Our CMO, Mark Harrington, recently wrote a feature piece in Social Media today called ‘Beyond “Buzz”: Five Key Social Business Intelligence Considerations.’ In the piece he reviews the major considerations leading companies are making when selecting their social business solution. We caught up with Mark to talk more in-depth on a variety of topics related to the feature.

Q: Of the five major considerations you lay out (quality, action, complexity, speed and expertise), which tends to be the most significant driver for businesses seeking advanced social intelligence?

A: Tough question since every business is different. It’s hard to diminish the importance of any of them, but I think we see speed and expertise and two significant drivers with most clients. In terms of speed, we often see a company come to us in need of an immediate social tracking solution. It ranges from an emerging industry issue or a product launch to a major action by a competitor or a social crisis. In most cases the company needs immediate, actionable intelligence to help guide their strategic plan and tactical actions. The other that tends to stand out is expertise. A lot of organizations head down the self-service tool route and realize that they end up getting meaningless noisy “buzz.” They also realize that they deep expertise to analyze and identify critical findings, else they simply get buried in irrelevant noise.

Q: When you look at the intelligence ListenLogic provides, where does the value for a company come from?

We talk to so many clients who review our findings on their markets, products, consumers, influencers and competitors and immediately say, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this.” The value of the insight is multidimensional. First, it’s deep and robust, providing understanding across millions of individuals a scale not widely accessible, even to the largest corporations. Second, it’s timely – back to the importance of speed. Yu need the answer now, not after the crisis or initiative is over. Finally, everything we provide is focused on the ability to take action. This is where “buzz” falls short, because you can’t act on it, or even trust it. We provide fast, detailed intelligence that corporations use to set strategy, drive innovation, make decisions and overall impact their business. That’s where the value really comes from.

Q: You mention a lot of teams that an benefit from social intelligence like “Risk, Legal, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Product, Brand, Insights and Innovation.” Do you see that expanding across the enterprise?

That largely depends on the culture and foresight of the company. Marketing, Brand and Product have been early adopters, primarily because of the nature of their responsibilities. They need to understand their markets, consumers, competitors and trends. Risk, Legal and Corporate Communications are emerging since these groups are starting to see significant threats that emerge via social media. We’re also seeing a lot growth with Insights and Innovation Teams. Beyond this, there is growing interest from groups like Human Resources and Investor Relations to get a better handle on the shifts and behaviors of their constituents, in this case employees and investors, respectively.

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ListenLogic Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Mark Langsfeld recently presented ListenLogic’s advanced social business intelligence solutions at The Pharma Market Research Conference. During his marquee session to myriad of pharamaceutical market researchers and brand managers, he reviewed how big data processing solutions are facilitating deeper, strategic understanding of markets, products, patients, caregivers, health care professionals and competitors by major pharmaceutical and health care companies.

Today nearly 170 million US consumers research their prescriptions online and, according to PwC Health, 90% of 18 to 24 year olds trust medical information they receive on social networks and 80% of this segment share their own health experiences online. As an increasing number of individuals look online and rely on social media to be part of their health decision-making process, health care and pharmaceutical companies are realizing they need to strategically listen and understand the insight this social intelligence provides.

Big Data’s Impact

During his session, Mark provided attendees with a deeper understanding of how advanced streaming big data technology is now delivering enhanced big data management and structure of the social and online conversations being shared by millions and millions of patients, caregivers and health care professionals on a daily basis.

“Having the ability to ask complex questions of the hundreds of millions of daily comments is revolutionizing how health care and pharmaceutical companies understand deep topics like the unmet needs of patients, the decision-making process of caregivers and the overall journey a patient goes through,” he explained.

He also illustrated how ListenLogic Health is pioneering major advancements in this space by providing this sort of insight to 15 of the Top 20 pharmaceutical companies across a wide array of therapeutic areas like diabetes, HIV, oncology, endocrinology, cardiovascular, allergy and asthma, infectious diseases, cosmetics and medical devices. “Our technology and expertise is helping the pharmaceutical industry understand products, markets, patients and competitors like never before, which is driving their strategic decision-making,” he said.

Deeper Consumer Understanding

In the clip below he reviews the in-depth patient personas ListenLogic Health assembles with its advanced social intelligence technology. Pharamaceutical companies are using this sophisticated intelligence extracted from big social data to understand the patients and care-givers on a deeper level, identify unknown and emerging market segments, and guide the overall strategies for their brands. Beyond the pharmaceuticals, companies across a myriad of industries are using this type of deep consumer inspection to identify, understand and consumers more effectively.

With the National Constitution Center as a backdrop, ListenLogic Founder and CEO Vince Schiavone presented and discussed the advancements and applications of strategic social business intelligence to participants in Wharton’s LinKS Executive Program.

During the extended session, Schiavone discussed how sophisticated big data hypercomputing has taken social business intelligence beyond traditional narrow “buzz,” delivering of actionable, in-depth insight that is driving enhanced market strategy, product development, consumer understanding and market analysis for leading corporations who are leveraging the technology.

He also reviewed how streaming big data analysis is making significant advancements on corporate risk and threat detection for Risk, Legal and Corporate Communication Teams and introduced the next generation of customer relationship management for Marketing, Product and Customer Service Teams.

Schiavone reviewed several in-depth case studies of these advancements spanning the food and beverage, automotive, health, media and device industries.

LinKS@Wharton is an extensive executive leadership program that includes C-level participants and board members from the public and private sectors uniquely designed to address many of the largest corporate challenges facing the participants.

Schiavone is a regular featured participant with a variety Wharton programs, including the school’s Advertising 2020 program.

ListenLogic Founder Vince Schiavone talks about the lab-developed big data hypercomputing technology that allows ListenLogic to deliver real-time, actionable intelligence to enterprises.