Don’t Settle For Social Stats, Get Customer Insights

There are all these companies that listen and count what’s being said on social media, but nobody really understands exactly what’s being said and why. We want to understand what motivates and creates the passion in the consumer’s mind and heart.

Because we read and understand language and most specifically what social media has done to language, the mix of words without vowels and with numbers inserted, all kinds of idiomatic statements. Something sick could have the flu, or it could be the coolest, hottest thing ever. We understand that language and then we have filters that help translate that into what’s driving the passion about a topic or a brand. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I think we all understand what a core social listening program can do, in many cases a real time customer service type of initiative, but some aren’t really that, right? It’s not the customer service like, “Hey, somebody is upset about whatever. We should tweet them back.” It’s got a longer time horizon than that and so who, in the enterprise, would use that kind of information?

We do support the use case, but it really goes beyond that. We work with brand management. We work with product innovation. It really goes across the board.

I’ll give you one of my favorite examples from the very early days. We did a study of Listerine, and you could use any tool to count how many times people mentioned Listerine, but our filters will surface the things that people are saying about it, and one of the things that popped up in green is that, “The smell of Listerine reminds me of grandpa.”

Believe it or not, there are tons of people, male and female, across demographics, ages, across the globe that when they smell yellow Listerine, close their eyes, and it reminds them of grandpa. That’s an insight. That’s something that I can take and stage grandpa in my next commercial. I can do a whole grandpa-type packaging for the holidays. Those insights can drive all different types of actions.

There are literally no insights there other than where people are coming from and their gender and their age, which is guidance information at best. But when you take Facebook insights data and combine it with something wherein you actually get that word cloud level insight, what’s happening around your Facebook fan page can become a lot more useful, not just as sort of a loyalty generation tool but also as a product marketing and business insights tool.