What’s Next for Social Media Analytics?

What’s Next for Social Media Analytics?

At WCG, we’re fond of talking about “next practices.” Best practices is a buzzword that’s been sufficiently killed by communicators for years.  Yes, best practices are important, but with the speed in which social media moves, it’s almost impossible to label anything a best practice.  Why would you want to anyway?  Are you really going to model your social media program on what some other brand has done?  Do they have the same customers as you?  Are they trying to achieve the same goals that you are?  The answer to both of those questions is probably “no.”

So where do you get started?  We’ve advanced well beyond the stage where you need to hear us tell you how important listening is for your brand.  It helps inform content, it helps alter content and it helps us measure the overall performance of your program.  Most brands are starting to grasp that concept.  What’s not being fully leveraged yet are the volumes of data and information available to a brand leader through the social Web.  When we’re listening to online conversations, we’re typically doing so to inform our marketing and PR efforts.  That’s great, but there’s much more to the equation than marketing and PR.

Last October, Ken Burbary and I developed the Social Analytics Lifecycle for brands looking to really take data available on the social Web to the next level.  Our thought was that data on the Web, while being leveraged for marketing and PR could also be leveraged in the areas of product development, strategic planning, customer care and sales.  Fundamentally, the lifecycle works by gathering data, filtering out signal from noise, segmenting the data by corporate department, developing insights that form business strategies, which ultimately lead to execution. And, as is the case with any “lifecycle,” the process then continually repeats based on changing goals.

There’s obviously more to this story that we’ll get into in future posts (like the convergence of Web, social and search analytics), but so far, we’re not seeing many (if any at all) brands using social data in this way.  Are you? Where do you see the evolution of data going?

By: Chuck Hemann