I regularly track a  lot of conversations on twitter and on blogs around international players (read brands). And have also noted most of the successful social media brands are the one who have a very clear understanding of what they want to achieve and how they want to engage customers on the social web. And I am sure most of them use advance level of listening and monitoring to make truly meaningful business decisions about their products, brands, marketing campaigns and Public relations.

Recently I came across Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang’s take on Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics and Social Insights. In his blog post, he suggests that there are several emerging use cases for leveraging the many insights locked in the opinions expressed in social media interactions. If organizations are effective in deriving insights from within the framework of these use cases, they’ll be able to deliver a premier experience to customers in a predictive fashion — long before they ever interact formally with the organization (enter a store, register on a website, contact support, etc.).

Owyang has made some very useful recommendation:

Corporate Social Strategists Should Evolve Buying Criteria Now. The social media landscape is noisy, and brand monitoring features [alone] aren’t sufficient for brands to be actionable — only reactive. As a result expect:

Brand monitoring companies who don’t evolve are on the path to becoming trilobites.

Instead, look for companies that will help derive intelligence from the excessive data source of social — not just provide monitoring and reporting.

Ask them to expose their product roadmaps before buying, look at their partnerships, and ask how they will derive meaning — not just extend alerting.

I couldn’t agree more.

Happy reading

M