Introducing the Social Analytics Lifecycle
October 22, 2009 by Chuck
2For several months, social media monitoring, heck, just social media all-star Ken Burbary and I have been thinking and talking about the many benefits of social media monitoring, a.k.a. listening to the online voice of your customers. Historically, most of the discussion on this topic centers around using monitoring as a reputation/crisis management tool, but that’s just scratching the surface of the potential uses and benefits. Instead we believe that the ever growing gigabytes of data generated as a result of social media participation is a customer data goldmine, waiting to be tapped.
Strategic Listening
Companies need to start thinking about taking advantage of the tools, technologies, and data available to drive improvements across many aspects of their business. If you work in product development, strategic planning, corporate communications, marketing, advertising, customer care, sales, or any discipline that touches the customer experience, then it is imperative that you begin using the insights from the social web to better inform your strategies, improve your products/services/business operations, and improve your customer satisfaction.
Over the last month I’ve worked with Ken to create a new graphic that helps illustrate how social analytics (discovery, collection, analysis and segmentation) of data from the social web can make its way through, and be used by the different business functions that exist in most companies.
Social Analytics Lifecycle
Click the image to download a higher res version on Flickr
This version of the Social Analytics Lifecycle is just the beginning, as we expect it to grow and change after discussions with other companies about how they should go about implementing strategic listening programs. We’re excited about the possibilities, please enjoy this visual representation and let me know how you’d like to see it evolve.
Nice job guys. I think this has lots of possibilities. One thing I’d like to see more on is number 2 - analyze. I agree that distilling the relevant stuff from the noisy stuff is important in analyzing information. But I think a lot of companies are still struggling with how to actually determine what’s relevant and what’s not. What are some questions and guideposts they should ask to figure out what’s signal and what’s noise?
Very much looking forward to watching the evolution of this from you and Ken!