Gathering Business Intelligence from Online Listening

When discussing brand management online most often the conversation gravitates toward monitoring buzz and handling comments from customers and the like. There’s nothing wrong with that at all but is has become the online listening industry’s equivalent of the lowest common denominator. It’s a concept that everyone gets and can nod their heads at the right time during a conversation so it is the new safe subject.

Online listening needs to be expanded though because it encompasses so much more that should fall under the heading of business intelligence. B to B Magazine did a nice article (with a Trackur mention, thank you) on the subject and said

The use of “listen” and “response” processes, as well as formal reputation-management tools, is a trend that’s taking hold. What’s more, these procedures are moving beyond the PR department to marketing, product development, sales and customer support. That phenomenon is itself triggering a related call to pull social media data into more systems, such as CRM or call-center platforms.

“Although a majority of marketers track customer feedback, they’re still in the early stages of putting that information to work for them. And, in most cases, [they] use fairly basic tools to manage their data collection,” said Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst at Forrester Research. “We’re still in the early days of companies adopting these tools, but the marketers I speak with see a lot of value in the investment.”

While I am not ready to give social media a free pass in to CRM and call-center platforms just yet (Let’s figure out some of the basics first please! Crawl before you walk. Walk before you run. Get it!), I do applaud the call for online monitoring and listening being more than just about reputation.

So what can be done with an online monitoring tool that goes beyond just seeing your brand mentioned online? Here’s a quick and far from exhaustive list:

• Sales intelligence: Determine what keywords and phrases prospects may be using to gather their own information about product and services. Maybe there are leads out there ‘advertising’ their need for your product or service. If you’re not listening for them, though, your competition may be.

• Competitive intelligence: This often goes hand in hand with sales intelligence because it’s very helpful to know where your competition is falling down with their customers. No better time to strike then when a customer is airing your competitor’s dirty laundry in a public forum. You have to be listening though to learn.

• HR intelligence: Got a rogue employee who likes to give away company secrets or bad mouths the company online? Minimize the damage remove them before their efforts leave a scar. There is also a positive side to the human element. What if you found an employee who is going above and beyond what is expected of them and is being praised by a client or other employees. Those people are the keepers and they, more often than not, are not the usual loud-mouthed internal self-promoters bucking for a raise. This may be the way to find these gems.

• Market research: There are great ideas being floated every day in open forums about how to improve things. What if you heard directly from your customers about changes the would like to see that would improve their experience. What if you enlisted their help? Think that goes a long way to building brand loyalty? The answer is yes, by the way.

• Cultural intelligence: The old way of identifying trends was when they were already underway. What if you saw them at their earliest stages through online conversations? Wouldn’t it be great to help shape the next trend rather than react to i

• Market intelligence: Often the mood of a marketplace is practically palpable when observed through online interactions. You can unfiltered feedback and data that is nothing like any artificial focus group environment could ever provide. People won’t tell you what you want to hear if they don’t know that you are listening. What you will learn, however, is the truth no matter how good or bad it is.

So don’t limit your thinking about online listening to just brand mentions. That’s so 2009. Open up your mind and your online ears to hear it all. Of course, what you do with that information is a whole other deal so we’ll save that for another day.

Interested in seeing how Trackur can help you listen? Request more information or a demo today!