Social CRM Needed To Make Sense of Consumer Data.
Social data is overwhelming. More customers, buyers, and consumers are creating content everywhere they go. Companies cannot scale to match this in a 1:1 basis, and most companies are in early phases of the 8 Stages of Listening. Earlier this year, I made clear investments in researching the Social CRM space and Mobile+Social space (report forthcoming), it’s clear that Social CRM is starting to get wind under it’s wings, and mobile/social is certainly happening at consumer level. So what do I see happening next? Two trends, social analytics intelligence, and social business value networks, which I’ll discuss at a later time.
The above graphic lists the Social CRM Use Cases (read the full report). I’ve highlighted the insights use cases (orange) which will yield predictive customer experiences (green).
Social Analytics and Social Insights are Components of the Social CRM Suite.
You can see how we indicated in the toolset there are use cases in Social Marketing Insights, Social Sales Insights, Social Support Insights, Innovations Insights, Collaboration Insights. If you can successfully derive insights from these 5 use cases, you’ll be able to complete the far right use cases and provide a VIP experience to customers –before they’ve ever entered your store or registered to your website.
Matrix: Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics, Social Insights
| Category | Description and Example | Current State | What no one tells you |
| Brand Monitoring | Aware. Simple aggregation and reporting –without any real intelligence. These technologies scrape and aggregate what’s being discussed by a topic, channel, or group and derive alerts and workflows. | Commodity technology. I started a list in 2006, yet now there are over 145 indexed by E&Y employees. These technologies do not provide intelligence, or predictive behavior modeling. | The smart brand monitoring companies have already started their integration plans. They don’t want to end up being trilobites and have become part of a larger system: Recent acquisitions include Scoutlabs+Lithium(community), Filtrbox+Jive(Community), Techrigy+Alterian(WCM) and others. |
| Social Analytics | Intelligent. Derive meaning what social data means. These companies provide intelligence and answer “Why are 500 people a week tweeting about goat milk?” Companies who derive intelligence from social data like Crowd Factory, Crimson Hexagon. | Emerging features are coming around. These tools help true data analysts derive meaning from patterns, and how it influences large scale commerce. | This space is still evolving, and expect that the business intelligence software vendors like IBM Cognos, SAS, Qlikview, Oracle, and beyond to start acquiring data streams in the social space and coupling with their engines within the next 12-18 months. Even analyst Esteban Kolsky agrees |
| Social Insights | Predictive. These companies can predict what consumers will do based upon social data. I’ve seen early examples from community platform Lithium who’s able to predict within 45 minutes if a community will be successful based on comparing to historical data, but for the most part, that’s limited to community data –not the whole social web. | Not here, yet. Right now, systems are just aggregating content to make meaning out of it, yet there’s no clear set of companies that are able to truly provide predictive recommendations. | Look for companies who have data across a value network. What’s that? Data in multiple companies from manufactured, supplier, retailer, to consumer. Expect companies like Bazaarvoice to be able to yield insights as they collect data from multiple manufactures like HP, Dell and are used on retailer sites like BestBuy |
Corporate Social Strategists Should Evolve Buying Criteria Now.
The social media landscape is noisy, and brand monitoring features aren’t sufficient for brands to be actionable –only reactive. As a result expect:
- Brand monitoring companies who don’t evolve are on the path to becoming trilobites.
- Instead, look for companies that will help derive intelligence from the excessive data source of social –not just provide monitoring and reporting.
- Ask them to expose their product roadmaps before buying, look at their partnerships, and ask how they will derive meaning –not just extend alerting.
- Expect social analytics and social insights, to emerge within the next year and a half, and many brand monitoring companies to evolve or perish as the BI incumbents move in.
Love to hear your perspective as companies seek to derive meaning –then predict customer behavior using social data.
I am interested in social business value networks. You are looking at the monitoring tools, while I am looking at the creation tools: Get Satisfaction, UserVoice, Collaborize. These have the power to create useful communities around brands, sometimes more easily than the brands themselves. Few brands have created outright positive online communities — maybe Zappo's, Best Buy, Southwest?–but many have created NEGATIVE communities (AT&T, sometimes Comcast) that go to those collaboration platforms to vent/vote/try to help. How do these efforts, which don't seem to be operating together now, begin to work together for the benefit of the customer.
Another issue: Doc Searls is working on VRM. That's the same thing, through the looking glass, isn't it?
Set me straight, help me out.
I am interested in social business value networks. You are looking at the monitoring tools, while I am looking at the creation tools: Get Satisfaction, UserVoice, Collaborize. These have the power to create useful communities around brands, sometimes more easily than the brands themselves. Few brands have created outright positive online communities — maybe Zappo's, Best Buy, Southwest?–but many have created NEGATIVE communities (AT&T, sometimes Comcast) that go to those collaboration platforms to vent/vote/try to help. How do these efforts, which don't seem to be operating together now, begin to work together for the benefit of the customer.
Another issue: Doc Searls is working on VRM. That's the same thing, through the looking glass, isn't it?
Set me straight, help me out.
I am interested in social business value networks. You are looking at the monitoring tools, while I am looking at the creation tools: Get Satisfaction, UserVoice, Collaborize. These have the power to create useful communities around brands, sometimes more easily than the brands themselves. Few brands have created outright positive online communities — maybe Zappo's, Best Buy, Southwest?–but many have created NEGATIVE communities (AT&T, sometimes Comcast) that go to those collaboration platforms to vent/vote/try to help. How do these efforts, which don't seem to be operating together now, begin to work together for the benefit of the customer.
Another issue: Doc Searls is working on VRM. That's the same thing, through the looking glass, isn't it?
Set me straight, help me out.
No combination of analytics insight and prediction is likely to overcome the organizational limits inherent in the way most corporations collaborate with their ecosystems. Unless the organization (specifically, its processes and cultural practices) is aligned with the goals of analytics we shouldn't expect much success.
No combination of analytics insight and prediction is likely to overcome the organizational limits inherent in the way most corporations collaborate with their ecosystems. Unless the organization (specifically, its processes and cultural practices) is aligned with the goals of analytics we shouldn't expect much success.
No combination of analytics insight and prediction is likely to overcome the organizational limits inherent in the way most corporations collaborate with their ecosystems. Unless the organization (specifically, its processes and cultural practices) is aligned with the goals of analytics we shouldn't expect much success.
For branding monitoring, it would be good if an aggregator could scrape data on an emotional connection
I think Vodacom (South Africa telco) has been using their location aware social network called The Grid (thegrid.co.za) to predict customer trends (including mood swings and the related cranky callers) in the last couple of years. If ported to a different industry, the scenario can be very useful for many B2C companies. I would love to hear how deep their insights go and how much actionable intelligence the derive from it.
I think Vodacom (South Africa telco) has been using their location aware social network called The Grid (thegrid.co.za) to predict customer trends (including mood swings and the related cranky callers) in the last couple of years. If ported to a different industry, the scenario can be very useful for many B2C companies. I would love to hear how deep their insights go and how much actionable intelligence the derive from it.
I think Vodacom (South Africa telco) has been using their location aware social network called The Grid (thegrid.co.za) to predict customer trends (including mood swings and the related cranky callers) in the last couple of years. If ported to a different industry, the scenario can be very useful for many B2C companies. I would love to hear how deep their insights go and how much actionable intelligence the derive from it.
I agree, as this is still so new the odds of accurate, relevant information is pretty sketchy at best. I do believe that it is headed int he right direction though.
I agree, as this is still so new the odds of accurate, relevant information is pretty sketchy at best. I do believe that it is headed int he right direction though.
I agree, as this is still so new the odds of accurate, relevant information is pretty sketchy at best. I do believe that it is headed int he right direction though.
I agree with the writer's opinion.Social CRM is important in the days. The list is good for companies.
I agree with the writer's opinion.Social CRM is important in the days. The list is good for companies.
I agree with the writer's opinion.Social CRM is important in the days. The list is good for companies.
Interesting post Jeremiah.
I completely agree that companies (such as mine) have to keep evolving to meet demands. I like to think that we currently help to provide some insights with some of our more interesting features that go far beyond just listening and engaging.
There's still a bit of a way to go though before software is going to be able to provide great insights (ourselves included), but we're working on it.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
Interesting post Jeremiah.
I completely agree that companies (such as mine) have to keep evolving to meet demands. I like to think that we currently help to provide some insights with some of our more interesting features that go far beyond just listening and engaging.
There's still a bit of a way to go though before software is going to be able to provide great insights (ourselves included), but we're working on it.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
yes, brand monitoring is really important. we are very much dependent on Twitter with the help of tools like tweettwain to monitor our brand and compare with our competitors. even we can set-up auto-reply for our keywords, which makes our life easy!
This is why many companies are adapting internal collaboration tools, to overcome the very limits you're referring to.
“Brand monitoring companies who don™t evolve are on the path to becoming trilobites”, truer words were never spoken.
The problem is that right now, although a lot of the tools are evolving, we are still nowhere near hundred percent accuracy, especially with automated tools. If you look at it, the insight is only as good as the data that you gather and the analysis that comes along with it. If the data is inaccurate, then the analysis will be wrong ergo the insights would suffer. We have to improve first the analysis, which at this point human analysis ranks the highest in terms of accuracy, so as to have meaningful insights.
A bit confused about why CrimsonHexagon (which seems like real-time sentiment monitoring) and CrowdFactory (which seems like campaign management) are marked as Social Analytics. Spredfast seems to have a very simple and to the point “analytics” portion and it may be their strongest aspect. Sprinklr also has analytics. Could it be that all of these are playing in each others' areas and we will soon see consolidation so that there can be one big company with monitoring + analytics + insights + engagement + management + support ?
Not as familiar with UserVoice and Collaborize, but I'd like to point out that both GetSatisfaction, Parature and BazaarVoice have interesting offerings for Facebook. Being able to integrate what's happening in .com with what's happening in FAcebook is going to get more and more important as people stop seeing Facebook as another AOL, and realize that data should be able to live… anywhere.
I agree with you about Facebook. It's a clear case of going where the people already are
Our social media monitoring tool's contract is up and rather than renewing I'm looking at completely outsourcing that function to our social agency until the tools (and market) mature(s). Too many cobbled together partial solutions exist today for listening and I'd rather let our agency deal with that so I can just get the actionable results. Of course this assumes that we'll have a very tight service level Agreement with them on what we need and when we need it. Your thoughts on outsourcing social media monitoring would be appreciated.
Definitely agree that social insights and analytics are key elements to social crm. Our social analytic tools use semantic technology to understand context and provides not only details about who is saying what but also why they are saying it. We also go one step further, our social market researchers derive meaning from the analysis. So often, when you run reports and analysis, organizations don't know what to do with it.
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