Best Practices•
on July 28th, 2008•
Seems most businesses are looking at Social Media as a marketing and/or customer service channel. Is this too narrow a view? Is something being missed that could add even more value to the brand than just marketing? Based on our conversations and clients, we think so. What do you think?
The more we read on Social Media from the commercial end, the more we see discussion around relationships to “buzz marketing” and “behavioural marketing”, how monitoring tools relate to these uses. These are, without doubt, highly viable approaches for business to Social Media. But doesn’t engaging in Social Media mean more than just selling products/service?
One excellent application for Social Media is investor relations when it comes to both industry analysts and to retail shareholders. Monitoring forums and blogs for commentary around a stock can elicit vital intelligence to both the PR and IR teams in a company. Engaging in the conversation can help a company to clarify issues around the latest financial statements or product release being discussed by shareholders. What’s the value in this case? protecting the possibility of a sell-off or maintaining a stock price through a difficult financial time. For the company, this means protecting your valuation. This is important if you have institutional investors.
There’s also innovation. By engaging not just customers, but other thought leaders or professionals through Social Media channels, a company can uncover potential innovations for products and services or even how it does business with its suppliers. Uncovering an opportunity to innovate can result in increased margins, a better product that beats the competition or increases market share – all of which contribute to the shareholder value, or even Economic Profit.
What other benefits do you see coming from Social Media? What about Governments? Of course, while the benefits may be there, in the end it also matters what the company/organization does with this intelligence doesn’t it?
Best Practices•
on July 18th, 2008•
Microblogging – Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk etc., all started with Twitter well over a year ago. Most pundits (myself included) wondered what the use of Twitter was. Now, 2 years later, so many people are on Twitter and others that one wonders why wouldn’t someone be involved? But as a source for competitive intelligence? Certainly. It’s just “how” it’s used.
There is now however, potentially valuable business intelligence in Microblogs. One has to know what they are looking for however. We also speculate that as it is a young service and people tend to speak very freely, there is the chance someone may reveal confidential information for a public company. So in what ways can you gather insights for business intelligence via Microblogs?
People Indicators: People may Twit (write) about job openings or lay-offs. Valuable indicators to competitors, including the ability to anticipate upcoming financial results for public companies. You might also find potential new hires.
Positioning: With TwitUps and PlurkShops (a type of real-time conference) taking place, you can gain valuable insights into how and where your competitor is positioning themselves. Additionally, you can gather leads of attendees for your marketing database.
Market Moves: Perhaps employees from your competition are traveling to trade shows or new markets pursuing business. Their Twits about this can tip you off to what they’re up to.
Brand Strategy: You can gather a trend in a branding strategy over a period of time, understand the thought leadership plan quicker than other methods and monitor the markets response to a company brand.
Product Feedback: You can monitor the reception of your competitors product/service through Microblogging posts. You’ll also gather your own.
There are other uses, but these outline what we feel are the main ones. Perhaps you can think of others? It is important to remember though, that it’s harder to lurk in Microblogs, especially one like Purk where participation is key to learning more.
Like Social Media monitoring as a whole, you want to have a strategy in place and someone who can sift through the information to pull out the useful nuggets and direct them to the appropriate place. Giving a Business Analyst on your team access to such tools is an advantage.