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Social Media: Strategic Tool 2.0

Social media tracking is no longer just for damage control and seeing what the consumers have digested, it is about looking toward the future and discovering what the consumer wants and how they make their decisions.

Recently the Cymfony CPG team has been working on bringing more of our Clients away from the purely tactical uses of social media and into looking at it as a strategic tool.  Currently I am working with a Client who has been with us for years.  They originally came to us to use our tools to track a negative PR episode and never adjusted the scope of work after things had died down.  For the last three years we were able to give them metrics that allowed them to keep a handle on damage control, but last week they came to us and asked, ‘how are some of your other Clients using the data you give?’

As social media evolves, it is becoming a more strategic tool for businesses and brand managers.  We have been hearing feedback from Clients in various verticals about using our data and insights to make changes in their customer service relations, or as fuel for long-term campaigns.

So for this Client, instead of reviewing the data on a monthly basis, we looked at the first quarter of 2009.   Rather than looking at the same data that we reported on, we looked at everything that was brought into our systems.  And finally, instead of looking at our narrow scope, we did a blanket search for "unbranded" key terms in all social media that is available to us at this time.  By doing that, I was able to describe consumer motivations in the category and identify alternative services outside of the Client’s definition of ‘direct competitors.’  This gave them data that validated a direction they were considering and helped them move forward to execute it.

Posted by Kate Kurtin on May 20, 2009 at 05:45 PM | Email this post Permalink

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