Are you listening to the gazillions of digital conversations?
As social media usage has ramped up, it's become increasingly clear that there's value in all that digital chatter and whisper. If only you can identify what's significant- that’s the multi-million dollar question. Few companies have the resources to personally monitor what consumers are saying, although some have tried- e.g. Comcast and JetBlue.
This is a perfect job for technology to monitor social media conversations (e.g. blogs, Twitter, Facebook you name it), use text mining to figure out the user's attitude (sentiment) and topic of conversation, and then prioritize and route to someone in the organization to take appropriate actions. We already have mountains of social data as a result of web 2.0 social networking, blogging, social bookmarking, and micro-blogging. The idea of social analytics raises eyebrows around privacy, network portability, network ownership, etc. that we will have to deal with. At this point of course, we can just add them to the growing list of open issues like governance, regulatory compliance, data protection, openness and transparency that are popping up as challenges to the social enterprise. As history has shown we'll work our way through these issues as we learn and grow through this business transformation cycle. It's an exciting time but in my opinion, it’s still the Wild West at present as we struggle through the changes and learn new ways of doing business and driving additional business value.
Even if you’re only dipping your toe into the social media waters, at the very least, you need to listen first. If you don’t listen, how do you know what people are saying about you? You can’t. And guess what? They are talking about you for sure.
I'm convinced that we are at a significant inflection point of business change brought on by the social media. You may never know or rather you will know if you take the time to listen. Are you taking the time out to listen?
