The Socializers | Peer Index

The W’s of journalism can be a great starting point for asking questions in social intelligence projects. See below expansion of the W’s for social intel, business intel and general social media monitoring work.

Note that the trend in 2011 will be towards integrating “action buttons” WITHIN social intel panels so that community managers can take meaningful and potent action on real-time intelligence.

Another take on this is that actionable tools like BuddyMedia will integrate increasingly powerful business-related intelligence within their already robust metrics panels, informing pre-campaign strategic process and whole-campaign adjustments. Research.ly is an example of a tool where one receives real-time intelligence from social networks and can act on that intelligence using a Twitter posting field.

Punchy insights from real-time data will inform strategic thinking AND the functionality of “social action” buttons used by non-analytical/non-technical Community Managers. Social Intel Tools will merge with Social Management Tools.

▪ WHO:
•Who are your current followers? Who follows them? (GIST)
• How can I take all of my connections established using social media + my contact database, and visually map out a path from my organization to those individuals/companies that will be beneficial to our initiatives? How can I clearly identify the connection paths, labeling what type of connection it is, and the role of the individuals? (PeopleMaps)
•Who is talking about your brand/product/services/employees? (Social Listening Tools)
•Would any of these individuals make good brand ambassadors, community managers, or customer advocates?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious, Research.ly)
•Which of your current followers are already key influencers in your niche or a related vertical?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious, TwitterGrader, Research.ly)
•Who influences them? And who influences those influencers?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious)
•What Twitter lists are these influencers on or following?
(Listorious)
•How influential are those people in your niche?
(Klout)
•Which of these influencers receive tons of comments?
(ConvoTrack, Technorati, Listorious, CoComment, Backtype)
•Which have tons of followers?
(Listorious)
•Who are the top influencers for your niche?
(WeFollow, PeerIndex, Klout, Listorious)

▪ WHAT:
•What are your stakeholders/fans/allies saying about you?
•What questions are they asking? (Quora)
•What are customers feeling about your brand/product/services/employees?
(One of the world’s greatest experts in the field of discovering sentiment and feeling – Life Analytics)
•What reactions do these stakeholders/fans/allies have about your brand/product/services/employees?
•How can you engage your followers/key influencers beyond a passing mention of the brand/product/services/employees? (Consume Brian Solis and Seth Godin material).
• How can you engage your employees/team members in more effective collaboration and gain insight based on collaborative feedback? (Spigit, 37 Signals)
•What percentage of the conversations are positive, negative or neutral?
•What are the actions of “peers” or the circle of customers around the brand/product/service in social networks?
•Are your customers/typical purchasers active in social networks? What is the ethos of their online culture?
•What are useful resources to research your brand/product/services/employees/vertical/niche? (Social Tools, Twitter Tools, The Journalist’s ToolBox, TwentyFeet, SproutSocial, Research.ly)
• What apps might provide access to my ideal followers/customers/fans/influencers? (AppData)

▪ WHERE:
•Where are your stakeholders/fans/allies located in social networks? (Flowtown, IntroMojo, GIST)
• Where do I stand in relation to my competitors in terms of traffic, share of voice, engagement? (Compete, Alexa, Klout)
•In which of the following are the conversations happening about your brand/product/services/employees?:
-Twitter (Listorious, Twitter Search, Twazzup, Topsy Search)
-Facebook page-threads, Facebook groups, Facebook Key Influencer wall-threads (Facebook Insights, All Facebook Page Leaderboards, Booshaka)
-blog threads (Social Tools, CoComment, Backtype)
-forum threads (Social Tools, CoComment, Backtype, Board Reader)
-web communities (Joongel)
-top-of-mind comment threads (Board Reader, Social Tools, CoComment, Backtype)
-video comments/shares (YouTube Keyword Tool)
-photo comments/shares (Flickr Advanced Search)
-presentation comments/shares (Slideshare search window, Scribd search window)
-LinkedIn groups/comment-threads
-location-based networks (4sqSearch)
•Consider the relative merits/benefits of joining a well-followed conversation vs. creating one.

▪ WHEN:
•What time of day are people talking about you?
•What time of the week/month/year?
•Are the conversations event-driven?
•Are the conversations cyclical/seasonal?
•How do you keep the conversation going during the off-season/non-event times?

▪ WHY: (beware of analysis paralysis on this category!!)
•Why are there spikes in conversation around your brand/product/services/employees?
•What events occurred, what specific words were said, what personalities were involved?
•The answers to the above questions can inform the broader WHY question.
•Create the BIG picture with a Montage (FuseLabs Montage) or hashtag/@-sourced/RSS-sourced real-time publication like Paper.li. Publish all of your findings as a report. (How to Write and Publish an eBook).
• Leave where you are and begin something new. Learn how at Startup School, at Seth Godin and through Tim Ferriss.
• Stay where you are and make a change. Same as above + read Charlene Li’s Open Leadership book + Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog.

The pressing need in customer intelligence is a solution related to a real-time eco-system. One deeper philosophical issue in this space relates to variable velocity, to quote Lee Bryant. Tools like PeerIndex and Recorded Future do a good job of segmenting and defining the truly staggering flow of data AND audiences interacting with that data. Datasift (http://datasift.net/) is a leader in architecting methodologies for analyzing the complex fabric of the social Internet.

For an important new study on Customer Intelligence Trends 2011, see the following Forrester Report: ‎”At the same time, the demand for insight — not just data — in real time creates a challenge but also a huge opportunity to extend the value of Customer Intelligence throughout the enterprise. Leading CI professionals who evolve and adapt to these trends will quickly find themselves at the nexus of the business.” ~from Customer Intelligence Trends To Watch In 2011 (http://bit.ly/customer_intelligence_trends_2011)

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: DEFINITIONS
(Some basic info below)

Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence is done by gathering, analyzing and disseminating information with or without support from technology and applications, and focuses on all-source information and data (unstructured or structured), mostly external, but also internal to a company, to support decision making. (SOURCE)

The global business intelligence (BI) software market is projected to reach $12.4 billion by the year 2015, driven by the growing need to empower all stakeholders of businesses with right information at the appropriate time.

Uncertain economic conditions, intense competition and increasing volumes of organizational information are forcing enterprises to seek efficient means of deriving value from information for improving the overall efficiency of business processes. In this regard, BI technology is emerging as an essential tool for identifying new revenue-generation opportunities as well as to control unproductive expenditures. BI offers tools, processes and applications for facilitating organizations to analyze and consolidate data gathered from various sources for optimizing operational performance and for improving business decision-making. BI and analytics software helps organizations to analyze the information built up over the years, which resides in the enterprise systems. (Source)