What is Social Media Intelligence?

Social media monitoring has significantly changed the way brands and marketers leverage social media for business. The constant stream of mentions on sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs provide a great way for companies to monitor their brands, products, and consumers in social media. While monitoring has been useful primarily in customer service and buzz-tracking, there is far more value to be realized.  Enter the age of social media intelligence.

What is social media intelligence?

Social media intelligence is the combination of quantitative and qualitative insights gained from monitoring a specific brand, product, or subject matter in social media.  All in real-time.

How can social media intelligence benefit my business?

Social media is the world’s largest focus group with millions of participants sharing their unbiased thoughts each day. With this massive data set, businesses now have the power to mine and further understand consumer opinion and slice and dice data by gender, age segmentation and location.  Here are 5 specific case studies on social media intelligence:

Applebee’s Restaurants – Campaign (in)Effectiveness

Seven (7) days after the launch of Applebee’s ‘Real Burgers’ national TV ad campaign in March 2009, the campaign was really striking a cord with consumers. The only problem was that we saw it was overwhelmingly negative (80%) with most wondering ‘What were they serving us before?’  Applebee’s ended up running the campaign for 4 months too long.  Imagine the money saved and harm avoided if they had learned that it was bombing sooner.   Their competitor, with our help, knew all of this as it unfolded, whoops.

Membership Association – Why are members canceling?

A national membership association was seeing a sharp increase in membership cancellations over a 3 month period.   Through social media intelligence they learned they had a material age segmentation issue: the organization’s stance on key political issues and a changing membership demographic was making a segment of members very unhappy.  The association segmented their member-base into three distinct buckets and now speaks to each segment with a unique voice.

Soft Drink Company – New Product Launch

With the launch of a new soft drink in 2009, a soft drink company saw that young men loved the the new product while women had mixed opinions.  Through social media intelligence the company quickly learned that older women were taking offense to the TV ad creative, not the product (the taste was great).  The soft drink company replaced the creative to better reach its female target.

Major Restaurant Chain – Location-based Issues

In September 2009, a restaurant client saw  ‘tough meat’ being discussed by its guests in social media.  Through geo-location, we helped the restaurant chain learn that the issues were regional in nature and all specific to the northwest US.  The client traced the problem back to a regional meat purveyor who had outsourced to a third party.  This issue was resolved within 3 business days.

Cable TV Network – Rapid Consumer Insights

In TV and Entertainment, learning what viewers think of programming is critical to success.  In Q2 2010, a cable TV network aired its hit show’s season finale on a Friday, by Monday we delivered the network intelligence on what viewers thought of the finale, the show’s entire season, and reported on 100’s of fan suggested story-lines for next season.

Social Media Intelligence Empowers Decision-making

Social media intelligence gives actionable insights into business and detailed and segmented information about consumers.  If your organization wants to understand questions like “why teenagers choose a competitor product, or how females in the northeast US feel about your service”, contact us.   We deliver the intelligence.