By: Jason Schneider, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Clarabridge
My good friend and teammate, Matt Cohen, recently wrote a great blog about the rise and usefulness of social data if done well. He included some great use cases of a few very successful companies. That inspired me to share my thoughts on the emerging trends I have seen in companies taking advantage of social data to measure their biz.
I have been in the customer experience management and analysis space for 6 years now and I am fortunate to see hundreds of companies across our customer base develop different strategies to take advantage of (Listen, Analyze, Act and Measure – LAAM) on the customers’ voice. As Matt pointed out the rise of social was a tsunami and as soon as the executives in companies realized that social data could help enable better business decisions, the game was on! Now we have hit another phase in the evolution of social LAAM that is causing a second tsunami to hit today’s enterprise CEM professional. This phase could potentially triple the data they had to previously analyze. Let me explain the evolution:
Social Phase 1 – ”Me Phase” – I have to LAAM what people are saying about my company, products, services, etc.
Social Phase 2 – “Me and My Enemy” – I have to LAAM for my company and my competitors – there is real-time comp intel!
Social Phase 3 – “Under the Sun” – I have to LAAM for my phase 1 , 2 and measure any external mega, regional, emerging and spokesperson trends that might effect the products and services the company is offering.
Phase 3 example – Perhaps I am a food producer and I decide to utilize an ingredient in my latest product. The ingredient itself is not part of your campaign for the release and it not expected to increase sales, but, it was a cheaper, faster solution to produce the product (this is the world we live in). Two weeks after launch the ingredient itself becomes a political wave. Is that wave really negative? Will it affect our new release, what type of consumers care and is my target market talking about this and comparing it to my new product? In addition, my spokesperson for the product just received a huge humanitarian award and I now have a competing positive and negative event to LAAM.
Phase 3 is real and is happening now. To Matt’s points, it requires company employees, not outside agencies, to take control of their social LAAM for all three phases. A strong CEM program combines social with all the other listening posts you have that are also continuing to rise (in volume, significance?) and be valuable. It requires the use of multiple social listening tools (one for news media and one for microblogs) and a system to aggregate the consumer generated data, media generated data and internal company listening posts (emails, notes, chats, multiple survey providers).
The companies that do not lay this infrastructure and learn how to LAAM now will be seeing their stock prices drop steadily because they will be out of touch with their consumers.