But don’t be confused by the apparent meaninglessness of some interactions in the social web. What is happening may seem like a waste of time but the communications can also be profound – and you need to be a part of them.

The social web, and more specifically platforms like Facebook and Twitter, allow brands to develop relationships with their customers in ways that have never existed before. Customer loyalty has always been recognised as incredibly important, but developing metrics that measure things other than swiping a card at the point of purchase has been difficult.

Now it’s not. With a well designed and executed social media strategy, companies can identify and reward the most loyal and vocal customers. The brand evangelists who actively encourage others to purchase from their favourite brand.

The companies doing this the best are the ones who understand that they need to create a relationship with each customer – they need to recognise that each customer is unique, and reward people for interacting with the brand. Customers now have more power to voice an opinion than ever before, and they will do it whether you are participating or not. It is no longer good enough to simply treat customers as something to convert into a sale then move on. ‘Speed dating’ marketing is out, romancing is in.

The brilliant people who work for Facebook understand this better than most. In fact, they have recently changed the way that advertising works within Facebook to incentivise brands to be more active and engaging. Facebook knows that the real value from their platform comes from the engagement that creates longer term relationships. And they are now changing the game within Facebook so everybody else gets that too. It is likely that the recent changes to the Facebook platform will be game-changers for some brands. Others, particularly brands who have been looking at social media as just a broadcast channel, are going to struggle. What is certain is that Facebook’s advertising revenue is set to make another giant leap as brands are incentivised to engage with customers more – and use Facebook even more as a result.

As a marketer you have many choices about how you treat your audience. You can develop techniques that let you know who they are and how they wish to be communicated with and you can engage them in creative interesting ways – creating long term relationships. Or you can look at the customers as numbers to be churned through quickly. We all know that being treated as an individual is more effective – and now it seems there is going to be an additional financial benefit to it.

So you can view the social web as a place where people waste time and generate low value. But it is up to you, as a marketer, to change the way your customers interact with you. Social media is fast paced and there can be a lot of distractions. To really stand out you need to create meaningful experiences – that can turn into happy long term relationships.

If an individual spent a lot of time trying to control every message they heard about themselves, and responding to everything that everybody else said about them, we would, quite rightly, think that person insecure or, worse, a narcissist. But there are a number of brands which think this kind of control to be normal. From the perspective of the general population there is nothing normal about it at all.

A brand that is confronted by negative comments on the social web needs to learn a simple two-step reaction: first, see the comment as valuable feedback; and second, view that feedback as an opportunity to improve and build its relationship with customers. This is the way the the best relationships among individuals work. As anyone who has gone through a personal relationship break-up will know, relationships break down when one party believes they are not being heard.

Recently I moved house. Before I moved I bought new furniture from a very well know Australian retailer. On the day the furniture was due to be delivered the delivery team arrived and got down to work. It turned out that one piece of furniture did not fit into the lift of my new apartment building. When I called to ask how to rectify this situation the immediate response from the store was “This is your fault; you should have measured the size of your lift; there’s nothing we can do.”. Needless to say I thought this was pretty poor customer service. So I jumped onto Twitter and said as much. Of course my experience with the local service rep was not indicative of the company as a whole but it did taint my view of the brand. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The company was monitoring Twitter and used my comment as an opportunity to contact me and offer to send around a new team the next day to carry the piece furniture up the stairs. Naturally I then went back onto Twitter and gave them high praise. Our ‘conversation’ started testily but ended up well.

My case highlights the way brands should be thinking about negative comments. It’s not about your ‘mistakes’ as viewed by others. We all make them. What matters is whether you really listen and how you respond. And this is the real opportunity. I’m not suggesting that every negative comment needs a ‘fix’ – sometimes it’s enough to simply tell the customer that they have been heard. But if a comment identifies a problem you can fix then a potential brand ‘enemy’ can be turned into a brand ‘lover’ very quickly.

So don’t try to bubble-wrap your brand in entirely positive messages. Embrace the diversity of your market and realise every contact point is an opportunity to stand apart from your competition.

This idea has become increasingly important as more firms participate in social media. Companies that have used the ‘customers own the brand’ principle as a useful intellectual exercise and little more are being forced to rethink, and very quickly. In the social web you can direct, participate and engage in conversations about your brand. But so can your customers. It is a level playing field. Social media has given your customers more control of your brand than ever before. Customers that believe that their needs are not being met will let you know, along with everyone else.

Customers’ relationship with a brand is an emotional one. Every touchpoint your customers’ interact with will shape that relationship. Understanding how your market interacts with your brand, and the personality your brand conveys at each of those interactions is vitally important. Think of a time you rang a utility provider and encountered someone on the end of the phone who was rude. For most of us the emotional response to this is “I don’t like this company”. We look for other information to support this view. We talk to friends and share experiences. The emotional connection with the brand has been assigned. Changing this type of entrenched negative view is no easy task.

But social media as a touchpoint is different because your customers’ views are visible. And you can respond. Social media platforms allow customers to interact with your brand in much the same way that they do with their friends. They treat it as a person. If your social media strategy recognises that, you can make sure your brand has a personality with clear emotional cues. If you don’t then your customers will assign a personality for you. And it may be not be the personality that you want.

So remember, a brand is more than a just a logo. Take the time to build a brand strategy that incorporates interaction in the social web. Define the personality and make sure your business understands it and can express it – particularly online. Opting out is much more risky than participating in social media. Get it right the rewards will be easy to see.

Before you can begin a thought leadership strategy there are a few things to consider: who are your companies thought leaders, who are the influencers in your network, how often can you create content and how will you distribute it? It is necessary to start to document each of these points. They will evolve over time but let’s look at the starting points.

Every professional service company has at least one thought leader. If you are a small consultancy you may be the one and only. If the company is bigger then it is best to try and get more than one person being a thought leader. This will put less pressure on one person and will exponentially grow the network you have influence over.

You then need to think about who the influencers in your network are. If you use LinkedIn it can be relatively easy to do this. The ones that have the most connections and are most active tend to be the most influential. It can get more complicated than this but in general that’s a great place to start.

It is important to try and plan regular updates to the thought leadership strategy. The first place most companies start is writing short pieces for their own blog. Creating a content roster for this activity is one way to make sure that everybody is participating in the thought leadership process. Try and avoid a flurry of activity followed by a long silence. If you develop a following and then simply stop because you get too busy then you run the risk of disappointing your market.

If you do develop a strategy around your blog you then need to think about distributing your content so it gets in front of more people. One mistake that is easy to make is assuming that people will keep coming back to your site or blog. Chances are they won’t as most of them are as busy as you are. Make sure you employ tools and techniques that automatically send your intent to various social platforms while also making sure you content is easy to share.

The ex CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, is a great example of a business leader who developed a thought leadership strategy. He had a blog where he openly discussed what was on his mind. And he invited comments from the public. Importantly, he tried to answer as many of those comments as possible, especially the negative ones. Over time this created a culture of honesty and a focus around customer service.

This is what being a thought leader is all about. You know a lot about your particular speciality – that covers the thought. How you express that, and
how you communicate with your market as you do so is where the leadership part come into play. If your up to the job your market is looking for a leader.

Like most aspects of running a business, rather than focusing on products or prices, it is best to focus on outcomes and objectives. In this article we will explore how social media monitoring works, and discuss what to look for when making choices.

Social media monitoring tools are similar to search engines in that they look through vast quantities of data and serve up relevant results. At a basic level the results show mentions of your company or brand name. There are many free tools that do this simple task well. But to obtain real intelligence, much deeper insights are needed. This is where more sophisticated tools shine. Each one has it’s strengths and weaknesses, so knowing how to ask the right questions becomes very important.

The ‘social web’ consists of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but it also covers blogs, special interest forums, wikis and any website that has an area where people can leave comments. Some of these platforms allow anonymous interaction, others ask for more detailed personal information. Understanding where your market is, is important. A basic search with a good monitoring tool should be able to give you this information quickly.

From this point you can start to dive into the data to obtain more meaningful insights. Basic demographic information – such as age and gender – can help you define segments quickly, and start to define the culture and language of the different groups. Many tools allow you to see how ‘important’ different users are – meaning you can pinpoint the influencers – positive and negative – very quickly, and develop strategies to manage them.

Geo-location information is being shared via smart phones with GPS functionality at an ever increasing rate. This allows you to know where people were when a certain comment was made. If you are looking at your own brand or product category, this can be helpful when thinking about where to focus resources. However, it can be far more powerful when you are monitoring your competitors. Knowing where your competitors are performing poorly can allow you to direct marketing spend to that area, and pick up the ‘low hanging fruit’.

Better social monitoring platforms also have a dictionary you can program, allowing you to apply context or meaning to words and sentences. The phrase ‘fully sick’ may be very negative for one demographic group and very positive for another. Once the meaning is developed, it then becomes reasonably straight forward to understand the sentiment, what people think about your brand, your competitor or anything else you choose to monitor.

In the end, listening to social media is about developing a business intelligence strategy. Your people in your market are having conversations every day. These conversations can provide valuable insights. If you get it right, it can be like running a never ending focus group. But, much like real life, it’s important to know ‘how’ to listen.

One of the business staples that is undergoing a transformation, and one that lends itself to the two way nature of social media, is customer service. Large and small companies alike are experimenting with innovative ways to use use social media to connect with customers to get feedback and provide pre and post sales service – all the while collecting valuable information as they do. As may of these tools have very low barriers to entry to set up all companies are essentially on a level playing ground. The only thing dividing one from another is the approach they take, or to put it another way, how much time they have spent on developing a strategy.

One stand out is the Best Buy in America which sells technology and entertainment products. They have developed a distributed system using Twitter. It works like this: A member of the public send in a question like “What is the best 3D TV?” or “Which headphones have the best bass?” and a team of Best Buys employees, known as the Twelp Force (a combination of Twitter and Help) respond with expert advice. What’s more they are actively searching Twitter for questions about the products they sell – even if they are not directed at Best Buy. The brilliant thing about this is that they have had the insight that customer service and customer acquisition are one in the same. To find out more click here.

There are many other cases of companies using Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms well for customer service. Take a look at what the big Australian banks are up to for example. There are also many examples of companies that are not doing it well. The difference between success and failure, as with most projects, is management buy in and a well developed and focused plan.

A big part of any social media customer service plan needs to be around measurement. Thankfully sentiment is reasonably straight forward to measure in the social media space so building a realistic set of goals for the team on the front lines can be quick to implement and simple to evaluate.

Whether your company is a major brand or you are a sole trader, customer service is a vital component of continued growth. Constantly fielding the same questions on the phone can be a drain on resources. So it make sense to direct a significant portion of customer service enquiries towards a public social media space. In doing so your customers may be able to find what they are looking for before they have to ask.

Most importantly, taking this approach shows that your company puts a high value customers as people. Just spend a bit of time thinking about how you will do it.

What the hell is the Twelp Force?

What Best Buys have done is set up a type of technical customer service centred around Twitter. It works like this: A member of the public send in a question like “What is the best 3D TV?” or “Which headphones have the best bass?” and a team of Best Buys employees, known as the Twelp Force (a contraction of Twitter and Help) respond with expert advice. Best Buys employees have been known for providing great advise in the US, now that advice has moved to the social web. You can check out more at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbkS8AnqNGU

Morphing Customer service into customer acquisition.

So why is this so brilliant? It really comes down to the insight that customer service and customer acquisition are one in the same. In the world of technical gadgetry customers ask questions during the lead up to a purchase. The easier you can make that process the quicker you can position your brand as a trusted advisor. The Best Buys team understand this and have moved the idea beyond the confines of their own brand and out into the social web. They are now looking for technical questions throughout Twitter with the knowing that helpful answers lead to sales–even if the questions were not directed at Best Buys to begin with.

Using Twitter to assign KPIs

What I find even more amazing is that a massive organisation like Best Buys have not only successfully adopted a technology like Twitter but have worked out ways to tie staff performance to it’s use. Being able to set performance indicators to something like ‘happy customers’, then measure it has always been a difficult task. The Twelp Force concept does that while managing to make sales at the same time.

Teamwork

In the end the one reason that this tactic stands out, and why it is paying off, is that the managerial team understand that social media works best when people collaborate. Rather than having one person use twitter as a simple PR tool they have decentralised it, initiated staff training and created an internal movement based around competitive teamwork.

Simple and brilliant. Like Twitter itself.

Social media has really made it’s mark on 2010. Twitter and Facebook seem to be in the headlines almost every day, Hollywood is even making a movie about Facebook, and it seems as if every company is now looking to social media to help propel themselves beyond the aftermath of the GFC. But there is still a lot of confusion about what social media actually is and where the threats and opportunities lie.

In this article I take a close look at the social media landscape, describe some of the “platforms”, examine how these are changing the market place and outline a strategic framework for deploying social media as a branding, marketing, PR and intelligence tool.

What is social media really?

The big social media brands are YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn but they are just that – brands, and like any brand they are designed to cater to a certain niche to meet a specific need.

As with any successful product or service the people behind these brands spotted a market need and developed a solution to it. They then had to work out how to generate revenue. Because social media is able to generate a huge amount of data about each user (age, gender, place of work, where they live, things they like, people they know and so on) the most obvious choice was to provide highly targeted advertising. Facebook is the brand that has managed to do this most successfully so far. But it is still early days – and Google is yet to weigh in seriously.

The market leaders do not define the market.

Social media is the convergence of technology and the desire people have to be heard and connected. In an age where people are feeling increasingly isolated, social media has managed to connect people with old friends, complete strangers and interest groups – or said another way connect people to the “market segments” they wish to belong to. This has happened in a way no other technology has been able to do.

We humans are essentially tribal animals and social media has allowed us to gather into these new ‘location free tribes’ incredibly fast. What’s more, the users of social media like it and want more.

The march of social media is now unstoppable. There have been times this year where the amount of time spent on Facebook eclipsed the time spent on Google. This competition is only going to intensify. Facebook recently released some new tools to extend its reach and influence over the whole of the web. Recently rumours around a new service called GoogleMe have started to surface.

Social media is now becoming more than a marketing experiment. By the end of the year the majority of big name companies will be looking at how social media can be directly integrated into their brand strategy. It will be the core of any new digital strategy.

Why has it happened?

Networking and collaboration is fundamental to what it means to be human. In our bodies atoms work together to create cells and cells work together to create our organs. In our brains’ neurons work together to create our thoughts, feelings and language. In your company people are working together in a similar way – to create something bigger and more exciting than the sum of it’s parts.

We can take this thinking and look at the development of the personal computer and see a very distinct pattern emerging.

Before anyone had a computer or a smart phone, everything was a social event. Meetings were face-to-face or over the phone. Communication in general was human-to-human based.

In the last 30 years things changed. Initially the personal computer made everything a private and secluded affair. Games, for example, could be played without the help of another human and work could be carried out sitting in front of a screen. The advent of the early internet exposed the power of a computer network. But from a personal perspective ‘computing’ was an insular activity.

The first social networks, forums and blogs worked with a huge number of anonymous users. While this was a step forward in person-to-person networking, the anonymity allowed people to behave in ways they would never dream of in real life. This constrained many of these networks to the domain of early adopters and special interest groups. The ‘rules’ that govern effective social networks were yet to be developed.

What has happened recently, particularly with Facebook, is that it’s become far easier to transport your real identity around the web. This means that increasingly people are joining new social networks with their ‘real identity’ – their real name, their place of work, and other details that define them as a person in a movement (sometimes referred to as the ‘Open Web’). Naturally this makes people think more carefully about what they say and how they behave on social networks.  Because they ‘own’ their comments the common rules of society come into play. When a person’s reputation is attached to what they say it makes them think carefully about what that comment might mean to others.

Of course people can still misbehave in social networks as they can in real world networks. But the networks are now being governed by majority rule so this behaviour is quickly dealt with. This makes cooperation and collaboration much easier. Because of this the barriers to entry are dropping at an astronomical rate. Companies are starting to feel more secure in setting up their own networks, knowing that the majority of users will join to get value out of the information that is provided and quickly deal with other users who lessen the overall value of that network.

So when thinking about why social media has become so widely adopted, and pondering where it is going, avoid getting distracted by in the leaps in technology. These are important of course but it is the behaviour of the network and the development of new social norms that are really driving the progress. Every individual in this massive network is doing what he or she is preprogrammed to do – communicate, collaborate and continue the march of civilisation’s evolution.

The New Web

The age of the “website” as we have known it is coming to an end. People may still go to your site but they expect information to be tailored for them and available on the social media platform of their choosing and on any device that connects to the web. What’s more they expect to be able to comment on almost everything they see. The web is no longer a digital version of print. It is the space where conversation is facilitated. Websites are becoming applications that feed information out to various social based platforms. This allows people to receive and consume information the way they choose.

The more you can utilise your social media presence and leverage the influencers in your network the better. It is even possible to embed e-commerce and other web based applications directly into Facebook. Most brands need to start thinking about their websites as a database that organises and distributes information and features to specific groups within the world of social media.

Owning the data

One way to think about the forces driving the development of social media is the old saying: “knowledge is power”. To that you need add a more recent motto “and the person with the most data wins”. Each social media brand-name earns its money from collecting and analysing data. And they are not too keen on sharing that information.

Obviously there’s a huge amount of data that brands can obtain from the many social media monitoring tools currently available. But if you really want ‘granular’ information about your brand you need to devise ways to generate and own your own data. If you are used to thinking about campaigns and short term goals this might feel difficult. If you take a longer term view however, it is possible to generate massive amounts of data relevant and specific to your brand, your product category and your competition.

It’s the economy, stupid

During the 1992 presidential campaign in the USA, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist coined the phrase “…it’s the economy, stupid…”. He did this to make the case that Clinton was a better choice for president because president George H. W. Bush had not successfully addressed the economy, which had recently undergone a recession. Clinton, of course, won that election.

Nearly twenty years later the world is emerging from a period of economic turmoil that has forever reshaped important elements of the market place. One of the most significant changes is the movement of social media into the mainstream. This is far from surprising. Challenging economic times always induce consumers to carefully assess how they spend. Being a member of a community where you trust the recommendations of people who are real consumers is an obvious choice. Technology has allowed this to happen in a measurable way and on a global scale.

We are now in a time where the phrase “it’s the social economy, stupid” could well become a catch phrase for companies rather than voters. Those that ignore the opportunities social networks provide may well be putting themselves at a distinct disadvantage.

Fractured or identifiable markets

There has been a lot of talk about how social media is fracturing markets. This is a myth.

Social media doesn’t ‘create’ new markets and market segments. It just identifies them. The interest groups and needs already existed – we just didn’t know enough about them.

The mountain of data that social media produces can now shed light on who these people are, and what they like. We now have clearly identifiable and serviceable markets.

Of course this has created an additional layer of complexity. But utilising tools to listen to, and more importantly, understand these market segments gives you an opportunity to talk to them in their own language and hear what they have to say. You might say this technology can help you treat your customers like humans – something that most forms of marketing and communication have not been good at thus far.

Defining value

A recent survey of the social media activity of major brands, including Nokia, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola and Red Bull, showed that some brands are engaging well with their Facebook fans. The people who have voluntarily decided to follow what these brands have to say tend to spend significantly more than non-fans – sometimes more than twice as much. Further, fans were more loyal and 68% were inclined to recommend the product to their peers. Nike was able to put a value of $209.83 on each Facebook fan – even though some fans spend nothing at all.

It could be argued that these fans would be loyal brand advocates anyway. But even so social media has given them a convenient platform to stay engaged and and share their views and preferences with others.

Starting a social media strategy

With this background we are now equipped to discuss how to form a social media strategy. Before we start a couple of principles need to be highlighted. First there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to strategy. Secondly it’s worth taking time to get a strategy right.

Many companies have been adopting an approach to social media based on an assumption that it is ‘free’. They have set up accounts and hoped it will work. It won’t. Hope is not a strategy, and social media takes time to get right – so it can’t be free.

So let’s walk through the basic steps…

Define your goal

A brand needs to first define it’s goal. Social media can be used for customer service, customer acquisition, brand awareness or public relations. But trying to do everything will produce unfocused results. Understanding what stage your company is at and setting goals to propel communications to your desired stakeholders is the first step.

Listen to gain context

Once you have defined your goal you need to measure what is already happening. Before meaningful KPIs can be set it helps to know what measurement tools are available and the quality of the data they generate. These tools can be categorised into three groups.

Site analytics – One of the most important tools you will need to utilise is website analytics – tools that measure the activity on your website. Google analytics is an extremely good free option but there are many others depending on what it is you are actually trying to do. Make sure you do your research get advice and know what option is right for you.

Social media monitoring – There are a number of ways to monitor what is happening in the social media space. Who is talking to who, who is influential and why the conversations are happening. There are free tools available but some of these lack precision as the technology is not constantly upgraded or not enough effort is put into collecting the data. A well developed tool is worth the investment. Good monitoring tools can give you extremely detailed information – what people are saying about your brand, who is saying it, details of the demographics of your social media following and even what people are saying about your competition. The right data allows you to snare the ‘low hanging fruit’.

Data mining tools – To dig deeper into data it may be necessary to employ more advanced tools. You may need ‘text mining’ to get an overview of what words or themes seem to be surrounding your brand online or ‘geo-locating’ comments to identify potential new markets.

Good choices require knowledge of what type of data is available, and how to best get your hands on it.

Choose your communication platforms

Platforms then need to be chosen. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are a few of the big ones but there are many more. Each is focused on a different demographic. There is also the possibility of creating your own platform to fulfil a need that may only exist for your market

Set KPIs

Once you know your goal, have chosen the tools you will use to measure it and the platforms through which you will focus your communications you are ready to set your KPIs. There are many ways of doing this. One of the most effective is aiming to ‘increase positive sentiment’ – basically getting more people on side.

Define a voice

Finally you need to create a ‘voice’. A tone for how you will communicate. Will you be informative, humorous or serious? What language will your market respond to?  Making the correct choice and implementing well is important. Get this right and your market will follow.

Get good advice

Ultimately a good social media strategy needs good advice. So make sure you talk to people who know this space well.

Looking to the future

Social media is here to stay. These methods of communicating have become embedded in our technologies and culture. Companies will soon be interacting with a generation that will find it impossible to imagine a time where the individual didn’t have a voice and an ability to exert influence.

This gives those companies a huge opportunity to be involved in conversations about their brands and to learn and respond to the views and preferences of their customers.

We are moving into the age of the ‘people organised web’ – information organised by people, for people and recommended by people in your network. We have moved beyond the ‘industrialised’ view of the world where markets are represented by impersonal statistics. Markets are made of individuals and they demand to be treated as such.

This is the beginning of the next great step in the evolution of human civilisation. It’s happening. Time to get on board and be part of that evolution.

W3 Chatter is an easy to use mobile app that has been developed by Melbourne based Working Three to keep you connected to all of the most important developments, and new RSS feeds are continuously being added.

Working Three clients can also access social media monitoring and a variety of other reports – so they have a detailed picture of how their brand is travelling in the social web.

If you have any issues please contact us

To download the app via iTunes click here.

Are you using social media to push your companies message, gain a thought leadership position or generate new product ideas? If the answer is yes then that’s great, consider yourself ahead of the curve. But if you are now wondering how to measure the effectiveness of your activity or if you have spotted that a lot of information is slipping through the cracks then it may be time to be rethinking your strategy.

know what you want

The first priority is to define a goal. That goal may be as simple as ‘generate new leads’, or you may want to manage your brand reputation, segment your market place to communicate with them more effectively, or generate long term customer loyalty by forming an effective customer service channel. Think carefully about what stage your business is at and what goal is most important. Remember effectively utilising social media takes time so it is not possible to do everything. Focus on one goal, and then set a realistic timeframe.

Know your tools

Once you have defined your goal you need to measure what is happening. Before meaningful KPIs can be set it helps to know how to define the metrics. The way to do this is understand the tools that do the measuring. They can be categorised into three groups:

Site analytics – One of the most important tools you, or your supplier, will need to utilise is site analytics. Google analytics is an extremely good free option but there are many others depending on what it is you are actually trying to do. Make sure you do your research and know what option is right for you.

Social media monitoring – There are a number of ways to monitor what is happening in the social media space. There are some free tools available but some of these lack precision as the technology is not constantly invested in or not enough effort is put into collecting the data. A well developed tool is worth the investment. Good monitoring tools can give you extremely detailed information – what people are saying about your brand, who is saying it, details of the demographics of your social media following and even what people are saying about your competition. The right data allows you to snare the ‘low hanging fruit’.

Data mining tools – To dig deeper into data it may be necessary to employ more advanced tools. You may need ‘text mining’ to get an overview of what words or themes seem to be surrounding your brand or ‘geo-locating’ comments to identify potential new markets may be essential.

Good choices require your knowing what type of data is available and how to best get your hands on it.

Choose your platforms

There are thousands of social media platforms operating in the market place. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are three of the best known ones but there are many many others. These social media platforms are brands designed like any other to meet a specific need. What matters then is finding out what your customer needs are, then choosing the platforms that fit them best.

It is also well worth remembering that social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn make their money through targeted advertising. This means that their most valuable asset is the users’ data – what they like, who they talk to, what stage they are at in life and so on. While this may make your advertising on these platforms cost effective it may also mean that you have limited access to the raw data.

If your market is big enough you may need to set up your own social network so you can ‘own’ the data and use it to define new products, segment your market and really understand what people are talking about. There are many ways to approach this, from blogs and forums to fully fledged social platforms with user profiles and interest groups. Don’t get caught up in the technology, it’s your customers needs that are important.

Get going

Of course you will need to define how KPIs are going to be set, who is going to be managing the communities and how your reports are presented. But knowing what data is available and how to read it is vitally important. In some cases just collecting the data and really understanding your customers may be a goal the is adequate enough.

Your customers are openly discussing their likes and dislikes, what they saw on TV and what they think of the news. There is also a good chance they are talking about you. If you want to get on the front foot and respond to that then get moving – start to collect data and make decisions based on what it is telling you.

If knowledge is power then data is it’s generator.