Social media data is a valuable source of enterprise-wide feedback for businesses that are savvy enough to leverage it. Social insights enable customer service teams to better serve customers, helps corporate communications spot crises and measure “buzz,” gives marketers a brand health barometer and competitive benchmarking index and allows researchers access to previously untapped consumer insights. Social data makes it possible for advertisers to optimize campaign messaging and track results, and gives sales organizations the ability to find their competitors’ unhappy customers, while identifying prospects in the market for their products.
However, social media data by itself is not nearly as instructive for taking action and driving results as it is when integrated into your business strategy and execution. The real power and ROI of social data comes from marrying it with existing business systems, processes and data (e.g. CRM platforms, market research, point of sale (POS) systems). Add in traditional media sources such as news feeds, television, satellite and mobile technologies, and with this holistic view you can see responses to your entire media ecosystem in one place. Combining social data with metrics such as Web analytics allows you to see the impact of your messaging and the resulting actions and conversions.
Making Integration Work
Let’s take things a step further. Consider the impact of combining social media data with other systems of record such as your POS system. Tying social data to your POS data can help you understand customer wants, likes, dislikes and thinking abouts, as they translate into buying activity at the counter of your brick and mortar or online storefront. Integrating social data into your analysis also allows you to merge the personas of your customers on the Web, which are far richer than static demographic data fields – helping you understand your customers’ needs and wants in a far more actionable manner.
Surprisingly, despite all of these social data integration benefits, few companies have yet to successfully incorporate social data into their business data and applications. They are committing the single greatest social media data pitfall—not integrating their business data with their social media data. Why? Until recently, the largest roadblock to creating an effective enterprise data ecosystem was a lack of technology capable of managing and integrating massive volumes of social data with existing company records and systems.
Today, thanks to state of the art social media monitoring and analytics platforms like Visible Intelligence®, this is no longer the case. These platforms have made creating a holistic view of your traditional and social data a reality, giving you the benefit of an integrated view of your customers, your customer touch points and your business. However, social enterprise integration is much more than viewing a summary chart of combined stats. It is the ability to:
- Tie customer social data to your CRM system
- Store entire case histories in a common database
- Analyze conversation data
- Better understand your prospects and customers
- Increase productivity
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Quantify interaction among traditional media, campaigns and social media activity
- Influence consumers on the go using social with mobile
- Establish a platform for a long term social CRM strategy
Holistic data integration allows you to Socialize your Enterprise, automating, scaling and integrating with your systems of record, to transform the way you do business and to become as social as your customers. Viewing your traditional media, website traffic, marketing messaging and response rates with everything that is said about you in social channels, all in one place, better informs you about the perceptions of your brand. It helps you identify and understand the known and the unknown to ultimately make better business decisions.
The Power of Integration
Social media is powerful, but it is ten times more informative and actionable when combined with traditional media, existing systems and emerging technologies like mobile. Think of integration as being not just about the technology but rather about the integration of your entire marketing strategy with campaign outreach and customer touch points. Marketing that creates brand expectations combined with servicing that has the power to make those brand promises and expectations real. And think of the integration effort across work groups and departments, breaking down silos. Integrating social data with your enterprise data gives you the power to understand and interact with your customers. Integration gives you the power to change how you do business.
How are you going to harness the power of social media data and put it to work for your business? If you would like to learn more about how Visible® can help you integrate your enterprise data with social data please contact us.
~Jackie Kmetz
Social Intelligence Crusader
