The Four Things You Need to Know About Social Intelligence
In November, Eastwick hosted its first Analytics and Insights Webinar: Evaluating Your Digital Brand Health Through Social Intelligence. Our VP of Analytics and Insight, Jun Quintana, along with and Jason Harris Senior Manager of Community and Evangelism at Sysomos, detailed how to measure the health of your brand online. There were some great points and questions brought up that we thought would be helpful to highlight. Here are the four greatest takeaways:
1. What is Social Intelligence?
Online communication has become increasingly important for businesses of all sizes, but it has also become increasing difficult to measure that success. Your company is now represented across the web in many different forms, and measuring all of those forms can feel almost impossible. That’s where social intelligence comes in — using data and values to show how your brand is performing online. As Jun likes to say social intelligence is finding out the “Who, What, When, Where, and How” about your brand. Who is talking about you? What are they talking about? Where are they talking? And how are they talking about you? At Eastwick, we use data attained from listening to online conversations about our clients, combined with an analysis of a client’s own online properties, and what we know about the client’s brand to create social intelligence.
2. Anyone Can Use Social Intelligence
While analyzing data may seem intimidating, or exclusively limited to enterprise-level companies, anyone can use social intelligence to help improve their online performance. Small businesses can listen and engage online; it can be time-intensive, but it offers an inexpensive customer service and marketing tool. Jason said that a small coffee shop could increase sales by listening for customers checking-in at other coffee stores near them. The small coffee shop could then reach out to those potential customers and offer them a promotion to lure them away from other stores. However, this engagement can’t happen without making informed decisions about which potential customers to reach out to. In order to make these informed decisions you must combine what you know about your brand, and listen to what others are saying about you. Only then will you be able to create an online community, and increase sales.
3. Benchmarking is a Crucial Part of Social Intelligence and Communication Success
Benchmarking, the process of setting goals and measuring your progress against them, is a key aspect of communications programs. It’s the only way you know if your campaigns are succeeding.
Benchmarking can seem intimidating at first, but it’s not! You already have everything you need to to set and outperform goals: your own data. For example, if last month you had ten conversions on your website, set your goal at 12 conversions. Then track your campaigns to see which lead to conversions. Once you know how you’ve done you can focus on the campaigns that worked, and re-set your goals. If you’re just starting out, and don’t have any data, you can use the same process, except this time start the campaign, and measure as you go. In a month you’ll have data that you can measure and set goals against to better inform your strategy.
4. Social Intelligence Should Influence Your Content Strategy
When a phone company Jason worked for decided to launch a new phone, they thought conversations would focus on the phone’s new screen. However, Jason saw that online conversations actually focused on the phone’s durability. With this knowledge, Jason suggested shifting the company’s message to address durability. The resulting shift leads to more online engagement and an increase in sales.
Jason’s client isn’t a unique case. At Eastwick Jun’s team works with multiple clients to listen to social content, analyze it, and use this social intelligence to improve messaging. One of these clients, a non-profit, was worried about a reoccurring event because at the last event speakers had stirred controversy. The Eastwick team was able to review tens of thousands of social questions and comments, draw conclusions from them, and from these conclusions craft a message that maintained the client’s positive brand perception. In both of these cases, social intelligence allowed companies to connect with their audiences in a more meaningful way.
Want to find out how to integrate social intelligence into your communications plan? Have questions or comments? Email us at Research@Eastwick.com.
