Owned data whitepaper #The new social media intelligence.

Combining Social and Owned Content to Gain Deeper Insights

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT


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Table of Contents

Overview 3

The Quest for a Better Customer View 4

Types of Owned Content Available for Integration 4

Benefits of including Owned Data Sources; Actionable Insights 5

A More Complete Picture of Your Customer is Key 5

How to Choose the Right Partner 6

Summary 7

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OverviewToday many progressive brands are combining social data with their own content to uncover new insights and gain deeper insights about their customers. This owned content may include survey data, private community site conversations, or even content from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Some objectives for combining owned content with social content include, extending the level of understanding of insights derived purely from social data, obtaining a holistic view of the customer experience, and enabling better data-driven decision-making. Owned content will play an increasing role in social intelligence in the near future.

Brands on Twitter and other social channels have started their journey toward direct dialogues with consumers. Combining social and owned data will greatly increase the use of these social channels for the purpose of one-to-many and one-to-one communication. In the coming years, marketers will have a greater need to merge owned data with social data for a more complete customer picture, making integrated and 1:1 targeting the norm for consumers and brands.

According to the Altimeter Group, the average enterprise-class company owns 178 social accounts, and 13 departments — including marketing, human resources, field sales, and legal — are actively engaged in social media. Social data, such as posts, comments, and reviews, are still largely isolated from enterprise data collected from Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence (BI), market research, and email marketing, and other sources. There are also hybrid data sets such as forums and community sites that may exist in a secure or semi-private setting. These data sets are also being used to gain a more holistic view of the customer.

The main concern for brands is that without consistent governance and strategy in place social media may be in danger of becoming yet another silo within the organization, leading to isolated findings that can miss big opportunities or miss identifying big risks.

“Combining social and owned data will greatly increase the use of these social channelse for the purpose of

one-to-many and one-to-one communication.”

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The Quest for a Better Customer ViewTo gain a holistic picture of customers, companies are starting to correlate sales data, call-center data, and web traffic data to understand what drives purchase decisions. Traditional research such as surveys and focus groups can often prove to be slower ways to uncover the motivations driving purchases. Most companies conduct traditional research activities quarterly or sometimes less frequently than that. Insights from social research, on the other hand, can easily be discovered in real time. There is a symbiotic relationship between owned data types of research and social research. Social research can fill in the blanks for brands about what questions they should be asking. Social conversations are more organic and because of this social often can inform the discussion brands may want to be having with their consumers.

In addition, social is an easy and fast way to get a pulse on targets. Integrating owned data inputs into social data could help identify areas of opportunity. However, it is critical to be mindful of the nature of the data set and take this into consideration prior to drawing any conclusions. Things such as determining benchmarks and identifying areas of improvement are good uses for analyzing social and owned data together. Some common types of owned data inputs include survey responses, internal communities such as IT support, sales performance data, and discussion summaries or win/loss summaries from the CRM of record. It is also generally more difficult for marketers to analyze narrative or “open ended” responses in surveys, forums, and forms. Using a robust platform with the capability to tame this unstructured data can boost the accuracy of program results.

Merging social and owned data into one repository for a holistic view of the customer experience is the goal. It should be noted that social data is often more open because people tend to share more freely if they feel they are anonymous. On the other hand, survey data is more observational because the questions are often guiding the answers. Looking at owned and social data together can help ‘fill the gap’ to answer questions and find the difference between what you’re asking consumers and what you’re hearing. Survey respondents, depending on the nature of the survey, may have a stronger positive or negative sentiment and often have a natural tendency to embellish. Combining these data sources supports other cohesive tone assessments. You can identify outliers and unmet needs using the approach of looking at owned and social data together.

Types of Owned Data Available for IntegrationIt is no secret that the types of data sources available for analysis are growing. There are a plethora of external social data sources to look at and there are also hybrids of social and owned that can be things such as community and forums that may be semi-external but behind a password or pay-wall. More progressive social monitoring and listening platforms allow you to integrate premium content sources such as subscriptions. Often these sources can be automated through APIs. Data that people look at includes market research and survey responses, which often have open ended questions about products mixed with social data that can give deeper insights into those customer wants, needs and desires. Community site data can also uncover new and important insights that the brand may otherwise miss.

Leading brands are developing actionable insights from looking at owned and social data together. For example, for product launches brands can look at launching the product and then listening to what the market thinks for a more holistic view. Analyzing owned and social data allows you to segment and compare many parts of the campaign, product features, brand attributes, and more. The insights from combining the different typed of data sets can be used for product ideation. Extending data inputs provides a more holistic view of the customer and the customer experience.

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Benefits of Including Owned Data Sources; Actionable InsightsGenerally companies are motivated to integrate their social and owned data because they want to make better investment and resourcing decisions, they want to better understand customer needs, and/or they want to discover unanticipated risks and opportunities.

Findings from combining owned and social data can help detect signals that could affect the health, reputation, and financial performance of organizations. It’s important to understand what people are saying about products, services, and brands across all channels to be able to make the most informed decisions and craft messages that resonate with specific market segments. Brands can take action on this new knowledge, and use the insight they gather to make critical and timely business decisions.

Customer experience includes social media channels but also sales analysis such as win/loss summaries, primary market research or surveys, press, web and digital content, and CRM data. Getting a better customer view can enhance areas such as brand awareness, competitive positioning, campaign effectiveness, market development, affinity marketing, customer experience, and targeted marketing. While getting a more holistic view of the customer is the motivation or driver for people to look at integrating different data sources across channels, what people really want is a way to get to actionable insights from market and customer dialogue.

A More Complete Picture of Your Customer is Key The top three challenges in social listening according to the Gleanster Q4 2013 Benchmark Report are:

1. Ability to generate actionable insights from social data 2. Ease of integrating social data with other voice of the customer data

3. Ease of integrating social data with CRM and other customer data

Depending on the team, the actionable insights and integration needs will be different. For example, in digital marketing there could be a goal to understand what drives community participation and need to evaluate data such as web analytics, social community sites, campaign analysis, or sales results. In brand marketing the goal might be to assess the value of a brand by looking at insights from mainstream press, social channels, market research, and analysis.

Outside of marketing teams, both customer care and product teams have unique needs. When trying to uncover customer experience insights, teams would want to discover what makes the customer experience seamless across channels. Here data such as CRM data, web analytics, social data, market research, and sales data come into play. Product teams needing to find unmet product needs can combine data from social media, communities and forums, market research, CRM and sales results to determine when the next product extension or target market to pursue.

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How to Choose the Right PartnerMake sure you find a trusted provider that supports a holistic customer centric view of data and analysis in their platform. They should have a healthy client base of B2B and B2C brands and experienced social and data experts that have successfully carried out scores of owned and social integration projects for their customers. Make sure the partner you choose has a robust platform that can handle enrichments such as sentiment and text analytics that allow you to apply social, owned and premium data sources and help identify nuances within the data. By feeding owned data into the system you should be able to apply consistent cross-sections across different data types and service outliers and within the data. It’s also beneficial if the provider you choose can also integrate with enterprise data such as business intelligence data, market research, CRM data, email marketing, and sensor data.

Case Study: Cruise LineTHE CHALLENGE

A premier cruise line wanted to increase return passengers and advocates. Their challenge was to glean insights from a specialized industry community and surveys to better understand customer habits and preferences.

THE SOLUTION Using the Visible Intelligence platform and API, they are able to view key insights combining social and nonsocial content behaviors simultaneously. The solution provided valuable information about customer sentiment before and after the cruise experience and insights about habits and practices of key segments.

THE RESULTS

As a result of this integrated approach, the cruise line freed up an entire resource that did the analysis manually prior to this automated process. The person can now focus on other critical initiatives and provide immediate visibility to executives and key stakeholders.

THE CHALLENGE

Integrate social media data with other Walmart internal data to obtain a comprehensive understanding of shoppers and their perceptions about the Walmart holiday

layaway program.

THE SOLUTION

Visible Technologies analyzed social media data along with traditional media, syndicated shopper research, Walmart shopper surveys, and online behavior research to obtain an integrated view of shopper perceptions and decision factors related to holiday layaway programs.

THE RESULTS

The analysis helped Walmart understand key layaway decision factors and some key steps to take to improve the consumer experience. Looking across data sources, including owned data such as the survey data, yielded richer insights than just looking at individual channels or data sources. The retailer learned that layaway item restrictions and long lines at the layaway counter were an issue for customers. Given that 27% of shoppers cite layaway as a shopping decision driver (Kantar) this could lead to lost sales.

Case Study: Walmart

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SummaryThe ability to look at owned and social data together empowers brands to simultaneously see the whole and the parts. This powerful new approach of integrating owned data with social data can create a holistic data source and much better view of the customer. It enables brands to complete their analysis easily and quickly by looking at the whole picture as well as segmented pieces of the picture.

According to the Altimeter Group, the social data maturity map has four stages.

The first stage is ad hoc and people and companies in this stage are looking at social data only. Stage II companies are also just looking at social data. It’s not until stage III where companies start taking an integrated approach and look at social and enterprise data sets in tandem. Companies in stage IV of the social data maturity map are taking a holistic approach and using all relevant customer-oriented data sets that are available to them.

20 years ago communication was really about one-to-many. Then we went into the mode of one-to-few. Now with a better customer view, we really are reaching the potential of one-to-one marketing that scales. As we learn more about the customer we are getting a better customer view by bringing in multiple data sources from different channels. We are learning more about the segments and the interactions that our customers are having with each other, with us, and with our competitors. We overall can get a much better and more accurate customer view. More importantly, we can create ongoing processes for carrying out the actionable insights derived from this better view of the customer. This in turn can have a quick and often profound impact on both the top and bottom line.

How Visible Can HelpVisible Technologies is the industry leader in advanced social intelligence and engagement for innovative enterprises and agencies around the globe. Since its inception in 2005, Visible’s patented platform – Visible Intelligence – and Insights Services methodology have enabled marketing professionals and business leaders at Fortune 1000 companies to transform their social media programs. The combination of leading technology and services provides real-time consumer insights that impact business decisions and drive tangible results and ROI. Learn more about Visible at www.visibletechnologies.com.

To learn more, schedule a demo, contact us, or call us at 888-852-0320.

Owned data whitepaper #The new social media intelligence.

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Transcript of Owned data whitepaper #The new social media intelligence.