Leveraging Social Intelligence within your business

The first part of this series covered how to gain business intelligence from social media. I gave examples of how to map conversation volumes to sales how to gain competitive intelligence and gauge audience feedback on product features and even discover new influencers and advocates.

What I’m covering here is how to apply these social insights to your business. (You can also view a video presentation of this article at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77PiGPnS8Q)

Business Functions: Teams

Mapping insights to business functions and units is the first step.

For example your customer support team might need to be involved to ensure your online reputation is maintained or increased or to leverage advocates and communities to help reduce customer support costs.

Additionally, your research and product development teams might be needed to leverage product feedback and suggestions. Another team like marketing and sales might need to be involved to leverage competitive data and improve promotional campaigns. You need to get together teams from  business units; to share insights, describe implications and also ensure buy-in across the organization and keep everyone in sync. You’d need to decide the operational team structure. Will it be a centralized model, a hub and spoke model? This depends on your organization structure, it’s culture and size.

Six Business Intelligence Process Questions

The next step is to ask a number of questions, such as who within the teams would be responsible for creating processes to leverage these insights? What will be the roles? What would be the tasks? How many people would be involved? How many internal processes would need to be refined or maybe new processes need to be created? Similarly where would this be done, which communication channels will be used, where will internal communications take place. Other questions like when would these new processes be in place? or how would people do these tasks, what training needs to be provided.

Essentially you need to define very clearly how you’re going to manage this. You’d need to create detailed processes, whether they’re entirely new processes… or maybe… modifications and enhancements to your existing business processes.

There is no one size fits all solution. Asking the above defined questions will help a great deal.

For e.g. Who would handle responding to queries on product enhancements or customer support requests? What are the social media policies which would need to be followed?

Across which channels would one respond? One might be logically inclined to just respond via the same social channels, additionally its worthwhile to also think about data flow and integrating data with your CRM systems or your FAQ’s etc. will be done.

These six questions help you define your processes, which will help internal collaboration, customer satisfaction and ultimately result in business benefits.

Timeline and Planning

It will take time to create and implement these processes. You need to plan for this and making some of these timelines public could prove beneficial in assuring your customers that you’re working on their requests. For e.g. if you’re adding a product feature based on customer feedback, it’s a great idea to publicly share the implementation timeline. Similarly, you might want to publicly acknowledge a problem and provide timely updates on how and by when you intend to fix it. On another front you might state that you’ll are not present on a particular channel for e.g. Google+ which is currently the new shiny social channel, and probably state that you’re still evaluating it, and will get back on x date about whether you will use it for interacting with your clients. Basically examine which activities could be publicly shared and will help enable the dialog and engagement with your customers. At the same time do ensure that sensitive information is not revealed.

Execution and Review

Once you’ve worked out all the details, such as which teams need to what? How you will engage external advocates and influencers? and how you’ll measure success?, its time to execute your plans.

Monitoring, reviewing and refining these steps is the last but most crucial aspect to ensure you’ve successfully leveraged the social business insights you’ve gained. This is a cyclical process which you need to undertake.

Summary

To summarize, the time spent rallying the teams, defining the team structure, the processes, the timeline and finally executing and reviewing is the framework you need to use, to ensure you successfully leverage social intelligence for your business.