October 9, 2014
The next generation of social listening is fast coming. Whilst social media offers a vast wealth of consumer data in response to brands and initiatives, solely monitoring the social sentiment will not provide the complete, deep nuances of consumer social interaction.
Listen up; your social listening needs to be more intelligent.
Social intelligence is the integration of the separate disciplines of social media listening/analytics into one multi-dimensional insight solution. The combination of manual input – (you, human!) And automated process are combined to produce action upon insight based upon intuition and knowledge. Leveraging these insights have brought social media into the spotlight for all business-customer relations, rightly so. However, as with everything social, it’s going to change.
The current tools we use across the industry produce insights into brand mentions, customer engagement etc., and classified along already-set categories. Social intelligence will provide business with the insights and intuition to continue to maintain meaningful relationships with the customer even when social data begins to move beyond already classifiable boundaries. Breaking it down; we monitor the media, we listen to the conversation – the next step is understanding that conversation.
The biggest challenge to social intelligence is infrastructure, and finding the expertise to discover and act upon insights. Though we have seen a proliferation of social listening tools and solutions since 2011 – the technological knowledge in the wider industry has, for a large part, yet to catch-up. Social Media analysis is a skill in demand. On top of this, the analytical expertise necessary to create concept modelling, find intelligence and sift through the complexity of the vast data of the web is some way removed than your average social media analyst’s remit. Structurally, this might not be a viable option for most businesses– but in the spirit of Web.2.0 and the collaborative economy, we should anticipate social intelligence to come about in part of partner solutions, collaborative effort between businesses.
Social intelligence is coming – its building blocks are already widely used – just like IBM’s Internet of Things, the devices, solutions and insights already exist and only need to be arranged in different ways. Social intelligence is the next step in social media listening, and will facilitate a shift towards a fully integrated social media. The future’s exciting – Be more human!
Do you follow your favourite kitchen paper on twitter?
© Photo “Advanced Social Intelligence.”