Last week I wrote about the importance of social intelligence. The obvious companion to any kind of business or social intelligence is analytics. Sure, it sounds boring -the collecting, crunching, parsing and analysis of massive amounts of data. Yet, if done well, this data can reveal amazing insights about your brand, your customers and your competitors.
Business intelligence has been the holy grail of corporate america since the beginning of time. of course in the "old days", this intelligence was gathered through human interaction and some possibly unethical behavior (can we say "News of the World"). Today, sophisticated applications collect data within a company to provide insight on sales performance, profit margins, supply chain effectiveness and more. The challenge with these applications is that they primarily look at structured data from a historical perspective.
Social media has changed everything. Not only has it changed the way we communicate, but it creates a lot of data! This data can be collected and analyzed to provide real-time understanding of how your customers are talking about your company or your competitors. A search on social media analytics will reveal a myriad of vendors. Most of their solutions are available for a fee which is based on the number of keywords you decided to track. The best vendors give you the ability to capture data and present it in a graphical manner. They also allow you to drill deeper on the content presented.
Rather than regurgitate a list of vendors that can be found elsewhere, check out the review on socialmedia.biz. Before testing any of these solutions, be clear about your goals and what data you really need. Don't forget about the data you may already have and be sure to look at the complete picture. Understanding your customer and how they are talking about your business can help you create and optimize marketing programs, customer service, acquisition strategies and more. So, go ahead, get analytical. It will help you get smart about your customers!
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