Social Monitoring Doesn’t Stop At Social Media

When most companies think about monitoring online conversations, the discussion generally stops at social media. Conversations about your brand are not limited to the social media landscape. Consumer are evaluating, requesting support and sharing their experience with your company through a variety of engagement points, like customer service agent transcripts, email surveys, social media assets, etc.. And that just represents the online experience, it doesn’t take into account the number of offline opportunities.

When most companies think about monitoring online conversations, the discussion generally stops at social media. Conversations about your brand are not limited to the social media landscape. Consumer are evaluating, requesting support and sharing their experience with your company through a variety of engagement points, like customer service agent transcripts, email surveys, social media assets, etc.. And that just represents the online experience, it doesn’t take into account the number of offline opportunities. Why would you limit your analysis to only a single data point when it makes more sense to extend your text analytics strategy to other assets?

Blend Social and Enterprise Analytics for a Holistic Social Marketing Approach

When devising a text analytics strategy for a campaign or other outreach effort, consider how insights derived from different data sources can be used to complement and validate your analytics insights.

For example, we worked with a beverage company that was devising a campaign that had to adhere to strict geographical and legal requirements. They were building a campaign to target male authors, 21 years and older. Additionally, our client wanted to be able to isolate and compare on-topic, brand conversations from the San Francisco/Los Angeles area to those occurring in the New York area from this specific demographic.

This client approached their project in a holistic manner. They had originally completed some market research for this campaign and used the findings from our social media analytics project to validate some of the conclusions. They also took advantage of our analytics methodology to surface themes and trends that weren’t on their immediate radar. Knowing how consumers associate your brand with well-known artists or celebrities may present an opportunity for co-branding.

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By setting up their approach to incorporate both social and enterprise data into their campaign analysis, our client was able to take advantage of the unique perspective provided by both. The important point to remember is not to limit your analytics approach to relying exclusively on social media for your consumer intelligence. Broadening your scope to include all sorts of data sources (unstructured text) will help expose unexpected insights and validate the direction of your business strategy.