Why You Need To Start Focusing On Social Intelligence

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How's your company's social intelligence?

Ask a roomful of business leaders that question, and you're likely to get a variety of different answers, ranging from "Great!" and "Getting better every day!" all the way to "Remind me". What's social intelligence? "

If you're on the latter end of that spectrum and still feel uncertain about how social networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare and/or LinkedIn can affect your business, I have to be honest: It's time to up your game. The truth is, social networks like these and many others are affecting your business – and if you're not paying attention, you're not only losing valuable ground to your competitors, your losing invaluable relationships with your customers.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not here to "hype" engagement across social media platforms. And the last thing I want to do is add to the list of problems keeping you up at night.

But, if you're a business leader interested in revenue growth – and who isn't? – you need to start focusing on social intelligence. Every day now, billions of messages are shared across social platforms. How many of them mention your company, product, service, industry, your employees ... or even you? Are those comments glowing recommendations, nasty complaints or something in-between? How many are threats? How many are opportunities? Don't you want to know?  How well are you "listening" to your marketplace?

Companies need to become more attentive and improve their understanding of how social media impacts revenue – both positively and negatively. After all, social media conversations are now shaping the marketplace more – and increasingly faster – than most companies can keep up with.

For example, new social interaction metrics are changing the way value is assigned to television audiences. In other words, the networks aren't necessarily gauging a program's success solely on the basis of audience size. They're also considering the social media activity and habits of certain audiences. As Kevin Glacken explained last week at Smart Data Collective:

"It's understandable that the traditional audience size approach has survived for the past 50 years or so given the one-way channel television has been over that period. However, today with the countless ways for viewers to immediately react to and interact with their television programs, quality of viewers in terms of interaction and insight is matching sheer audience volume in many cases. "

"Programs that have high IVRs (Interactive Viewer Ratings, a metric developed by ListenLogic) can gather to deep, multidimensional understanding of their audience members via advanced social intelligence in terms of interests, activities, likes, dislikes, attitudes and behaviors. This ultimately can deliver better targeted and effective messaging to advertisers. This increases the efficacy, and thus the value of the program. "

At Teradata, we know it's increasingly essential for all companies – whether they're B2C or B2B – to tap into the insights available from social media big data streams. Even better, we know that true business value emerges when social intelligence is integrated with other internal practices. Put another way:

Big date scope + freshest delivery date + behavioral and contextual data + comprehensive predictive analytics + real-time messaging = Maximized business results.

With its thorough and detailed data-driven understanding of customer behaviors, Teradata's Interactive Customer Engagement now empowers marketers to:

Combine online and offline data to reveal new insights, Deliver optimized, personalized real-time offers, based on historical and contextual in-session data and search results;Offers coordinates across online and offline channels in real-time;Leverage industry-leading campaign management and email delivery functionality to identify and communicate more relevant and personalized offers to the customer;Gain a clearer view of both the customer's path to purchase as well as his or her journey through various channels;Have a better understanding of paid channels ' roles and effectiveness in converting browsers into buyers; Deliver relevant, meaningful, real-time offers across multiple channels by learning from previous interactions and self-aligning with company goals.

The big data generated by streaming social media offers a wealth of information about your brand, your industry, your competition and most important of all, your customers. It's time to start listening. It's time to start understanding. And it's time to start putting all this information to work for you.

-Darryl