The heart and the mind are the true lenses of the camera. ~Yousuf Karsh
Business Intelligence consists of data, insights and strategic recommendations related to customers, competitors and markets. Such intelligence is derived by teams using best-practice research methodologies and technologies – it is both art and science. Exemplary business intelligence ALSO peers into shadow (what is unknown about one’s own self, one’s own business), into the heart of the matter (the essential nature of the business identity), and can deliver business initiatives related to these insights.
Intelligence projects should not only serve the stated company mission BUT speak to (and reveal potential within) the human situation at the company headquarters and branches. Satisfying insight into the human situations BEHIND a business facilitates fantastic evolution and progress. Depth of insight and revelation of the volume of conversation around these “hidden heart-landscapes” is the gas pedal of social revolutions and community growth.
SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE DELIVERABLES:
(a) a report that reveals the past, current and rising top influencers within social networks in chosen verticals,
(b) a graph of connections between these visible social influencers to decision-makers not active in social networks,
(c) insights on the past, current and future activities of BOTH entities. As an example, blending Interest-Graph discovery via Research.ly WITH findings in Recorded Future will yield excellent insights.
WHAT LANDSCAPE DO WE SURVEY: We survey properties identified to be relevant to the brand or entity in the social universe.
SOLUTIONS USED TO SURVEY THIS LANDSCAPE: We blend research using these tools and these tools.
HEART INTELLIGENCE: True heart-intelligence gives us a story. We start with spreadsheets and end with punchy tales that act as guides. The essential deliverable of Heart-Intelligence Projects consists of telling stories BASED UPON past, current and future content. Future content is discoverable using tools like Recorded Future. Past and current content is discoverable through a multitude of very efficient social monitoring solutions.
SOCIAL STORIES: The social objects/signals (tweets, status updates, apps, content) that our customer and competitor (object of study) has uploaded provide the content for story-telling. And these stories dictate who we pick up the phone to call, who we send an email to, and what we decide to sell or publish. The power of story for businesses is both compass and vessel. We see our customer and competitor AND we create the craft into sales with content derived from our research.
FRIEND ONE: One friend replied, “Very cool… Its really interactive and connects with some great websites and services. Great idea.”
FRIEND TWO: Another replied, “I’m not sure why people would do it if they don’t get something from it. It’s not that fun and it doesn’t seem to give you anything. I’d be curious how this site did but I don’t think that something like this which isn’t great game- play would work. Different story if it is a cool game that has a lot invested in it and people want to play it and get something out of it.”
THOUGHTS ON THE TWO RESPONSES: BOTH perspectives are needed and important. OUR WORLD needs a blend of the creative-enthusiast AND the critic-refiner. Each grows the other. Creativity that grows out of the rich soil of critique is the magic this world needs! Creativity involves play, grows out of play. It’s the dance of a tendril through rock and soil into sunshine, air and rain.
Through the growing field of Social Business Design, organizations are being asked to take a hard look at how decisions are made internally and why. Jeff Dachis is one of the leading voices in this area: http://bit.ly/social_business_design
Organizational structure is a central topic of conversation by Jeremiah Owyang, as he describes 5 ways large entities are structured and the value in each of these. Owyang leans toward the Hub and Spoke model as being optimal for entities entering social business: http://bit.ly/hub_and_spoke_owyang
When one looks at decision-makers WITHIN the organization, there are two initial levels. At the C-Suite level, programs are being approved to meet stakeholder expectations and deliver results needed/desired/assumed.
At the next level down, there is a debate (at the core) between objectivists (who believe something exists only to the extent that it can be verified through independent observation) and subjectivists (who say that social phenomenon would be unobservable if not for our capacity to experience and communicate intersubjectively…how we know (epistemology) influences what can be known, thus shaping one’s ontological assumptions about what exists).
Generally, it seems that Objectivists start with ontology, believing something exists ONLY to the extent that it can be verified through independent, unbiased observation. Subjectivists seem to put greater emphasis on epistemological assumptions, believing there are MANY phenomena that would be unknowable using the methods designed by and for objectivists. These include thoughts, feelings and social processes that are impossible to perceive with the five senses alone.
The BEST social business people are matchmakers, weaving the ethos of the Objectivist AND the Subjectivist together.
Interdisciplinary programs are core to this “matchmaking”. Organizations need BOTH objectivist and subjectivist! The machine certainly does a lot for us AND the human IS the last mile. (See Tim O’Reilly speaking here on the importance of the humans as the last mile in the field of business intelligence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhgoAxXRLPQ).
THE BOTTOM LINE FOR ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERS: This debate MUST become a dance, a love affair, where the benefits of quantitative and qualitative approaches compliment one another. Nowhere is this more evident than in the actual nitty gritty work of Socializers (Community Managers) communicating within social networks AND then delivering results to Bean Counters. Content-Marketing BASED upon solid Business Intelligence is a critical slice of the pie in this regard. In other terms, it’s about combining the best of Gartner (http://www.gartner.com) with the best of Copyblogger (http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/).
It was an honor to present on Business Intelligence via Social Media Data: Insights and Recommendations at the Boussias Social Media Conference, March 22, 2011. I had a blast working on my presentation with the fabulous artist Ana Foureaux Frazao, who created Guy Kawasaki’s “Enchantment” presentation for SXSW 2011. Her description of the artistic process behind the Greece presentation is fantastic and may be found here: http://bit.ly/axzbism
Business Intelligence via Social Media Data: Insights and Recommendations – PART 1
Business Intelligence via Social Media Data: Insights and Recommendations – PART 2
SUMMARY: In all fields of business, there are varying levels of sophistication. The small business owner juggles bookkeeping, rent, vendors and customers and, if he is lucky, has time left over to take his original business plan one step further via Marketing and Sales activities. The medium and enterprise level businesses have a responsibility to analyze their markets through best-practice business intelligence and innovate. Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to unknown. The open seas that enterprise-level businesses chart require captains and admirals who can judge when and how to take such risk.
THE VALUE OF SCOUTS: New technologies aid such leaders in their future plans. The most important members of the team in this respect are the SCOUTS. In the world of social media marketing, the scouts are social intelligence providers, experts in predictive analytics, text analytics, cluster analysis and sentiment trending. It is the responsibility of these scouts to discover the VERY BEST sources of intelligence in a specific vertical or world region. As the founder of Klout says, “Targeting the few key influencers who have authority around a given topic and allowing them to tell the story. The message is then amplified up through the network to reach a large engaged audience that trusts the message sender.” It is important to note that social media monitoring tools come in all shapes and sizes with varying angles on what is and is not important.
Highlighted in an article by Brian Solis,Ray Wang writes, “Overall, on a global scale, social analytics will evolve in 2011 from ad-hoc experiments into refined information services. Enterprise-level organizations should continue with experimenting in listening services that filter out noise from the social sphere, identify trends that deliver insight, and create models that support prediction.”
REGIONAL PROVIDERS:(In the following paragraph, I mix some of my thoughts with Mr. Wang’s observations to deepen the observation). “Regionally, it is recommended to identify LOCAL providers who have a deep understanding of the local language and customs. As algorithms increase in complexity, global tools will have to adapt to these regional and cultural differences, as well as requiring greater vertical specialization. The global tools like Sysomos, while very good, will no longer be able to support in house efforts due to the volume of demand and that may effect quality. A new breed of LOCAL information brokers will aid global intel providers in delivering social analytics at a scale and specificity that will support the challenges of big data in heterogeneous systems. Expect vendors such as Sysomos, Alterian, Attensity, Buzzmetrics, Cymfony, IBM, Radian6, SAS, Scoutlabs, Telligent, and Visible to shift their business models from software vendors to information brokers.”
LOCAL ANALYSTS: Regional Business Intelligence providers with LOCAL vendors trained in Predictive Analytics, Semantic Analysis, Cluster Analysis, and active in hands-on solutions analyzing the local language are important allies/partners to these global tools. This is clearly seen upon going into the representation of the data by these global social media intelligence providers with LOCAL analysts. Refinement of the data MUST be accomplished by native speakers. It is advised that the global tools identify regional managers to (a) make sales (b) identify local highly trained analysts who speak the language natively and (c) shift their identity from a tools centered approach to human-refined intelligence provision.
MERGING OF SOCIAL INTEL AND SOCIAL ACTION TOOLS: The leaders in the field will form alliances with social action tools like Hoot Suite and Buddy Media to mutually enhance value proposition. M&A in this area is an important evolutionary step for those organizations keen to the benefit of actionable intelligence. Brands want punchy insights, smart recommendations based on these insights along with actions that may be measured.
THE BUSINESS INTEL CUSTOMER: The sophisticated customer of social monitoring intelligence wants his provider to develop insights and action-steps from the masses of data that come through a WOMMA-ethics-level tool…that is, a tool that includes total, or near, access to firehoses from “walled-gardens” like Facebook or the giant Amazonian rivers of Twitter. He then wants that provider to write up a brand booklet complete with a few neat charts and a storyline of how the brand may utilize the current economic climate for maximum growth.
LIVING INFOGRAPHICS: To go further, the Business Unit Manager of the marketing agency working with this enterprise-level customer may want the intelligence provider to produce an interactive infographic that gathers intel AND grows customer equity all at once. Great example of this is JESS3’s APTA project.
BUSINESS PLAN: In an A+ scenario, the Business Unit Manager from the agency provides the Brand Manager with a comprehensive plan that charts the growth of the brand over the coming year, its relative competitive weaknesses and advantages (SWOT style or another scenario planner) and a few preliminary creative mock-ups of the customer-facing solution. For internal business solutions, the Business Unit Manager recommends a few choice third-party vendors to come alongside the team for sCRM, a possible re-vamping of how collaboration takes place in the organization and re-vitalized, efficient HR.
IMPORTANT QUESTIONS ANSWERED: Important questions answered through social intelligence projects include:
• Buzz in broadcast and social media: what is the volume of mentions?
• General topics and impact: which news, headlines and developing stories influence my brand?
• Special topics and impact: which hidden parameters influence my brand?
• Opinion mining: do people think positively or negatively about my brand?
• Mood analysis: do people express pleasure about my brand? Are they calm/relaxed or alert?
• Seasonality and time-of-day: when do people discuss my brand and topics of interest?
• Named entities graph: who am I connected to?
• Influencer detection: who do we recommend as influencers in regards to my brand?
• Meme detection: how do ideas spread throughout the population?
• Visualization: how can I represent information by combining insights and graphics?
“ON THE FLY” COMMUNITIES: But the MOST important fruit of business intelligence derived from social media data is an on the fly community. Non-branded aggregations in Twitter of Key Influencers in the form of lists OR Twitter accounts filled with Key Influencers around a specific topic are a very powerful means to accessing a customer base quickly. TO REPEAT: Non-branded, on-the-fly Communities aggregating Key Influencers are a far better fruit of business intelligence than “snap-shot” insights. The social eco-system is fluid and Brand Managers want something of real value from BI projects that can be used RIGHT NOW. Using tools like PeopleBrowsr one may assemble such “on-the-fly” communities quickly and accurately. Check out this video of Jodee Rich, CEO and founder of PeopleBrowsr, talking about the Research.ly solution:
WITHIN THE ENTERPRISE: The happy Brand Manager gets to go to her Marketing Manager and GM and show off a plan for her brand(s) that will elevate business by a nice percentage, decrease overall internal costs, address any outstanding PR and Customer-Service related issues and foster a glowing relationship with the community in her region through a customer-centric ad/marketing campaign. And, due to the entire solution being driven through social business, she has decreased the ad spend by 60%, saving money in the process. Finally, through deeper business intelligence, the enterprise may find ways to economize and grow hitherto unseen: