Social data is becoming increasingly important in the new product development processes of many companies. In particular, manufacturers are tapping into social conversations as they explore new product ideas in order to learn what consumers are interested in and talking about. Later, when launch is imminent, social channels are becoming a key factor in setting media and advertising strategies.

These applications of social media analytics only scratch the surface though. Social data can be a unifying thread of information that supports decision-making at every stage of product development – discovering a new product idea, building a business case for it, developing the product, testing and validation, launch, and post-launch review.

For example, during discovery, social media data can help uncover ideas for new products or product line extentions to existing product lines. Then, as you’re building the business case and developing the product, social analytics can be used to monitor the pulse of consumers, alerting you to changes in their attitudes and interests.

During testing and validation, social data could play a crucial role in deciding to stop a project. Information gathered as part of market analysis might signal that customers are showing strong preference for the features of another company’s competing product. Pulling the plug on your development efforts could potentially save millions of dollars.

Social data can also be invaluable in the media planning and buying process. By assessing the potential “social lift” that social media can provide to your paid media initiatives, social analytics can help you commit the minimum effective spend needed to achieve the maximum effective return on media expenditures.

In our most recent white paper entitled Stage-Gate success: How the social web drives product development, we examine the role of social media analysis and data in the product development process, using the example of the highly regarded Stage-Gate^® Product Innovation Process.

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So I was talking with a CMO buddy of mine the other day over dinner and this topic came up. Of course you know as a CMO of a leading Social Media analytics firm – I think you can guess which side of this argument I was on. But seriously, my buddy honestly wanted to know – so what can you do with all this good social media analytics that you talk about? He really didn’t know.

So here is what I told him that marketers should be doing with analytics but haven’t truly adopted. I think part of the problem is that some of these tactics haven’t become a standard operating procedure but I can tell you folks that is exactly where we are heading. Marketing is the last big spend on the income statement and its our turn to show how we can be more effective with the same dollars.

One way is to use the analytics to create your ideal customer persona by interviewing your best, most profitable customers who have had the highest velocity in your pipeline. Use this persona to drive any ad plan, sponsorship plan or event plan.

Another way is to use the analytics to inform your media plans and to predict the outcome of a specific campaign.

Another way is to use the analytics to zero in on new messaging or even use those words to inform the SEO and SEM that you should be doing or buying.

Another way is to use it for product innovation, some companies are not crowdsourcing ideas for their products rather they are using the analytics to find a “white space” in the market where there is an unmet need – then launching a product or service to fill that need.

These ways are guaranteed to make you dollars more effective since you will know with certainty how effective those dollars will be in hitting a predefined target. How can you hit a target you can’t see – with good old gut feeling – I doubt it!

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The speed with which social media spreads ideas and information has led many marketers to place a premium on capturing data in real time. But should real-time data be such a priority?

Real time means different things to different people when the term is used as a proxy for recency. To an evolutionary biologist, real time could mean thousands of years of species development data. To a 911 dispatcher, real time is a few seconds worth of critical information from a telephone call.

What about marketing and advertising? This notion of “relative real time” extends there, too. To a marketing executive, real time may be data necessary to make annual, semi-annual and quarterly budget decisions. Real time to a media buyer may be several weeks of ratings data to understand what target consumers are viewing. To ad networks serving targeted banner ads Web visitors, real time is microseconds.

Ultimately, gathering the most data possible to inform a decision or solve a problem — in the window of time that best suits your need — is more important than having instantaneous data access. And to do that, you need to start with how you’re going to use the data. What do you want to accomplish? What business problem are you trying to solve?

While social data is exciting because it’s abundant and easily accessible, it’s still relatively new for corporations and how they’re integrating the voice of the consumer into business processes. Real-time social data is just another information source to be incorporated into your decision-making process, from problem definition, to research analysis and, ultimately, project execution. Data doesn’t need to come to you any faster than the time frame that process allows you to act on it.

At Networked Insights we help brands analyze social data for improved decision making — daily, weekly and monthly. While access to a rich data set sounds appealing, sometimes more is not better. Rather, understanding the behaviors of your target consumer is the quickest path to achieving marketing success.

Start by analyzing the decision cycles within your organization or department and how you want to engage data. The timeline of that process will determine what, relatively speaking, real time means to you.

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Chief Marketing Officers take pride in being the trendsetters around the corporate corral – the arbiters of hip, the sharpest dressers, the consummate gadgeteers. But when it comes to using data to support decision making, the CMO is likely not to be the smoothest operator.

Each year the Marketing team works hard to distill consumer insights into planning documents that will guide its programs in the months ahead. Meanwhile, there are already other departments within corporations that are continually refining their budgets and plans using the latest business intelligence data from enterprise resource systems.

Good creative will always be important in marketing. But when customers can abandon you for a competitor in a mouse click, it’s simply not enough. You have to be ready to act in a heartbeat. And to make the right moves, you need the ability to acquire consumer data, interpret it and apply it to your marketing programs – all in near real-time.

Winning companies are defined today not by their product and service offerings but by the manner in which they respond to the needs of their consumer. Social media data analysis opens windows into consumer conversations, producing real- or near-real-time data that can guide key decisions in marketing and across the value chain including product development, production, sales and customer support.

Better data can lead to better decisions and, ultimately, better outcomes. Now that’s cool.

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Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools.

Social Media has hit the mainstream these days but the big concern on every product marketer’s mind has been how to justify the ROI?  Never is that more true than at budget time. The purse string holders might harbor unspoken thoughts like:  “We spend big bucks on those developers, customer support and sales engineering people.  Why are you wasting the company’s money by giving them geek toys when they should be doing real work for us?

If you’re concerned about social media cost justification, you’re not along.  A recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) survey found that only 20% of CMO’s felt social media produced measurable ROI and 62% hoped it may someday.  If the CMO’s lacked ROI confidence, then just imagine what a CFO or CEO survey might have told us!

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools. The classic product marketing approach to social media is treating it like just another broadcast media channel by posting press releases, sharing events, posting videos and expecting to see instant results like you get with other online media like banners, text links and search.  All of that is a good start, but the results you need to justify your efforts will come by taking a holistic company approach.

Here are some real-life examples and I am sure you can find others when you start thinking this way.

Improved Customer Support

Social customer support can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides an “exceptional customer experience” which also unlocks the beauty of social media and the web in sharing stories of great customer service travel far and wide.

Collaborate with your customers

I don’t care whether you own a community or your rent one from a provider like LinkedIn Groups – but a community is a great place to create a social experience with your customer. B2B marketers often host bi-annual advisory boards or annual user group meetings and these are just screaming for a way to keep them connected via a tool like on online community. When you do that the results reported in a recent Jive report of over 2000 customers are outstanding. Lower costs, more revenue – a perfect combination!

• Users
  • Generated 32% more ideas
  • Sent 27% less email
  • Found answers to questions 32% faster
• Employees
  • Spent 42% more time communicating with customers, which led to better retention rate
• Results:
  • Support calls dropped by 28% (Lower costs!)
  • Sales to new customers jumped by 27% (More revenue!)

Activating brand advocates

When you give great customer support or have a great product – why not activate the social channels to accelerate their word of mouth. See below for what happens when you do.

• Find diehard fans on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Enlist them for your brand
  • Get them to make recommendations
  • Build your brand with the power of their voice
• Results:  5-9X ROI (based on revenue lift) by activating best brand advocates

Increase Engagement with Professionals

• Used LinkedIn recommendation ads to invite endorsements and engage target users
  • Earned 2000 product recommendations
• Results:  500,000 viral updates on company products

Finding intent to purchase

You may be wondering with all this great social media conversations going on – is there anyway to mine social media to market smarter? The answer is yes there are tons of ways to mine the data to improve your content creation, SEO and SEM keyword selection, media planning (from online to tv media) and for lead generation.

• Analyzing social media to find leads using a variety of search terms
  • Both competitive and non-competitive search terms reveal buyers such as “replace product X” or “upgrade competitor Y” – any list of competitive terms paired with the words replace or upgrade can give you a list of potential prospects

• Results:  $250,000 sale found using social media and completed in 14 days

By now, you should be getting the idea of ways to expand your thinking on justifying social media. When you find others, let me know!

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“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff

The media landscape has evolved tremendously over the last quarter century. Consumers have evolved even faster with the advent of high-speed Internet-enabled mobile devices and social media. Have your marketing efforts evolved with them?

Marketing at the peak of the television era was relatively simple. There were broadcast shows that could give brands tremendous reach. There were also a growing number of cable channels that allowed smaller brands to afford broadcast advertising that could be delivered to more precise audience segments. It was easy for media agencies to find your target, and almost as simple to measure the response.

Now we’re in an era of continuous messaging that ultimately is tremendously fragmenting. Everyone is clamoring for consumers’ attention, from TV and Web content they’re genuinely interested in, to an onslaught of thoughts and activities of friends and relatives, posted via every social media channel. Additionally, consumers are smarter and savvier in their use of the extensive toolset that the Internet provides to make more informed decisions.

As a marketer, how do you possibly compete for attention within this constant stream of information? The answer: You don’t.

How do you speak to consumers who don’t want to hear traditional marketing messages? The answer: Give them what they want to hear, not what you want to tell them.

Competing for attention is simply no longer sustainable. It worked when you were basically interrupting what your target audience was doing—watching TV. Marketers can no longer program consumers with advertising; instead, now your imperative is to attract people through unique content and authentic brand experiences.

As a marketer, you need to identify the various vehicles for conveying messages to consumers, and then constantly measure engagement, as defined by each brand, at multiple touch points. Are you delivering value at this point of contact? Are you establishing a connection with the customer? Are consumers entering conversion pathways that lead to sales opportunities?

To succeed, you’ll need to understand where your brand fits into your customers’ lifestyles, become a member of those conversations and/or communities, and continually evolve your advertising efforts into opportunities to engage and connect.

There’s certainly no silver bullet approach. Content will be different for every brand. But this can be quite liberating, as you’ll have to become more comfortable with who you are as a brand and how you define success for your business—standing for what you believe in and developing content that’s consistent with the product and values that will attract others.

Everything is pointing to digital technologies and social media, even in offline experiences. The next generation of retail is a blended in-store experience enhanced by digital technologies. Is your business making the necessary steps to advance to the next stage of this marketing evolution? Are you working to get in sync with your consumers?

Sound daunting? It shouldn’t. Remember: There was a time when no one was email-marketing. And it’s hard to remember when selling products online used to be a foreign idea.

Consumers led the way then, as they’re leading into mobility and Internet-enabled devices now. Wherever they’re taking these devices, that’s where you’ll need to be—learning more about your customers preferences, and using that data to inform marketing decisions. It will be survival of the fittest—you just need to get in shape a different way.

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I presented at Advertising Week and that is the exact topic I wanted to drill into – How to be relevant by using real-time data about your audience!

So to illustrate this, I decided to run a research experiment to show at IAB MIXX. This was research that was exclusive to IAB MIXX, but you can now see below. The idea focused on how I could show the IAB MIXX audience how to target marketers like themselves with real-time data.

To do this, I asked our research analysts at Networked Insights to study what marketers talk about. We created a custom audience based on social data from blogs, microblogs, social networks, and forums. We then added to that with web information from Google, comScore, and Quantcast. Together, this information tracked what topics were important to marketers over the last 4 weeks.

As a seasoned marketer, I came to the table with my own ideas of what topics marketers discuss, what media they consume, and what popular culture they talk about. The results were different than I thought (see below).

It proved to me that even though you think you know your audience, you can never know them well enough! Real-time data can give you incredible Intelligence and can make marketing decisions like sponsorships, product placements, advertising, and content development much easier!

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Ok so this isn’t the newest concept you ever heard of – but hear me out – its time we really changed a few things in the marketing organization.

So its easy to see that today’s marketing teams are not that well equipped to handle “real time marketing” as David Meerman Scott defined it. We need better systems to take in data and analytics in order to make smarter better business decisions.

I would argue that you have to have several sensing mechanisms in place – one that is a data set that is always looking backward (like a rear view mirror) so see what has been said and is always listening and watching the conversations, in addition to that you need a forward looking data set (like a windshield) to help drive decision making on what new products or services to launch, what will be the effectiveness of this campaign, what new hyper customer segments can we go after, and then of course you need a dashboard that pulls all this together in one place so you can see across multiple forms of media.

With today’s fragmented media landscape no single individual can pull together all these media channels to orchestrate and master them. And as a result you get silos of sub-optimized media.

In a real time marketing world speed will be key. So how can you even think of making a yearlong media plan? But that’s what some media planners are doing when it comes to TV and Print. As marketers we need to be optimized for speed and rapidly effective decision-making. Having said that I know we have a long way to go but anything is better than making gut level decisions or worse taking advice from your CEO on a media plan!

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Some advertising agencies charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars to create what they call the “ideal customer persona”. I discussed how you can do this for FREE with Facebook in a prior post called Generating a Buyer Persona with Facebook Advertising but unfortunately you do get what you pay for.

What if there was a way to build the ideal customer persona by using social data? Well there is – and I am here to say I have done it and the results were actually quite surprising.

After a recent win here at Networked Insights that took under 2 months to close I began to think we struck a chord with this buyer as we have done previously with some of our best and long standing customers. So some close examination of the pipeline yielded a bunch of high velocity sales that could be modeled to create the ideal customer persona.

I personally conducted the interviews with those customers to understand things like: what do they read – physical print pubs, what do they read online – list of sites, where do they go online for news – list of sites, how do they get their news – Twitter, RSS readers etc, where do they go online to learn – trusted sources, what events do they regard – trusted events, what events have they attended – in the last 12 months, what events won’t they attend again.

From the output I got great data on the places I should post display ads and sponsor events. Plus I can plug all that digital data into an engine like we have here at Networked Insights to find out what topics are trending with those audiences, what words do they use when talking about companies in our space, what new places are they going online.

Who said there isn’t an ROI in social media – I just found another way to save me tons of money and make my marketing dollars more effective using social data!

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