How Social Intelligence is Leveling Up your Analytics

Almost everywhere you've turned for the past couple of years, you've read about the benefits of big data. But at best, these articles are confusing and, at worst, they create great anxiety. We hear terms like structured and unstructured data; and qualitative and quantitative analysis. We've seen the rise of data scientists and hear about frameworks like Hadoop, database management systems like Cassandra, and predictive models like R. But without getting a degree in computer science, how do regular folks like you and I benefit from big data?

Prior to the web and the ability to track real-time customer activity, we did a whole lot of guessing with a little bit of surveying and observation to piece together things like customer journeys, decision trees, motivations, and patterns. Prior to social media, there was very little data on our customer/potential customers' affinities, tastes, needs, desires, influences, challenges, hopes, and dreams.

But we now have the web - where we can track just about every customer pattern - and social media - where customers are practically handing you the key to everything they are. And no, not everyone is active online or is bearing their souls on social media, but compared to the data we extrapolated our insights from prior to the web and social media, this is a goldmine.

In this week's video, I talk about the trouble with the social media tracking tools that we've been using for years and why I'm so excited to see the emergence of what are being called Social Intelligence Tools. Forrester defines these as:

"the management and analysis of customer data from social sources, used to activate and recalibrate marketing or business programs"

That's a bit of a mouthful, so my interpretation is that Social Intelligence Tools allow you to use pro-active social listening in order to find valuable insights into what customers need and desire so that you can do a better job of reaching them.

Social Intelligence Tools will help you understand the full picture of your customers and potential customers - not just what they are saying about you and your products. And why would you care about this? Because you are not the center of your customers' universe, no matter how much you believe you are. Understanding your customer is key to unlocking the insights that will help you create better products (innovation), forge deeper relationships (customer service), and figure out how to give them great experiences that they will want to share (customer loyalty).

The real promise of big data is finally being realized through Social Intelligence Tools. 

Referenced in this video:

• My article on Hacking the Facebook Interest Graph.
• The interview I did with Affinio, Nexalogy, and LittleBird - three of the awesome social intelligence platforms I've used:
  
  Part I: https://soundcloud.com/trulysocial/a-primer-on-social-intelligence-part-i-truly-social
  
  Part II: https://soundcloud.com/trulysocial/a-primer-on-social-intelligence-part-ii-truly-social 

And btw, the Daniel Goleman book Social Intelligence (that I'm holding in the thumbnail image) is not really applicable here, but it's still an awesome book. It's definitely on the Truly Social reading list.

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I've been working on this social stuff for over 16 years and I've been a participant in the social web since 1992. My videos will come out every SUNDAY...with 2-5 minute "lessons" on what are truly social practices (and what are NOT).