As social media continues to become part of everyday life, market researchers are beginning to leverage social data in a multitude of ways. Focus groups, surveys, and panels will never be completely replaced, but social media is quickly becoming an affordable alternative for deep qualitative research.

Here are a few ways market researchers can leverage social media data for deep insight:

1. Consumer Segmentation

Consumers are talking online everyday, about everything, in massive numbers. This volume of data alone allows for a much deeper analysis into specific segments within the market than study groups.  Whether you are looking to identify emerging trends in a specific demographic segment (ie: Hispanic mothers between 25 – 34) or understand the path-to-purchase among a broader spectrum (ie: Males 25 – 49), with the right data and the right technologies, social media can provide incredibly insightful answers.

2. Customer Experience

Companies are placing a larger emphasis on customer experience. A great experience is what can set retailers apart in a world where e-tailers and big box stores are winning the price wars. Mobile social media adoption is providing a wealth of customer experience data.  Customers are now documenting their in-store experience in real-time on the social web in the form of Tweets and Facebook status updates.  Analyzing this data can help to understand how consumers view staff, merchandising, promotions, as well as in-store purchase triggers.

3. Competitive Intelligence

Consumers talk about brands all the time in social media.  From customer service to product performance.  Social market research makes it possible to identify correlations between a competitive brand within a target demographic (ie: What type of activities do females 18 – 34 who shop at a certain retailer often engage in?).  Social media provides deep insights into unmet needs and switching preferences which can help drive purchases away from competitors to your business.

Be sure to request our social market research whitepaper to find out more about how social media can work alongside your current research methodology.

Recognizing the increasing need for large enterprises to identify and manage online and social media corporate reputation issues in real-time, ListenLogic today announced the launch of its Reputation Management System, ListenLogic RMS™. Currently serving Global 1000 companies, ListenLogic RMS™ leverages ListenLogic’s proprietary real-time intelligence technology and Integrated Social Intelligence Platform™ to help organizations identify corporate reputation issues, drive social outreach, and manage communications with a first of its kind issue tracking and influencer relationship management system.

Find out how ListenLogic can help transform your business into a social business. Request our Social RMS™ Product Brief.

In Part 2 of our What is Social CRM? series, we discussed some the major efficiency and scaling challenges facing large companies currently utilizing social media for customer service and marketing outreach. Today we look at ways in which Social CRM can be utilized to implement an efficient and scalable social media engagement program.

• Integrate Business Rules – In order to create a repeatable process, brands should integrate current customer service business rules and develop a ‘Mission Matrix’ that puts objectives and goals at the forefront of the social engagement strategy.  Use the Mission Matrix to build a roadmap for customer identification and case escalation within your customer service and marketing outreach operations.  For example, create a roadmap to identify and escalate irate customers, product complaints and prospective sales inquiries.
• Turn on the Social Media Firehose – It’s time to turn on the social firehose and listen to every brand mention, not just 1 out of 10 posts.  Many companies are already struggling to process the sampled data feed they’re currently receiving, so how can they scale to handle 10x the data from a firehose without adding 10x the Customer Service Rep staff?  They simply can’t.
• Marry Man & Machine – Free up your Customer Service Reps from wasting 95% of their time sifting through social media posts to find actionable customer issues and focus them solely on handling the customer issues themselves.  CSRs are not human spam filterers, they’re too expensive and slow.  Leverage smarter technology to automate the sifting and categorization process and only send CSRs what they need: the real-time actionable cases.
• Intelligently Triage – Automate the categorization, prioritization and queuing of cases based on your Mission Matrix and send these cases to your CSRs through smarter Social CRM technology.  Instead of reps processing cases in a purely time-based linear fashion, escalate the more important cases to the top of the queue so they can be addressed immediately.

Enterprise Social CRM uses smarter technology and processes to enable your organization to reach 10x more customers in 1/10th the time without adding CSR headcount.  By collecting all the social media conversations, automatically categorizing and triaging cases, and optimizing workflow around your CSRs, you’ll be on your way to becoming a best-in-class social enterprise.

In our last post, What is Social CRM (Pt 1), we discussed the basics of Social CRM to help better define exactly what Social CRM is (or perhaps, what it should be). Today, we look at some of the major challenges companies are facing in their current social customer service and social outreach operations.

Implementing a Social CRM strategy

As Social CRM goes from idea to implementation, large organizations are quickly becoming aware of the challenges presented by a social media engagement strategy. Some of the main challenges:

• Sampling Data - Many organizations are only getting a sampling of the social data out there from their data provider. Some as little as 1 in 15 posts on the brand. This is an obvious concern as many issues go unseen, and brands need visibility into the entire stream by opening up the firehose.
• Noisy Unstructured Data – Once the social data firehose is opened, the sheer volume of social media data is overwhelming. Brands are quickly inundated with thousands of mentions that don’t meet their business rules.
• CSR’s or Human Spam Filters – With that noise comes a shift in your employee roles and responsibilities. Instead of engaging customers, solving problems and fostering opportunities, your service reps spend 95% of their day sifting through irrelevant data to find actionable cases.
• Slow Response Times – Without prioritized data streams, reps simply respond as they go along. This model all but guarantees that urgent cases or great opportunities will be missed. Social media engagement is all about timeliness.

Due to these challenges, major brands today have dozens of social media reps parsing through a dirty set of sampled data in an effort to engage with customers online. We will look at how to solve for these scaling issues in Part 3 of What is Social CRM? (Coming Soon)

SocialCRM – By now, most have heard this idea of SCRM thrown around quite a bit. It has become accepted that the goal of Social CRM is to effectively manage customer relationships through social media. More specifically, a well-designed Social CRM plan will create an intimate and beneficial relationship with customers in conversations and platforms that the customer owns. This is a major shift away from inbound e-mails and phone calls which occur on company turf and built around the company’s processes.

Social CRM is more about outbound public engagement with customers and defining a process which makes that both highly efficient and scalable.  So before embarking on a Social CRM program, let’s look at the 5 W’s of Social CRM:

• Who – Define which types of customers you want to engage with. Are you focusing on customer service, or are you also looking for sales & community building opportunities as well?
• What – Lay out the business rules of social media engagement. Specific types of issues get handled differently than others and there is a process for every instance.
• When – Engage as soon as possible, but not all issues require the same attention, prioritization is key to making sure reps spend time on the most important cases.
• Where – Which social channels do you plan to engage on? Most are just focusing on Facebook and Twitter and ignoring key platforms like YouTube, blogs, and forums.  Know where your key conversations are happening.
• Why – ROI of course. Social CRM, when done well, can increase efficiency of social media, customer service, and marketing teams by reducing the time it takes to get through social data.

As you may (or may not) expect, there are a lot of challenges that companies are facing with Social CRM from identification and sorting to prioritization and delivery.

Find out more about these challenges in Part 2 of What is Social CRM?