As the world becomes social, large enterprises are being challenged to come up with new and more efficient ways to stay ahead of social media and get closer to their customers. Many of these companies have become polarized by the volume.

Dr. Steve Andriole, Thomas G. Labrecque Professor at The Villanova School of Business, outlines 10 Things Management Should Know About Social Business Intelligence (SBI).

About this whitepaper

This whitepaper discusses critical issues that large businesses must understand prior to fusing social into every aspect of their business, including:

1. All Social Data is Not Created Equal
2. Social Data Must Integrate
3. Derivative and Predictive Analytics
4. Man Versus Machine Classification
5. Social Business Intelligence Strategies

Be sure to request this social business intelligence whitepaper to find out more about how social business intelligence can transform your organization.

‘Occupy’ Movement Threat Extends Beyond Wall St. to Target Big Business, According to Social Media Data

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 6, 2011. Via The Street & PRNewswire

The ListenLogic Social Listening Intelligence Center (SLIC) today issued a threat advisory to large US corporations after identifying the heightened potential for violence and/or malicious cyber attacks.  Social media patterns similar to those witnessed prior to flash mobs and other violent forms of protest are occurring with increasing frequency.

Because of the evolving risks of this situation and the need to understand potential threats of the Occupy movement, ListenLogic has setup a publicly-available Occupy Threat Center that will provide current threat level assessments, infographics including a timeline of the movement sine its July 13th inception, geographic social media activity, and a current news feed.  This public resource will provide continuously updated information on this issue.

Occupy Threat Center: www.listenlogic.com/threatcenteroccupy

“Based on our tracking, the Occupy movement is now being actively influenced by the social media efforts of an increasingly diverse group of organizations.  Clearly, the activists know how to use social media to provoke action, but the actions they provoke cannot be controlled.  This is the greatest threat,” explained Vincent Schiavone, ListenLogic co-founder & chairman.  ”While ListenLogic operates a dedicated real-time SLIC for its clients, we also feel it necessary to provide certain information to the public and to all of corporate America due to the alarming social activity we are witnessing.”

The SLIC analysis of over one million social media posts in the U.S. indicates significant increases in:

• Social media activity from Occupy supporters and activists promoting physical destruction and violent action
• Direct and specific threats from Occupy “hacktivist” groups against specific financial and law enforcement targets
• Funding and support from national labor unions including the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Transit Workers Union, United Auto Workers, and the United Federation of Teachers
• Support from community organizations, including MoveOn.org, ACORN, and Rebuild the Dream
• Social media posts, videos and images specifically targeting an expanding list of corporate entities and the wealthy, specifically 1) all financial institutions that issue mortgages, foreclosures, and student loans and 2) all corporate entities that received bailout money or government subsidies, pay high executive salaries or bonuses, or are perceived to be paying exceedingly low taxes.

Occupy began to “go viral” on social media following the arrest of over 700 people in New York this past Saturday.  Each day since, the volume of social comments has been steadily increasing.  ”At this rate, we are confident in predicting that the Occupy movement will go global,” adds Schiavone.

The physical size and amorphous composition of the Occupy movement continues to grow, as does the number of websites and facebook pages calling for local action.  Social media conversations surrounding the movement have now spread to over 400 cities and protests have been planned in over 100 U.S. cities.

Media Note: Social intelligence, privacy, and information security expert, Vincent Schiavone, is available to provide press interviews and ongoing analysis of the Occupy movement.  Media representatives should contact Matt Donaruma at mdonaruma@garfieldgroup.com.

About Vincent Schiavone
Vincent Schiavone, ListenLogic co-founder and executive chairman, has been involved in social business intelligence, privacy, and information security since 1996.  Prior to ListenLogic, Vince was the Co-founder and Chairman of Turntide Inc., an anti-spam technology company, which was acquired by Symantec Corp., co-founder and Principal of InfoSec Labs, an information security company, which was acquired by SafeNet. Vince was also a founding board member of The International Association of Privacy Professionals.

According to a new report from global strategy and consulting group Bain & Company, early adopters of social media have been able to capture real economic value from their activities. These social business pioneers were among the first to implement social media into their organizations on a large scale investing anywhere from $750,000 to $10,000,000 a year in social programs.  As a result, they have slowly but surely answered the popular social media question of ROI.

So, what is the ROI?

Bain & Co. report that a key indicator of social media return is customer loyalty. Customers who engage with companies over social media typically spend 20% – 40% more with those companies than other customers. Additionally, Bain & Co. also found that customers who engage with brands via social media demonstrate a deeper emotional commitment to the companies. Social media is quickly becoming a cornerstone for companies to engage with and retain their customers for both advocacy and customer service.

The strategy of early adopters

Contrary to popular belief, social media doesn’t apply to the ‘Field of Dreams’ principle, building it is not enough. You need to consistently provide value to your customers if you expect them to engage and interact with your brand.

Bain & Co. outlines a few key strategies that helped these social businesses take off:

1. Social media objectives should be matched to existing business objectives
2. Know your key customers, and target your efforts with them in mind
3. Build a cross-functional social media team to lead social operations
4. Monitor progress and measure results
5. Keep social media initiatives as nimble as possible, sometimes directions change

Key Takeaways

There are a few key learnings from this for any business looking to integrate their social activities and become a more organized and efficient social business.

1. It’s All About the Data – Without comprehensive data that can go across all facets of the organization, costs will always be higher and results will never be consistent.
2. Customers are Everywhere – Meeting customer appetite for brand response has extended past the reach of an owned Twitter or Facebook account. Customers are discussing your brand on their own walls, forums, and blogs.
3. Engagement Must be Scalable – Expect volumes of discussion and brand mentions to rise exponentially on social media. With this, the human cost of data sifting to uncover issues will grow without the proper infrastructure.

What should businesses do? Prepare themselves with better technology to capture more data from more sources and triage to the appropriate individuals and units.

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.

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.