Our Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Harrington, was recently featured in MarketingProfs with a guest piece entitled, ‘Five Ways That Advanced Social Intelligence Helps Marketers.’ In the article he discusses how deep insights derived from millions of online consumer social discussions is delivering unprecedented understanding to Marketing, Product and Brand Groups. We caught up with Mark to go more in-depth on the topic.

Q: Mark, you talk about how social business intelligence is driving innovation. What aspects of innovation are benefiting most in corporations.

A: The value this advanced social consumer insight provides lies in the speed and trustworthiness of the data – it’s immediate and unbiased. With most of the missions we conduct for clients we can extract millions of relevant conversations on their industries, markets, brands, products or competitors. This allows for rapid, true understanding of market reactions, attitudes, behaviors, decisions and actions.

Given this, we’re seeing companies use it as an immediate feedback loop from shoppers, consumers and influencers on elements like new packaging, messaging, features or flavors, new market entries and even the revitalization of products that are losing market share. So we’re seeing Brand, Marketing, Insights, Innovation, Strategy and Product Teams heavily rely on it. Traditional shopper surveys, for example, can take up to six months for a company to get results. In that time you’ve missed the opportunity to adapt and impact sales. So, the immediacy of this social business intelligence is being strategically used on both the front end to drive decision-making and back end to test the decision results.

Q: You say, “One of the fastest-growing strategic areas advanced social intelligence is being used for is with competitive analysis.” Talk about how companies are using social intelligence to understand their competitors.

A: Often we have clients that end up understanding their competitors better than the competitors understand themselves. They gain insight on the attitudes, behaviors, actions, decision points, demand moments and overall path-to-purchase for a competing product from shoppers and consumers (who are not always the same individual). They understand why their competitors gain and lose customers and switch to or from their products as well as the strong points and vulnerabilities of their offerings.

And we deliver all of this insight so that it is actionable for the company to strategically drive everything from messaging and education to packaging and promotions to product development to overall innovation to effectively increase sales and win market share.

Q: In terms of media planning, how are teams using this insight to reach their audiences more effectively?

A: ListenLogic tells our clients what their consumers are doing while consuming their products, what specific shows or sports or movies or websites or apps are they engaging to drive channel selection. How they shop for their products for partner or distribution decisions. What activities or interests or hobbies their consumers have. The attitudes on specific product attributes to drive messaging or education. The depth of understanding is pretty incredible to give true insight to plan out promotional campaigns like never before.

One of the most common questions ListenLogic gets from clients is ‘how are other companies strategically using social business intelligence?’ Given the deep experience ListenLogic has across the food and beverage, media, automotive, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals and entertainment industries, it’s understandable that leading corporations are interested in learning best practices an applications from other leading corporations – and ListenLogic serves as a hub for that knowledge.

In response to this question, we compiled a consortium of academic and professional social business intelligence experts that collaborated to write Social Business Intelligence: Reducing Risk, Building Brands & Driving Growth with Social Media (hardback, 191 pgs, Ascendigm Press, $24.95).

Today, advanced social business intelligence is delivering detailed, actionable insight on shoppers, consumers, markets, influencers, brands and competitors like never before possible. With the exponential growth of commentary across mainstream social networks and niche open-source channels, like blogs and forums, social business intelligence is now a “big data” challenge requiring massive, real-time processing capabilities and concept modeling beyond the limitations of keyword lists and data samples.

This book provides the first comprehensive business guide to unlocking and leveraging social business intelligence across the enterprise. In fact, this book serves as an executive guide exploring social business intelligence with analysis and case studies on leading brands like Apple, BMW, Disney, The Daily Show and Wisk, providing recommendations on how businesses can effectively implement an advanced social intelligence strategy to set strategy, drive innovation and make decisions.

Early reviews for the book include:

“This book is a must read for any business executive or market researcher.”

-Jerry Wind, The Lauder Professor, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

“The analysis and research in this book provides the practical hows and whys for managers to effectively leverage social business intelligence.”

-David Larcker, James Irvin Miller Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business

“…this book shows you not only case studies of how social business intelligence can move brand forward, it gives you a framework for doing it yourself.”

-Jason Falls, Founder, Social Media Explorer

We are reserving a select number of complimentary copies for qualified professionals. If you’re interested in receiving a complimentary copy to learn more about strategically implementing social business intelligence for your organization register here. If you’re interested in purchasing copies you can contact us at SBIbook@ListenLogic.com.

Stay tuned to our blog as we feature case studies and analysis from the book in coming weeks.

Our Executive Vice President, Kevin Glacken, further discusses the feature piece he recently wrote for Social Media Today entitled ‘The Enterprise-Wide Advantage of Advanced Social Intelligence‘ which details how the next generation consumer insight extracted from social networks and open online sources is making a dramatic, strategic impact across the enterprise.

Q: Kevin, in the article you review a wide variety of groups taking advantage of advanced social intelligence. For years, social monitoring has seemed to focus on Marketing, what’s changed to expand it to so many groups.

A: Traditional social monitoring focuses on “buzz” and “sentiment,” which Marketing may keep a cursory eye on, but it doesn’t provide credible, actionable insight. Every team needs actionable intelligence to drive their strategic decision-making. It’s not a new concept that intelligence drives impact, no matter the business team or discipline. What ListenLogic delivers is a holistic view of the social media universe’s billions of daily comments, way beyond narrow samples of Twitter or Facebook. Our technology goes deeper than ever before, with the ability to tell brands who is using their product, why they are using it, how they are using it, when they are using it, why they are abandoning it and even what else they are doing while using it.

With the right market insights Marketing can execute the ideal media plan, Product can build the next desired feature, Brand can develop the right messaging. This is exactly what advanced social intelligence provides to leading corporations. It gives them actionable understanding of their markets, consumers, prospects, influencers and competitors like never before possible.

What’s different now is that the tsunami of social commentary provides intelligence that spans the organization, providing actionable insight for Legal, on lawsuits or recalls, for Security on technology hacks or facility threats, for Human Resources, for employee misconduct or hiring issues and for Corporate Communications and Risk, which are each responsible for all of the above. It’s amazing when veteran executives see the specific, detailed social intelligence available and respond saying, “I have never seen detailed intelligence like this before.”

Q: You say, “companies realize they need to understand the decision drivers, wants, needs, attitudes and activities of shoppers and consumers.” How does social business intelligence help them specifically understand their shoppers and consumers at this level?

A: It literally provides them with market truth direct from consumers themselves, free of bias. It’s digital ethnography and allows companies to clearly see the different types of prospects reviewing their products, shoppers buying their products and consumers using their products. Every second millions of consumers are broadcasting those likes, dislikes, attitudes, behaviors, actions, desires, interests and decisions. Our solution allows leading brands to understand, for example, how Moms feel about specific attributes of their product or the demand moments and decision drivers for their brand among students – actionable answers to highly specific, custom questions,

There is a wealth of specific, actionable insight within the billions of daily comments if companies have the technology to effectively collect, filter and classify the entire relevant discussion universe. The smart brands are the ones leveraging this intelligence as powerful competitive advantage.

ListenLogic’s Chief Strategy Officer, Mark Langsfeld, and Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Harrington, sit down to discuss the recent Business2Community feature entitled How Smart Brands Are Succeeding in the ‘Age of the Consumer’ which reviews how companies are using consumer social insight to intelligently compete in the ‘Age of the Consumer.’

Q: There’s been much discussion on the ‘Age of the Consumer,’ what’s the bottom line impact of this on brands?

Langsfeld: Consumers are much more empowered today with information – price engines, product comparisons, brand reviews – allowing faster, better-educated purchase decisions. It’s only logical for companies to address this by taking advantage of advanced intelligence from across social networks on how the consumer thinks, decides and acts to best develop, position and align their product to fulfill those consumer needs.

Harrington: We have so many clients come to us with the mission to discover as much insight as possible on their prospects, consumers and influencers. Social networks and open-source channels provide an incredible wealth of understanding that has never been available in such an unbiased, widespread and immediate manner. We’re helping brands gain insight across millions of consumers in a fraction of the time it takes for a traditional survey or focus group to be conducted and without the inherent bias, which can easily misdirect strategic decisions.

Q: What are some of the most important aspects of social intelligence that drives this consumer understanding for companies?

Harrington: When you look at consumers today, the purchase cycle for many products, even large-ticket items like cars, has compressed because buyers have so much available information on products and pricing, as Mark said. This is why ListenLogic’s ability to process billions of social conversations in seconds is critical to brands. It allows intelligence to be extracted at unprecedented speed across millions of consumers. So, instead of taking weeks to conduct and compile a focus group of say 40 participants the brand can quickly, deeply understand demand moments and decision points across millions of consumers.

Langsfeld: Aside from speed, a lot of it is around the depth of view we deliver. We construct the path-to-purchase for a product and its competitors to understand the consumer decision points Mark mentioned. This helps brands see what they need to do strategically at each demand moment, which could be educational, positional or promotional in nature. We also develop robust, multidimensional consumer personas so brands understand how to effectively reach and message different buyer segments. We also deliver aspects like unmet needs, market influencers, consumer behaviors and activities and so much more, to drive everything from media plans to product innovation to package messaging all to effectively compete in this ‘Age of the Consumer.’

Recently our EVP, Kevin Glacken, wrote a piece titled ‘5 Social Business Intelligence Myths Holding Businesses Back’ which was featured in Social Media Today. In the feature he states, “With questionable accuracy and a lack of related actionable insight related to “buzz,” many companies have thrown up their hands assuming that this “thumbs up / thumbs down” gauge is the best they can do when it comes to [social business intelligence].”

It’s quite timely that a mere few days after Kevin’s piece was published Coca-Cola tells Ad Age, that they “didn’t see any statistically significant relationship between our buzz and our short-term sales.”  This is despite their brand having over 61 million followers on Facebook.

What’s even more interesting is that Coca-Cola validates Kevin’s commentary that the basic accuracy and trustworthiness of “buzz” is largely lacking. As Coca-Cola stated, simply determining whether buzz is actually positive or negative in the first place is a challenge. Beyond this, relying on buzz is often futile since it’s typically not insightful or actionable.

As more and more businesses realize that the general “buzz” social media monitoring tools deliver is inadequate, many leading corporations, including several in the food and beverage industry, are going way beyond “buzz” to achieve advanced social intelligence. This is largely why companies are relying on ListenLogic, and it’s advanced streaming big data and concept modeling technology in place of traditional keywords, to gain deep understanding of markets, products, consumers and competitors, and also to gain powerful, actionable insight to make business decisions, set strategy and drive innovation.

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