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Social Media Listening: Is There Value For the Business User?

As social media listening continues its adoption path into mainstream, it must be a useful tool – one that provides value – for the business user. This is a requirement which Cymfony has long recognized as our customers made the data available beyond the market research, social media, or analytics teams. Those additional users extend beyond the marketing function, to include the likes of product managers, R&D, and even executives who may not even understand the mechanics behind using social media. Making social media listening a function that can help those users make business decisions requires more than simply buying another license to whatever social media listening platform is used. To make social media listening valuable within the larger corporate context, it must be:

  • Accessible
  • Easy to use without requiring specialized training or knowledge
  • Specific for the business need at hand

To that end, our Maestro roadmap has included capabilities specifically aimed at helping our clients make the data widely accessible, and more integrated into, their decision making processes. Our latest release, Maestro 1.6 which was announced this week, simply continues our commitment to supporting this trend.

Consider the following examples, which utilize existing and new Maestro 1.6 capabilities:

New product launch: As you launch a new product, your marketing team wants and needs to keep the product teams (product managers, R&D, regional teams) informed on how the market is responding.

Maestro makes this straightforward through:

  • Dashboard templates for rapidly building dashboards specifically crafted for the launch
  • Fine-tuned filtering options to segment the conversation around target sites & publications, regions, and those that specifically echo the marketing messages
  • Cross tab widget for identifying the frequency (and which specific) posts also mention the competitors
  • Ability to mark, collect in a container, and route the container to the product team need to read (and possibly respond to)

Crisis management: Your company is entangled in a lawsuit about unfair employment practices. Executives, HR, and your legal team want real-time visibility into market reaction and sentiment.

Maestro makes this an easy undertaking by:

  • Threshold-based email alerts sent to the executive team when negative conversation exceeds a specified volume within a given time period
  • Deploying Cymfony Widgets (which is any widget that can be created within a Maestro dashboard) into your HR team’s corporate portal page for them to track coverage and conversation without needing to directly access Maestro.
  • The influence matrix widget deployed into your legal team’s corporate portal page, ranking the posts based on your corporation’s view of conversation reach

These examples are but two of actual uses we already see in play today. In these two cases, and many others unfolding, social media listening can play an active – and continuous – role in daily business making processes by distilling the conversation to those posts which are perceived to have an impact based on the criteria designed by you.

Posted by Michael Maziarka on August 26, 2011 at 02:58 PM | Email this post Permalink

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