Chapter 7. Analyze Your Data

ROE: Return on Everything

Every Social Business measures the impact of actions on its results. The process of measuring could be simple or more complex. Today, however, the bottom line for everyone seems to be ROE—return on everything, including social techniques. Because an organization becomes a “Social Business” by empowering all stakeholders in the use of social tools, measuring the result of this empowerment is crucial to showcase competitive advantage.

But how does social work produce value for the business? Efforts to measure actions must go far enough that your company assesses the impact of the actions on the business; anything less is not worth the effort/resources to measure. Your company needs a process and discipline to show there is translation into business results.

Social media has added a degree of complexity into the mix. While you can now measure more things than before, tracking the return of the action has grown more complex. What do you measure? Is it followers or clicks? Is a celebrity’s tweet really worth $25,000 for your brand? (At press time, Kim Kardashian was charging $25,000 for her to tweet about a brand!) How do you measure the value of those community members who talk positively about your product? How do you measure soft and hard ROI?

What complicates measuring even more is how you measure incremental gains. Traditionally, companies like hard-dollar savings, or ROI. For example, a web conference can reduce travel costs; or VoIP phones could reduce the expense for desktop phones. With social media, there can be hard ROI. For example, YouTube videos could reduce marketing costs for traditional print advertising. More often, we see a soft ROI that is tougher to measure as social media gets embedded into an existing business process. For example, it is tough to measure the business impact of co-editing documents using a wiki versus emailing attachments around. Using a wiki will likely save you time, but that time savings is difficult for many organizations to accept as hard ROI. The preceding examples are all examples of bottom-line cost savings. When it comes to Social Business as well, much of the ROI will come from top-line revenue upside—for example, the additional revenue from digital coupon click-throughs that are shared through social media techniques.

Aside from tracking, the debate for which measurement methodology to use in today’s new social world is even more contentious. Everyone values different things, and that value varies by region. Some regions value the “eyeballs” (or your reach) and some value the impact on ratings (or how your clients rate your product). Whatever you measure, it typically needs to translate into how your company will make more money or how they can save money by working more efficiently. In the next few years, I believe that the sophistication of tools and technology will improve greatly. The relationships of actions to results will become more clear and measurable.

I will share in this chapter the basics of why measuring is important, and provide some simple and more complex metrics for you to review in light of your goals. Analytics applied to the data provide insight into your business and enable you to know what’s working and what’s not.

First, I’ll start out with covering the potential of analytics and then move into some of the types of metrics and tools that are available to assist you in that journey. Then I’ll recommend some actions such as creation of a dashboard, a center of excellence, and even a new role in your organization. Again, as a Social Business, choose what fits your goals and culture.

Business Analytics and Social Analytics

Business analytics is the discipline of turning data into insight, and using those insights to drive better business decisions. This process helps to answer the questions of how you are doing, why you are doing well or poorly, what would happen if you changed, and what you should be doing to be more competitive. The output of using analytics is to do the following:

• Enable an evolving workforce to become savvy in making decisions from data

• Expand perspective on the business for a more complete view

• Facilitate collaboration about the information to fuel insight and alignment

• Respond to the growing need for insight to make the right decisions

Now let’s add into the picture the concept of social analytics, a subset of business analytics that focuses on the insight gleaned from the social techniques and tools that exist. Social analytics quantifies the role that social initiatives play in influencing engagement, behaviors, and conversions. There was a discussion on Facebook which included IBM, Altimeter, and others on “What Is Social Analytics?” and I like the crowdsourced definition of social analytics. Social analytics is the process of measuring, analyzing, and interpreting a brand’s level of engagement, influence, sentiment, and share of voice (mindshare) across earned, paid, and owned digital channels within context of specific business goals and objectives:

• Earned is media, content, and channels that are delivered through a third party without exchange of payment. For example, in the traditional world it would be things like public relations generated news, and analyst coverage. In the digital channel, it would be things like tweets, blogs, and product recommendations.

• Paid is delivered through a third party or an intermediary in exchange for payment. For example, in the traditional world, it would be things like TV, radio, or print ads. In the digital world, it would be things like sponsored content or display ads.

• Owned is media, content, and channels that the company directly delivers, has control over, or owns. For example, in the traditional world it would be things like direct mail, call center, a branch or store, or an ATM or a kiosk. In the digital world, it would be things like a blog, a Facebook page, a community, or a microsite.

The bottom line is that social analytics is a discipline that helps businesses measure and explain the performance of social initiatives in the context of their goals and objectives.

To analyze social data, you must have the ability to tie into broader business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to truly understand the impact. For example, if your broader business metric is improvement in customer satisfaction, then showcasing that your customer satisfaction, through Twitter as a service channel, is improving supports the overall business goal. Social Businesses have the ability to bring together not only the historical perspective but future perspectives based on predictive trends. By drawing actionable conclusions from the information, a Social Business is nimble. For example, the insight could enable a company to come out with a new product due to the data showing a new trend in the market.

Actionable means that you can incorporate the new insight into how you message consumers, perhaps over social media itself, or how to affect employee sentiment to retain your top talent. Strong analysis allows an understanding of the market impact, and assists in making strategic decisions on where to place resources and budget. With internal social techniques, analysis enables your company to gauge how your business is functioning and identify processes that could be improved.

Social analytics can provide an increased aperture of a consumer, a business, or an employee and provides the ability to see new patterns and opportunities. Some examples of leveraging effective social analytics are to do the following:

• Determine target buyers for your products

• Understand future trends and impacts on new products

• Help you understand your customer needs to target new offers and products more cost-effectively—to allow you to grow your business

• Help you make messaging decisions to enhance your reputation among your customers and constituencies

• Strengthen brand preference and loyalty by targeting the right influencers and messages

• Enable you to respond more quickly to customer requests to improve service-level effectiveness to improve customer care

• Understand employees’ sentiments by leveraging social networks and forums to augment the existing employee satisfaction and feedback surveys

• Explore changes for employee retention

• Understand how to onboard employees more effectively

• Help you facilitate targeted innovation sessions on new product ideas in specific segments

• Enable you to respond more quickly to top talent employees’ need for satisfaction

Finally, a Social Business must leverage this information to drive your business’s speed in driving the right decisions and actions. What makes a company stand out from its competition is the ability to use analytics across the end-to-end business model. I’d like to introduce the following four-point strategic plan as part of the bold Social Business AGENDA:

1. Match what you measure to your goals and maturity.

2. Provide easy-to-use reporting and querying.

3. Provide advanced analytics and dashboards for sentiment, affinity relationships, and evolving topics.

4. Create a Social Analytics Center of Excellence. The Center of Excellence will focus on the following:

a) A dashboard with real-time alerts, notifications, and activity streams to identify critical updates and attention management. This dashboard should include predictive analysis as well.

b) A Social Analytics Manager who will focus on the digital forms of information for insight (this person complements your Business Intelligence team).

c) Process sharing and best practice collection.

Match What You Measure to Your Goals and Maturity

Ensuring that what you analyze is aligned to your Social Business goals (discussed in Chapter 2, “Align Organizational Goals and Culture”) is crucial. An example is shown in Table 7.1; based on your overall objectives, the areas of metrics will support progress in reaching those goals. The saying, “You get what you measure,” is so true. So make sure that your metrics support the business goals that you have set!

Table 7.1 Match Your Goals to Metrics

If your goal is to speed up the sales process to drive greater revenue, then the social tools you choose and your metrics need to show progress and results around that particular goal. If you wanted to build loyalty in your client base, you would want to measure specific areas of reviews or recommendations from your brand army, or top clients. In addition, you might want to measure feedback results from top innovations suggested by your clients, as well as sentiment improvements.

As Table 7.2 illustrates, you see a Social Business whose goal was a focus on improvements in their marketing process. They wanted to increase conversion rates from marketing campaigns, and lower campaign costs through increased efficiency leveraging social techniques to achieve the results. The business goals are the first step, as shown previously. Then the focus becomes how to reach the goal through social techniques. Finally, the Social Business outcome is illustrated to help you start your business case.

Table 7.2 Metric Alignment

The following list presents a Social Business whose goal was to increase its revenue through a virtual conference. With its Twitter account, they targeted high-quality followers and invited them to their conference. They then wanted to see the revenue generated from those people who attended. This particular small business tracks the revenue per tweet for “new clients.”

# Tweets: 8

Followers: 350

Total # Impressions from Tweets: 2,800

# Clicks from Tweet to Landing Page: 42

# Clicks from Landing Page to Start Registration: 19

# Completed Registrations: 10

Total Revenue: $15,000

Revenue/Tweet: $5.36

Revenue/Follower: $42.86

The key point of matching your goals to your metrics is clear. You get what you measure, so ensure proper mapping from your goals to your metrics.

Your company’s maturity in social analytics will also help to guide your view of what you want to measure and the timeline of capabilities your company will need to get there.

There are four stages of social analytics:

1. The first stage is to monitor and engage. This stage involves identifying your KPIs and using soft means to improve, qualitatively, your overall decisions on processes by listening to the conversations and engaging in the ones that support your brand goals. Typically, this first stage is using data from the blogosphere.

2. The second stage is to quantify and operationalize the analytics approach. This stage involves measuring ROI. It starts to gather insight on the process, like human relations, marketing, or customer service, and operationalizes that insight to the right owner, pulling data not just externally but also internally from CRM systems. This stage moves beyond qualitative means of improvement to more quantifiable means to improve overall socially enabled processes. In addition, differentiation between insight from the masses of networks versus your influencers or tippers begins at this stage.

3. The third stage is to predict and integrate. This stage provides continuous feedback and leverages the insight to optimize decisions across processes. By analyzing the data to understand social conversations and trends, the Social Business can predict behavior and recommend the next best action. It embeds full sentiment, or the way people feel, and geo-spatial analysis, which shapes the insight by geographic region. For example, it could conclude that influencers are positive in London, but negative in New York City. In addition, affinity analysis is added at this stage. Affinity analysis is about the relationships of buyers or buying patterns. For instance, it could enable the discovery that two products are usually purchased together or find the types of people buying a product. The data sources are broadened to internal systems, the blogosphere, and a broader level of partner data.

4. The fourth stage is about the seamless integration of internal, extranet, and public data with a sophisticated governance mechanism. The social analytics are embedded in all decisions, and data is pulled from a complete data set inside, outside, and beyond the company to suppliers and partners.

Provide Easy-to-Use Reporting and Querying

The market today includes a number of tools that generate basic metrics. For those Social Businesses getting started, the basic things that you should measure are focused on the following:

• Social reach and share of voice

• Reputation/influence

• Time

• Engagement

Social Reach and Share of Voice

Your social reach determines the number of overall friends, fans, and brand advocates you have in your domain. It is a simple measure of who is potentially listening to your subject matter expertise or expressing a belief about your company, product, or brand. Social reach is helpful in determining geographic location and the types of people listening to you. It is the measure of total audience (typically represented as some percentage of a total population). For example, my brand has 80% reach for males 18 to 24; or my company has 40% reach for the United Kingdom.

With blogs, sometimes having the most readers isn’t the best metric. The long tail, or those blogs that have a smaller but more concentrated and engaged readership, might be the best strategy for your goals. Quality readership is more about the influence. You need to know what drives your business outcome and measure that element—reach or influence.

Share of voice represents the percentage of the conversations for a given topic that include your brand. For example, I have 20% share of voice for topic x (the implication being that for a given topic related to my brand, 20% of the conversations involve my brand and 80% do not). If I am tracking social analytics software topics, I would want my brand to be high in share of voice.

These metrics don’t necessarily value the “business” but measure the value to those who are fans/follows of the business. It is a subtle but important distinction.

Some examples of social reach and share of voice metrics include these:

• Facebook: Number of fans; number of RSVPs, new fans/removed fans, monthly active users; media consumption: photo views and audio views

• Twitter: Number of followers, number of tweets

• Twitter accounts: Number of employees who have Twitter accounts

• YouTube channel: Number of subscribers, number of unsubscribers

• LinkedIn: Number of contacts and the number of people attending your events

• Communities: Number of members

• Website: Number of unique visitors

Some tools to potentially help you measure the metrics in the aforementioned channels include the following:

• TweetReach: Tracks how many potential eyeballs your tweet was in front of.

• Bitly: Provides built-in analytics for your shortened URL. When in LinkedIn or Twitter, make sure you use a URL shortener with analytics built in so that you can track the number of clicks, traffic sources, and times of clicks.

• PitchEngine: Used primarily to create a social media release and track the number of views.

• Woopra: A real-time tool for your website to see where your viewer came from (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and has the capability to segment your visitors based on their demographics, their last action, or a custom criteria that your company wants to explore.

• TubeMogul: Provides a complete set of metrics regarding who watched your video, audience geography, referring sites, and so on.

Consider the reach as the number of eyeballs you have on your activity. Just remember, this gives you numbers that are interesting but not complete. Make sure these are not the only metrics that you use to measure success.

Reputation/Influence

Chapter 5, “(Social) Network Your Business Processes,” discussed reputation management. Reputation is what others believe to be true about your company, product, or brand. Reputation management is being able to appropriately shape that reputation by doing the following:

• Having the right listening to know what others think about you

• Countering negative opinions

• Building positive opinions through action

Your reputation online matters a great deal, so you need to be able to measure your influence and value in the market. Reputation is not measured by numbers of views, or friends, but by the value they find in your brand, product, or company. Reputation has become so important to both companies and people that there are now many tools that attempt to quantify its value.

Some examples of types of reputation metrics that provide your company insight on your reputation include these:

• Comments on your website, Facebook page, LinkedIn, and so on (neutral, positive, or negative)

• Influence metrics to understand the level of influence they have on with their fans, followers, and friends (will a recommendation or suggestion lead to a purchase?)

• Competitive insights to compare and contrast your reputation against that of your key competitors

Many agencies now specialize in reputation analysis, and your company could consider the value in engaging one. Some tools to help you measure your reputation include the following:

• SocMetrics: Measures “real-world” influence as well as online. From its website, SocMetrics evaluates the content people create, as well as the activity their content generates—shares, comments, tweets, and the list goes on. SocMetrics focuses on topical influence—that is, influence on a certain topic or in a certain vertical, as well as how concentrated the followers are within that topic. For example, say your association deals with technology and wants to reach out to moms who are influential on that topic. You can pull a report of influencers in technology who are also moms. I experimented with SocMetrics at SXSW 2011, a social media festival in Austin, Texas (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 SocMetrics example

• DeepMile’s Agent 209™: Enhances digital and social media efforts by

• Predicting influence: Employs Bayesian models to predict users’ likelihood to send a message to their followers or initiate a conversation; looks at frequency and quality of dialogue, not just breadth of reach.

• Creating influencers: Identifies potential influencers within and across communities that lead to message cascades.

• Emphasizing relevance: Analyzes user communications for content and semantics—it’s critical to look beyond user profiles to identify influencers based on topical relevance at scale.

• Tracking influence of in-market activation: Once influencers are identified, Agent 209 initiates specific in-market activation and track message cascades to determine which messages/content lead to the most viral activity across segments.

• Unlimited data sources: We look at all available social media platforms (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on) where there is an API or open access to data.

• Access to experts: Human analysts are involved at key points in the process, especially validation. The Agent 209 team is made up of the same people who are analyzing billions of records to track terrorists and other “bad guys” for the CIA and NSA.

• Klout: Measures influence, in terms of whether the person can create resonance on Twitter and Facebook. Klout bills itself as the “standard of influence.” The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence but only in Facebook and Twitter (a weakness, I think). The scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses more than 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. From their website, True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes, and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network Score indicates how influential your engaged audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout Score is highly correlated to clicks, comments, and retweets.

• Vizibility.com: Showcases all the places with information about your company (and you personally).

• Soovox: Soovox is a marketplace or network of top influencers. For an influencer, you get a Social IQ, which is your social influence. According to Soovox, the scoring is done on three attributes: Trust Score, Connections Scores, and Authority Score. The source of the data comes from profiles, the size of the network, and the influencer’s content activity. In addition, the quality of the content, and the buzz factor, is weighed in as well. That score can get you rewards from brands that you support.

• Listorious: Highlights influencers by domain, not by numerical score. You can go onto Listorious and find the person on Twitter who tweets the most about a topic, region, or profession.

Understanding the reputation of your company as well as the reputation of certain individuals inside and outside of your company will help you better understand where to allocate time and resources. If you find certain people who have a strong reputation across a certain segment of customers, leverage that person. If you identify that there are certain key customer segments where you have little or no reputation, that is where you want to focus time and effort.

Time

In a Social Business, time is important. Whether it is time to find a resource, time to solve a problem, or time-to-market with a new product, speed is a competitive advantage. Social techniques like communities or Twitter can assist in this area. For instance, monitoring tweets can help you know about situations that require immediate action. In Chapter 3, “Gain Social Trust,” one of the trust builders is the ability to respond responsively.

Here are some examples of time metrics to consider:

• Time to respond to a Twitter concern

• Resource (time to find an expert resource internally)

• Time to onboard a new employee and train them for their job

• Reduction of time-to-market for new products/services

Engagement

Engagement is critical to your success with people. Engagement is the emotional connection with your client or employee usually created by exceptional experiences that are integrated, interactive, and identifying. This metric gives you a feel for how people associate themselves with your product, company, or brand. Engagement could be someone retweeting your comment (retweeting is when a person takes your tweet and resends it in Twitter), or voting for your article on digg. (digg is a social news site, where content is posted by users and the users vote on the value of the content.) It is really about this interaction with you—sharing content about you. While not all engagement activities are the same, it is important to look at the types of engagement that people have with your company, brand, or products. While we will discuss more advanced metrics such as sentiment in the sections that follow, there are some simple ways to start to see your engagement scores. Different types of engagement have different business value, and, therefore, some types of engagement are more valuable/critical than other types. For example, customer loyalty/retention is a particularly valuable form of engagement. Some examples are given here:

• Facebook: Comments, Likes

• Twitter: Number of brand mentions, number of retweets

• YouTube channel: Comments, virally passing link

• LinkedIn: Number of references, number of answers

• Communities: Number of members

• Blogs: Time spent on site, comments

• Website: Number of unique visitors; number of RSS subscribers and your repeat traffic (demonstrates loyalty)

• Polls: Number of people who respond and participate

Some tools to potentially help you measure customer engagement in the aforementioned channels include these:

• Google Analytics: Measures site engagement goals including mobile.

• Facebook Insights: Tracks daily active users, new likes, and referrals, and when you have spikes in comments, it will show you what caused them.

• SocialToo: A comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter.

• YouTube Insights: Provides views, popularity, content clicked on, and community engagement.

• ENGAGEMENTdb: Altimeter has worked on an engagement study exploring the top 100 brands and ranking their engagement with different social media channels—a total of 11. What the study uncovered was that a brand’s engagement across multiple social networks significantly impacts its bottom line, but this is preliminary. Keep your eye on this piece of work! http://www.scribd.com/doc/17666696/Engagement-Rankings-Of-The-Worlds-Most-Valuable-Brands.

There is no standard way to measure engagement today. The qualitative aspect of engagement can be estimated by sentiment analysis, which is still an advanced capability.

Provide Advanced Analytics and Dashboards for Sentiment, Affinity Relationships, and Evolving Topics

As your Social Business becomes savvy about its use of social techniques, a more advanced look at results is required. For example, while the list of tools in the preceding sections is interesting, it is not aggregated nor does it show the linkage between elements. So for the more advanced user, I recommend looking at tools that aggregate and frame the data into a comprehensive analysis using techniques like predictive analytics and content analytics.

As Figure 7.2 illustrates, data must be gathered from multiple sources. While some of the aforementioned tools look at two or three input parameters, what is needed is a tool that takes real-time data from all the sources available in the Social Business world.

Figure 7.2 Analyze your data.

For me, there are four crucial elements that must be viewed:

1. Comprehensive Analysis

2. Evolving Topics

3. Affinity

4. Sentiment

For Social Businesses, these four elements provide a competitive advantage. The sections that follow examine these four elements in greater detail.

Comprehensive Analysis

One of the first items that you want to be able to focus on is listening to the marketplace or better understanding your internal employees. The key here is to have a comprehensive view of the areas that are of importance to your business. A comprehensive analysis is a view of all that is being written in the blogosphere about your chosen set of keywords, company, brand, or product. Start by defining the set of key topics, regions, timeframes, and brand or product areas that you would like to consistently review for trends.

The ability to analyze billions of blog posts and hundreds of thousands of forums and discussion groups on publicly available websites “on the fly” to measure the effectiveness of your social impact and the sentiment of consumer opinions of your brand and company is invaluable. Companies can get access to publicly available data and data in their own private forums, but not in other private forums. So you need to take some of the metrics with a grain of salt as they measure a subset of the total universe of data.

This comprehensive view of the data provides you with an overall perspective of the topics in relation to the key areas of focus that you determined along with trending.

Evolving Topics

It is important to look at the new topics in the blogosphere and on your internal intranet. A Social Business captures a summary of discussions to determine snippets that share the same terms and related topics above and beyond your analysis of trends and common discussion topics across time.

Evolving topics provide good insight into future products and services. Using content analytics from the crowdsourced data across multiple public and private websites, you can draw relationship to topics around a given keyword. For example, if you sell home entertainment equipment, you might find evolving topics from your customers related to “installations” and “customer service.” A Social Business will be able to translate that into an opportunity to do a better job of offering installation services at the point of sale for every home entertainment system.

These evolving topics help you to determine risks and opportunities of related topics to corporate reputation, marketing, product innovation, and customer service.

Analyzing evolving topics enables a Social Business to more effectively target broad adjacent themes and events to link your product, services, and corporate messages while prioritizing and ranking their relevance and applicability for proactive campaigns. In addition, evolving topics provide insight to incorporate other discussion contexts by analyzing evolving topics related to hot word sentiment and by targeting other social media communities or communication channels.

Affinity Analysis

A Social Business needs to understand the relationship between different areas of analysis and view the snippets that are associated with their intersection to gauge impact and identify future messages or innovations among key audiences. Affinity analysis is a process of taking data and seeing the affinity, or relationships, of product purchases. For instance, if a person buys one product, is he more likely to buy another product? Or if someone buys one product, does it make her more likely to not buy another product? This level of analysis helps you gain insight into affinity relationships in your marketing, using hot words to modify messaging with more agility and precision. In addition, affinity analysis helps you anticipate new opportunities. Based on this information, a Social Business can engage audiences in specific subject areas with the words and messages that resonate with and are specific to their interests and perspectives.

Finally, a Social Business can better evaluate messaging by analyzing affinity contexts and associations with corporate and brand values to ascertain responsiveness and reaction to reputation, customer service, and corporate social responsibility activities. For example, a Social Business could start to filter down to product categories that they offer and understand how each of those compares against the source to identify whether certain products are more heavily discussed in Twitter than in YouTube.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment is the way people view what you are doing, either positively or negatively. You can gain an understanding of how people feel about your company, brand, or category based on what they write. Sentiment defines snippets of social data as positive, negative, or neutral/undefined. Social analytics takes the data into insight about feelings and emotional connections. A Social Business needs to be able to analyze sentiment and filter by concepts, hot words, and media sets to have a complete comparative analysis by comparing positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent sentiment.

Sentiment analysis helps a Social Business make decisions with analysis into consumer and stakeholder sentiment. It adds value in assessing precise trends and changes in perception of your corporate reputation and reaction to campaigns.

In addition, sentiment analysis can help you identify and target new channels to drive greater advocacy of your products and services with key influencers based on an analysis of sentiment. For example, the effectiveness of your campaigns’ messages and their impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions, as well as the resonance and believability of their promise, are valuable pieces of information. Internally, sentiment analysis would help a Social Business gain better insight on how employees truly feel about the new travel policy, usage of the CRM solution, or what mobile devices it should support for remote employees.

Establish a Social Analytics Center of Excellence

Social Businesses need social analytics tools and skills. The best way to do this is to staff a skilled set of professionals with an aggregated dashboard that is reviewed and improved upon on a regular basis. The Social Analytics Center of Excellence mission is to expand the company’s transformation through the leverage of analysis at the individual, organization, and enterprise levels. Working with leaders across the company, the primary objective is to drive business and client value through the efficient, effective use of tools and data analysis. This Center of Excellence should be linked to the Social Business Digital Council in Chapter 2.

A Center of Excellence could be a full-time staff or could be staffed with individuals on rotational assignments. In addition, your company could leverage external agencies. IBM creates its Center of Excellence with a combination of Market Insights, brand-led Social Business Managers, and external agencies. This approach brings practical experience to the team for a defined period, and then transfers the talent back to the business units after gaining broader experience.

For example, Gatorade, a brand inside of the Pepsi Corporation, set up a Mission Control Center to analyze and more deeply engage with its consumers. This digital hub is a combination of insight analysis with action-oriented changes that are made based on consumer trends. With a combination of tools and four full-time staff, Gatorade uses real-time data and analysis to make changes in their marketing campaigns. Some of their results have been an increase in engagement going from 35% one-on-one interaction about sports performance to over 60% today. Gatorade tracks online discussions, sports landscape, media performance, outreach, brand attributes, and brand buzz. This covers all of the key areas of sentiment, affinity, and evolving topics in their category.

Having a Center of Excellence drives a central focus for your Social Business across internal and external uses. Select a Social Analytics Manager who will focus on the digital forms of information for insight. This person compliments your Business Intelligence team. They can also assist in determining who should have access to analytics and what content should be made available by the process.

The Social Analytics Manager should have experience in analytics, social tools, and understanding of the advanced analytics areas of sentiment, affinity, and predictive models.

In Figure 7.3, I wanted to share some of the top solution areas for the Center of Excellence. As you can see, these are the core areas:

• Customer acquisition, growth, and retention

• Operations management, infrastructure, and security

• Suspicious-behavior detection, risk mitigation, and fraud prevention

Figure 7.3 Top solution areas

In the sections that follow, you will see three examples of the use of social analytics and the value in three processes that cover many of these core areas: customer service, marketing, and human relations.

Sample: IBM Social Analytics for Customer Service

As an example, let’s look at social analytics applied to a call center. The call center is the first line of defense in ensuring that customers are happy. If your company understands what drives “happiness,” your company can drive more revenue. Chapter 5 discusses how companies are embedding social networking into their customer service processes. Now let’s determine the right social analytics that could be used to help your effectiveness.

The goal in the call center is to be more productive by proactively engaging consumers online during the busy season.

In this example, the customer service manager needs to accurately and precisely filter through sources of complaints to engage customers’ issues effectively and quickly. In addition, there is a need to assess evolving topics associated with the customer complaints so that the customer service manager can begin to assess and provide feedback to managers on future issues. In a Social Business, the leader of the call center wants to reduce call and email volumes for minor customer complaints by proactively engaging in issues and feedback online through the call center by doing the following:

• Precisely determining the online source of complaints

• Determining the sentiment and filtering down to specifics

• Evaluating and assessing future complaints

• Making the parts of the business causing the dissatisfaction aware of the issues

Social Business analysis requires the review of sentiment in this example. Sentiment analysis across specific consumer discussion boards and blogs will help you reach your goal via a filtered and targeted analysis of online sources of customer complaints.

In addition, evolving topic analysis helps to determine whether there are other problem trending items that you can address before they become too big. In that evolving trending, analysis of the volume of negative and positive feedback, viewed in parallel with call-center statistics, can help you determine any issues ahead of time as demonstrated previously in Chapter 5.

Figure 7.4 shows a consolidation of the metrics that McKinsey found for Social Businesses in the customer service space.

Figure 7.4 Value of Social Business for customer service

Source: “The rise of the networked enterprise. Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Global Survey Results, 2010.

Sample: IBM and Social Analytics for Marketing

As an example, let’s look at social analytics applied to a marketing organization. Applying social analytics to marketing can result in expanded revenue opportunities. For instance, social analytics could assist you in combining attitudinal and survey-based data with social sentiment to anticipate and target new segments, or to predict consumer sentiment through social channels to segment customer behavior and optimize campaign ROI.

The goal in marketing is to make relevant changes to the program strategy or execution. The sample company wants to assess the impact of the company’s corporate social responsibility campaign and determine whether it has improved the reputation of the company in the communities it serves. In the corporate social responsibility campaign, the company will need to understand current reputational standing as well as the campaign’s effect on either modifying or stabilizing it.

In this example, the marketing team needs to go through 100,000 forums and discussion groups to measure the effectiveness of the social campaign and the sentiment of consumer responses. In addition, they need to gain insight into affinity relationships in search of the campaign’s hot words to modify messaging for their campaigns with more agility and precision. They also need a baseline assessment of the company’s reputation among stakeholders in communities and to assess the shift in reputation after the campaign.

The Social Business analysis that should be done in this case is sentiment analysis of reputation on community-based blogs and discussion groups. For example, in Figure 7.5, the identification of the most causal variables driving sentiment assists in developing marketing campaigns to maximize positive sentiment.

Figure 7.5 Predictive models to drive positive sentiment for marketing campaigns

Social analytics provides the critical baseline to justify engagements with particular stakeholders in your company’s community.

With its capacity to assess sentiment regarding attributes associated with the company’s reputation, for instance, you can provide management with a clearer picture of the public’s reaction to issues.

In Figure 7.6, there is a consolidation of the metrics that McKinsey found for Social Businesses in the marketing process.

Figure 7.6 Value of Social Business for marketing management

Source: “The rise of the networked enterprise. Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Global Survey Results, 2010.

Sample: IBM Social Analytics for Human Relations

As an example, let’s look at social analytics applied to the human relations process. HR is a critical process, where talent management is a competitive advantage for all companies. If through social analytics you can retain more top talent, your company can save money. Gallup says that a 1% improvement in employee turnover saves $1 million (based on a company of 5,000 employees). Chapter 5 discusses how companies are embedding social networking into their customer service processes. Now let’s determine the right social analytics that could be used to help our effectiveness.

The goal of human relations in talent management is to retain more of the company’s top talent. By understanding employee sentiment through social listening and by leveraging internal and external information sources such as social network and forums, the existing employee satisfaction and feedback surveys can be augmented and even become real time, eliminating the need for the once-a-year view that is out of date as soon as you get it!

In this example, the talent management needs to understand employee sentiment about working at the company by understanding employee sentiment about working at IBM, understanding employee sentiment about IBM’s products, services, and clients, and IBM policies/programs. In addition, they need to assess the onboarding experience of new hires, monitor acquired employees assimilation/integration, and identify data/trends that will enable HR to determine whether interventions are necessary to address employee dissatisfaction, especially for critical job roles.

This insight results in improvements across HR’s talent management. For instance, they can do the following:

• Identify areas for new/additional training needs (e.g., to sales/delivery teams)

• Obtain insight into employee needs

• Identify whether there is a need for corrective actions related to certain programs (e.g., evaluate the incentive plan to reduce attrition of the sales force)

Social Business analysis requires the review of sentiment in this example. Sentiment analysis across specific employee communities and blogs will help you reach your goal via a filtered and targeted analysis of online sources of employee concerns.

In addition, evolving topic analysis helps to determine whether there are other problems trending by focus area. For instance, filtering and targeted analysis of the source of complaints by geography, business unit, job role, and tenure could help focus the talent management issues on the right areas to have immediate impact.

In Figure 7.7, there is a consolidation of the metrics that McKinsey found for Social Businesses in the human relations space.

Figure 7.7 Value of Social Business for HR

Source: “The rise of the networked enterprise. Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Global Survey Results, 2010.

Conclusion

Social analytics are the new black. Black is so popular because it is universally flattering. Social analytics will become popular because these metrics help you understand client needs so that you can target the right offers and products. They drive the evaluation of corporate reputation and help you have the facts to make the right decisions at the right time. In addition, they reduce the response time as they help you predict client requests so that you are ahead of the curve. To use social techniques and media appropriately and to better assess service-level effectiveness and reduce costs, a Center of Excellence with advanced metrics is recommended. Whether you are a small, medium, or large company, the integration of the measurement of your social media strategy into your business and operational processes is the winning play.