Getting a grip on social media analytics

Social media has gone overnight from a limited use application to a pervasive technology with billions of participants. The implications for business are significant, and like most technologies, can be a threat or a benefit. Comments or opinions from anyone are instantly available, and while good news travels fast, bad news seems to travel faster. People with an axe to grind now have a global bully pulpit, and the network effect means isolated incidents can take on a life of their own.

Like the earlier rise of the internet, the rise of the social ecosystem has caught most businesses off guard. Scrambling to create a social media strategy, companies are in the early stages of understanding the impact of this technology. While you’re reading this, millions of conversations, posts, tweets, likes, etc. are going on all over the world, and you can safely assume a significant portion of them are talking about your company or products. How do you track and measure what’s being said, and more importantly, what can you do about it?

Currently Social media analytics have a core focus on transactional numbers. You have lots of quantity, limited quality and actionability, and nothing ties to the bottom line. It’s clear something important is going on, but exactly what this means, and what you can do about are the big questions.

Companies with a social media presence need to identify who is saying what, but more importantly, those comments and the people making them need to be categorized in an actionable framework. You need to know who is promoting your brand, who is criticizing your company or products, and who is most influential on the social web. Assuming you could get this information, then what?

The real challenge is being able to take action on comments. You need to be able to respond to that particular person, and you need to be sure the right person within your organization is following up.

The true value for business in social media is in controlling your brand presence not only at a strategic, but at a tactical level. This means understanding broad sentiment on your brand or product relative to your competitors, understanding brand dynamics at a very tactical level, and then quickly responding to changing conditions in the social media space.

A properly developed social media analytic application can precisely track consumer sentiment across a broad array of networks, separating signal from noise, and giving marketers the critical insight needed to act. Businesses are then able to measure dynamic, unstructured comments about their brands using a predictable customer loyalty metric and business practice that is focused on driving profitable growth and customer loyalty.

By delivering actionable insights into customer sentiment across social media, social analytics complement and extend the capabilities of traditional Voice of the Customer surveys. By tracking changes in customer sentiment, you can deliver competitive benchmarking based on social media dynamics contextualized by an actionable framework. Social media analytics cut through the noise to identify the people that matter, allowing you to focuses on those individuals by leveraging positive posts where customer feedback is most active.

A social media enabled business is one with a clear, firm grip on its strategy and execution. When a major event occurs, they can track who says what, segmented into promoters and detractors. They know who is influential in affecting brand or product perception, and they can ensure the right person is following up in a timely fashion. Most importantly, they will be able to directly correlate social media sentiment to their bottom line.