If you’re actively harnessing social listening platforms to deliver insights to your marketing and customer service organizations, congratulations! These two use cases, though most common, are in some ways also the most critical as they represent channels to both acquire and retain customers. But what’s beyond this? Some of the most advanced users of social listening platforms are hard at work developing processes to feed insights to multiple organizations within their companies, often referred to as “scaling across the enterprise.”
The Visible Intelligence platform is built to scale with the enterprise in mind. Here are four ways to scale social data across the enterprise:
1. Form a Steering Committee
Often times ideas get shot down because they don’t have enough executive buy-in. Form a cross-functional steering committee that is comprised of one or two people from each organization within your company that you feel may benefit from social media data. Then secure what’s called an executive sponsor, or senior-level person who has the ability to get behind an initiative and work it through corporate hierarchies to receive additional support and visibility.
2. Examine the Impact on Sales
Once you’ve taken care of your current customers, examine the potential impact social media data can have on your sales organization. Whether your model is B2C or B2B, point of need listening can work in both, and though more common in B2C settings, there are some very strong case studies out there on B2B lead generation. Designate a person within marketing and sales to work collaboratively on finding and engaging with prospective clients via social media. Look for those who may be seeking out advice on a general product/service category and be their unbiased resource for information. Also, with the convergence of social data with CRM and marketing automation platforms, I suspect the sales organization will be one of the heaviest users of social listening platforms and social data in the years to come.
3. Competitive Intelligence is Key
Competitive intelligence data is among the most valuable information you can attain for your company as it can inform your current position in the marketplace and give hints on where you may need to focus to carve out more market share. Start by examining when a competitor launches a web-based marketing campaign, how much reach it has, and what types of content they build and release. By understanding their “content strategy,” you can gain understanding on what the industry is looking for and where potential gaps may exist. In addition, drilling into conversations about your competitors can unearth their strengths and weaknesses and can inform how to best position yourself against them.
4. Product Development
Product Development is tied very closely to consumer insights. How can social media data be used to drive product development? Let’s say for instance you’re a CPG company who has developed a new product but needs to release it in test markets to validate mass distribution and build sales projection models. Your ability to examine how a product is being received in market is a critical input for your product development organization, not to mention the fact that by using social data in near real-time, you can build models that project if, when and where product recalls may occur.
How are you using social data to inform different areas of your organization? Let us know!
Steve is a Solutions Engineer at Visible, where he is responsible for helping our clients build social intelligence solutions that inform their strategic business decisions and contribute to the successful adoption and scale across the enterprise. Steve resides in Maine with his wife and daughter, and when not at work, has been known to play a little guitar.
