business intelligence

Social Business Intelligence Advance #4

The business intelligence solution that marketers want is the following: a cloud-based service that is comprehensively analyzing in real-time networks of regular customers AND matching these customers (and their friends) to upcoming deals specific to past purchases. For instance, if Amazon were to fully integrate its data with Facebook’s data, a profound level of matching would become possible. Senior leadership within major FMCG and retail entities should be actively cultivating technical vendors and in-house technicians to achieve this type of customer intelligence solution.

Social Business Intelligence Advance #1 and #2

When social business intelligence solutions provide a “Create Prospects CRM” button, the social analytics industry will have leapt one more notch forward. What it looks like is this: a series of 10,000 individuals have commented on a specific brand/issue over 1 month AND this CRM button collects Name, Current Address, Current Phone, Current Email, Current social links for each individual. Instantly. Downloadable in a CSV format or a colorful PDF “dossier-style” format. The social media monitoring solution that offers this button will become a global leader in prospect generation.

Advance number two is when this service is fully applicable across global borders, delivering such info for residents of all nations.

A brief description of Social Business Intelligence

WHAT IS SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: The basic concept behind the term “social intelligence” is to derive customer, competitive and market intelligence via data scanned in social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

THE NET RESULT OF A SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PROJECT (WHAT YOU GET FROM A S.I. PROJECT): The value of a social intelligence project is manifold, including the following benefits:

• discovery of warm leads related to psychographics and demographics from a customer’s current database.

• discovery of current trends and developments in a market sector that could lead to product/service innovation.

• discovery of a competitor’s activities that may aid one’s sales efforts.

• discovery of what your customers talk about, leading to product/service innovation and changes in marketing/sales strategy/tactics.

• discovery of new regions where your product/service is being discussed and your competitors are making money.

• discovery of upcoming events where you could generate awareness and sales.

• discovery of new pools of customers in digital networks. You may not have been aware of these pools of customers and their interests.

• discovery of conversations that social marketers and community managers can enter and utilize for higher brand awareness and sales.

• discovery of vendors and employees via professional networks like LinkedIn or the European Women’s Professional Network.

HOW TO PERFORM SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:

WHO: Gathering social intelligence is best performed by someone trained in research. Although a great amount of data may be aggregated automatically during a social intelligence project, it takes a human being to segment and make sense of this data and create insights related to the data.

HOW: There are many tools used to gather social data. Some of the best are expensive and require additional training to master. One of the best ways for a novice to begin is to use Twitter and LinkedIn. After setting up accounts in both social properties, use the free tool Listorious to research lists of influencers surrounding specific keywords in Twitter. Be sure to sign up for an Executive Account in LinkedIn so you can use all of the features in the Advanced Search tool.

WHICH TOOLS: More advanced social intelligence tools include Radian6, Sysomos, BrandWatch, PeopleBrowsr, Crimson Hexagon, Recorded Future and Trackur. A comprehensive list of these and other social intelligence tools may be found here.

Webcast: Social Intelligence and Foresight by Recorded Future and The Socializers

Recorded Future (http://www.recordedfuture.com) was joined by Nathaniel Hansen, CEO of The Socializers, to discuss how temporal analytic technology supports in-depth social web research. We discussed how identifying key web sources and potentially catalytic future events supports social intelligence research.

The presentation includes an introduction to Recorded Future’s technology from CEO Dr. Christopher Ahlberg, a brief a live demo of our analytic tools, and discussion of how the Socializers map and measure the most influential online figures.

Social Intelligence reveals the Heart of a Business

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.

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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.

theunconscious

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.