organization-wide Integrated with other technologies Strategic Executive decisions

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Stage 1: Listening
In the Listening stage, organizations monitor social media to build a greater understanding of their customers, their competitors, and the influential people and forces that shape their industry. Social media listening is typically conducted by individuals or small teams in marketing, PR or communications, but other departments may run their own ad hoc programs. This stage is an opportunity for social media practitioners to gain confidence in measuring their own activities and demonstrate their results. While tracking basic metrics and keywords, practitioners uncover insights from social media data and make recommendations to improve related operations within their departments. For example, practitioners in marketing may identify highperforming keywords that can be applied to search engine optimization or pay-per-click advertising. Typically, these insights are siloed within social media teams or departmental working groups, and are therefore not visible to the broader organization. Listening teams at this stage may experiment with technology which collects buzz or general brand sentiment from social media. Such tools provide an overview of the conversation around the brand and its competitors. However, in order to gain a more comprehensive and real-time understanding of what is being said, listeners must employ a social relationship platform. With an SRP, listeners have a single interface through which they can monitor multiple social networks for customer comments, brand mentions and relevant keywords. An SRP also brings other information sources together for listeners to analyze holistically, including listening tools, channel-specific analytics services, and content discovery technologies. Social media listening can quickly prove its worth during a public relations incident. When an organization is on the verge of a brand crisis, the first people to know are usually the practitioners monitoring social media. If they are able to notify people in other teams and departments, the enterprise can efficiently respond and take control of the situation.

Department Marketing

Listening stage benefits Social Opportunity Social Health

Metrics Reach: Fans, friends, followers, members, visitors and readers Engagement: Posts, comments, shares. Awareness: share of voice Reach: Influencers, Media, Analysts Engagement: Posts, comments. Awareness: discussion volume of Brand, Products, Employees positive/negative comments and posts, share of voice

PR & Corporate Communications

Brand Opportunity Reputation management Brand Sentiment

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Stage 2: Engaging
In the Engaging stage, departmental teams start to follow up social media listening with action. They continue to analyze brand sentiment with SRPs, but now work proactively to address customer inquiries or complaints. They conduct two-way communications on social channels, building relationships with customers, sales prospects and brand ambassadors. Integrating social media into customer service, sales and influencer marketing are all indications that an organization has reached the Engaging stage. As teams transition from passive social media listening to active engagement, the use of a comprehensive social relationship platform is crucial. An SRP allows teams to collaboratively monitor and respond to inbound messages on multiple channels. It also combines outbound publishing and analytics into one system, enabling teams to analyze social media signals within the context of their own engagement efforts. Therefore, information gathered at in this stage is much more meaningful and actionable. Over the course of the Engaging stage, each departments social media tactics become increasingly data-driven and centered on business objectives. For example, marketers connect social media to web analytics, helping them to refine their campaign messaging and demographic targeting to increase lead generation and deliver measurable ROI. Departmental social media programs inevitably capture qualitative and quantitative data that can be greatly beneficial to other areas of the enterprise. They collect product feedback, customer data and competitive intelligence that typically does not get disseminated to Market Research, Business Intelligence, and Product Research & Development who could apply the data to strategic decisions. This information will remain inaccessible until the enterprise develops effective mechanisms for sharing it across departments.

Department

Engaging stage benefits

Metrics

Sales

Lead Generation Lead Qualification Revenue

# of leads Av. contact time, # of presale interactions Net New Deal Size, Renewal Rate Reach, sentiment, attributable ROI Lead generation, virality Reach of advocates, ambassadors, and influencers, # of interactions # of cases handled, Av. resolution length Re-contact rate, post-contact survey results Forecasted contact load v. actual, contact volume by communication channel, av. response time

Marketing

Campaign Results Content Performance Community Management

Customer Service

Agent Productivity Customer Satisfaction Service Operation

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Stage 3: Intelligence
As the enterprise progresses into the Intelligence stage, social media data becomes visible throughout the organization. This information is no longer owned by social media teams, but treated as a strategic resource for the whole enterprise. Information gathered from social media starts to influence campaign objectives, sales projections and resource allocation. Consequently, social media KPIs are incorporated into business planning and reviewed regularly alongside other indicators to evaluate strategies. In order to support executive decisions, departmental teams routinely disseminate their insights and demonstrate the results of their activities. They can automatically generate custom reports and dispatch them to stakeholders, while command center displays provide organization-wide visibility of campaign performance and the voice of the customer from social channels.

Department

Intelligence stage benefits Opportunity Management (Sales cycle length, Improved win-rates) Upsell and Cross-sell Revenue Tying social analytics and attribution to major campaigns Enabling entire organization for success Deeper insights and product feedback Cross departmental problem solving

Sales

Marketing

Customer Service

Holistic Intelligence Drives Strategy

In the Intelligence stage, business intelligence professionals and market researchers within large organizations gain access to clean, consolidated social media data and analyze it in tandem with structured intelligence sources, including customer satisfaction reports, Net Promoter Scores, and survey feedback. With real time information from social media, these analysts can not only validate

insights from traditional sources, but also start to ask new questions about customer behavior, marketing effectiveness and business operations. When the immediacy of social media is combined with other business data, executives are able to make strategic decisions and adjustments far more rapidly. Therefore, organizations that make social media an integral part of their general intelligence practices will gain a significant advantage over their competitors.

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Distributing Social Intelligence Across the Organization

In addition to guiding top-down initiatives, social media intelligence should fuel the business from the bottom up. During the Intelligence stage, social media data moves fluidly through integrated business tools, across departments and into the hands of whomever needs it. The entire organization becomes more informed and responsive to the voice of the customer. This vision cannot be delivered by a single listening technology or one centralized team. Instead, it emerges when people in all areas of the enterprise can access and share information from numerous social media sources, both internally and externally. Organizations lay the foundation for distributed social media intelligence by adopting a standardized SRP throughout multiple departments, business units and regions. This enables cross-functional groups to collaboratively monitor social media accounts, access various listening technologies from a secure interface, and coordinate their interactions with customers. Enterprises must also develop scalable processes for handling the wide variety of sales leads, requests for service, brand mentions, and real time conversations that occur on social media and the wider web.

In mature enterprises, responsibility for social media listening becomes decentralized. Full-time social media teams remain vital, but they are aided by the eyes, ears and expertise of general employees: anyone who recognizes a sales lead or a customer issue is able bring it to the attention of anyone else. Individuals and teams involved in listening have the ability to push timely social media data to those who need to see it, across multiple departments and devices. By routing inbound messages to subject matter experts, engineers and other specialists, an enterprise can deliver the voice of the customer to the entire workforce.

Building a Customer-Centric Organization

Todays customers expect to move between different digital touch points without waiting for companies to catch up. Therefore, enterprises must work to create a unified brand experience on every social channel, all the time. By sharing data across departments and between tools, they can work as a single organization to communicate with customers, influencers and brand advocates. Successful enterprises engage at scale, continuously applying social media intelligence to countless interactions. For people in every business function to fully leverage customer insights from social media, the SRP should connect seamlessly with CRM, helpdesk and other business tools that employees use on a daily basis. This puts social media data into context for on-the-fly decisions, so customer-centric behavior becomes the norm. When customer intelligence from social media is made visible in CRM records, for example, sales representatives can routinely access it throughout their sales process to gain introductions, build relationships, and close deals. To broadly empower the workforce with social media intelligence, an organization needs straightforward policies, educated employees, and a social relationship platform which is as approachable to part-time users as it is to full-time social media managers. Everyone must understand how they can and cannot use social media data, especially in regards to customer privacy and regulatory The Journey to Social Media Intelligence | 7

MARKETING

IT CUSTOMER

SALES

HR

CUSTOMER SERVICE

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compliance. Standardizing on one SRP with the appropriate safety nets of education, training and guidance ensures that overall goals are met without incident. Once social media intelligence becomes accessible across the enterprise, people begin to apply it in unanticipated ways toward business goals. Ultimately, social media intelligence requires a managed convergence of public social media channels and the enterprises internal social business initiatives. Employees listen and respond to customers on public channels, then pull their ideas into discussions internally. These ideas spark mass collaboration over the companys internal social network, private Facebook groups, employee blogs, wikis and other platforms. The virtuous cycle of listening, engagement and intelligence continues.

Stronger Together
In the era of social media, enterprises must maintain a culture of continuous learning and adaptation to customer needs, or watch their competitors race ahead. The better your organization can capture, manage and distribute insights from social media, the more informed and customer-centric its actions will be at every level. Realizing the vision of social media intelligence requires an organization-wide strategy. Different departments and teams will always have their own needs for social media data, but an integrated approach will inevitably trump siloed practices and fragmented data sets. With a standardized social relationship platform, intelligence from multiple social channels can move fluidly between business tools and across departmental barriers, so its visible wherever and whenever decisions are made.

LISTENING

ENGAGING

INTELLIGENCE

Collect customer sentiment Identify crises, trends, and inuencers Monitor industry landscape Track campaigns Build relationships with customers Listen and respond in real time Use social media data to achieve departmental goals Combine social media data with other data sources Automate reporting processes Share social media data across departments Integrate social media data into executive strategy

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About HootSuite Enterprise

Partner with HootSuite to enhance your social organization with our value-driven solutions:
HootSuite Enterprise is designed for organizations that want to drive, and connect, business goals with social media efforts. Securely deploy broad social programs that empower employees to participate in social, regardless of department, function or geography. Provide executive insights on your entire social media footprint, and feed social data into existing systems for CRM, customer service and compliance. Beyond tools and features, HootSuite Enterprise enhances the value that social media provides by seamlessly integrating all social media efforts with existing systems and structures. Request a custom demo today by visiting

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