With the announcement of Microsoft’s Looking Glass product, the online debate about moving beyond the practice of monitoring and analyzing the social web to gain insight into consumers’ wants, needs and experiences has shifted towards using online buzz to help predict sales, market share, competitive positioning and other outcomes.

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The Opinion is Out There to Mine

Let’s face it; a full 40% of bloggers frequently post about brands they love or hate and the blogosphere itself is so big that it is an accurate barometer of consumer opinion (from Wave 3, Universal McCann)

“All brands should be using it as a means to measure consumer opinion, track response to marketing initiatives and as a forum for research.”

It sounds pretty straightforward: listening to key influencers and customers are saying about your products, brand, etc., can yield conclusions about brand preference, competitive differentiators and insight into why.

Filtering for Relevancy

Unfortunately, however, it is short sided to take into account only data mined from the web in way that employ simple methods of counting up the change in brand mentions. The need to qualify the mentions by influence and authority comes into play so that the correct weight is assigned before counted.

Additionally, the medium that it is mentioned also comes into play. If a particular computer brand is mentioned in a major newspaper (offline) and the buzz from that advertisement is picked up it is weighted more than if it is mentioned on a blog with low authority.

That leads us into the next big step…after filtering for relevancy, it become necessary to turn intelligence into actionable results.

Marrying Social Media Analysis with CRM = Social CRM

Dave Evans of ClickZ, just published a post called “Social Business and Customer Relationship Management” where he touches upon the early advances of this approach. It really boils down to harnessing the power of your customers through the direct contact you have via the social networks, and unifying the sales, marketing and support services. Ultimately, armed with intelligence from the social web from your customers, you’re able to act upon that information (poll them to rank the order of product enhancements, post to Twitter published content from your customers about your product, etc.). We take it a step further and provide additional insights into trends, hot topics, and key influencers to respond to which will ultimately allow our customers to build a central repository of intelligence.

The Bottom Line —

By transforming online buzz into actionable intelligence, business managers can be proactive and targeted ultimately being able to work collaboratively with their counterparts to collectively contribute and track conversion. Measurable results for real!

Tags: Social Media Measurement

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 12:00 AM by Wendy Troupe and is filed under Wendy Troupe's Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.