I believe we are about to go through a renaissance in social listening. Call it the second wave. The first wave saw tons of technologies emerging and selling themselves to organizations based upon the simple, intuitive promise that you ought to listen to "the conversation." This led to many, many phone book-sized reports with endless pie charts landing on executive desks around the world. The best of them led the way to making a case for actual action. Too many where as useful as a phone book - nice to know the names are there but when was the last time you actually cracked one open?
Business and brands are smarter. They know that standard technology like monitoring software is a fraction of the battle. In the second wave, there are two ways business will get true measurable benefits from listening.
- Building a listening, insight and action discipline within their team - this is relatively simple but perhaps not easy. No more phone book-sized PowerPoints. It's time to empower the analysts within the organization (or at a trusted partner) to only do the percentage of listening necessary to form actionable insights. Creating a stand-alone valuable report has never been the hard part. Getting the "so what" teased out of it (and on page 2 of the document) and presented to a receptive audience inside the company has been more than half the battle.
- Looking at the information in new, insightful ways. The NYTimes Lab has really done something useful with the new data visualization approach (not sure if it is fair to call it a 'tool'- maybe a 'platform?'). Called Cascade, the visualizations seem to cover the two must-have criteria for good visualizations - they look cool and they are actually meaningful. Most visualizations just look cool. I have books and books of them. I have always appreciated great data visualizations and can easily succumb to meaningless beauty. (thanks, Mashable). You can see the video describing Cascade here.
Think about the following 5 questions the NY Times was keen to find the answers to. Ask your self if you might also want to know the answers in relation to your own business:
- What is the impact of a single tweet?
- Are certain people more influential on certain topics?
- Does the content of a tweet affect its impact on the conversation?
- What variables like time-of-day or day-of-week, affect the impact of a tweet?
- How can the NY Times use this information to expand the impact of the conversation?
What are you doing to build a listening + insight + action discipline? How about new ways to look at the data? Is that someone's job?
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