Using Monitoring to Achieve Richer Customer Insights
Hot Potato Topic of the Week: Social Media ROI
Measurement of social media activity to determine ROI is a hot (and controversial!) topic on the web right now. You can see some examples of just how controversial it is here, here, here and here. Hat tip to Chuck Fitzpatric of ImpactWatch blog for those examples and more (and for the sound of dueling banjos that played through my head as I scanned the list of headlines).
Still, few people will argue that social media doesn’t have clear, distillable value to companies. Social media monitoring, in my opinion, is one of the most easily translatable value-driven elements of corporate social media, especially when viewed as an add-on to existing brand research efforts.
Getting a Clearer Picture of Your Customer
A better understanding of your customer is critical to effective communication with them. Put it in the context of your interpersonal relationships. How many communications misfires do you have in your personal and professional relationships due to a poor understanding of the other person’s perspective?
Brand research is an excellent tool for gaining a basic understanding of your customers and prospects from a demographic and psychographic standpoint.
If you’re using personas in any capacity in developing your marketing communications, social media monitoring can be hugely helpful in creating fully-rounded, three-dimensional personas instead of stereotypes and cardboard-cutouts
By monitoring social media for references to your brand, your products, your industry, and your competitors, you can gain additional insights that can often help flesh out and provide depth and dimension to your understanding of your audience’s attitudes, opinions and vernacular.
These insights can help your organization speak your customer’s language more like a native, and less like a tacky tourist.
Particularly for businesses whose customer base is largely made up of passionate enthusiasts in a particular activity or lifestyle group, having greater authenticity in your communications with them is critical to success.
The Plural of Anecdote Isn’t Data, But That Doesn’t Mean We Don’t Like Them!
We’re always anxious to hear stories of ways in which social media monitoring has been applied effectively to improve brand communications. Got an anecdote you can share? Drop it in the comments. Or if you’d like, contact us about doing a case study guest post. We’d love to have it!
Social media monitoring has been of great value to my organization (Metro United Way). We don’t have too much buzz in the social media sphere, which, perhaps, is not exactly what we wanted to observe, but at least has given us the learning that we have a great OPPORTUNITY to engage people and create some buzz in this space.
Erin,
Good to hear from you. I think people discount the value of benchmarking. I like to compare it to a person’s weight–until you step on that scale, you tend to either overestimate or underestimate where you really are. Knowing your true starting point makes it easier to prove the value and success when you achieve even small gains.
Good insight.
KatFrench´s last blog ..Using Monitoring to Achieve Richer Customer Insights
This is a little off the subject of this blog but I work for http://www.lvmannequins.com and wanted to give you a source for the mannequins you have in the photos. If anyone was to come accross this blog and liked them. Thanks.