Social Media Intelligence Today

The current state of social media intelligence is one where organizations are investing in social media monitoring but drowning in social media data and metrics. In an effort to make sense of the seemingly infinite volume of data that social media produces on a daily basis, analysts are computing an equally overwhelming number of metrics. The problem is that organizations are measuring what is easy to measure with the data. Twitter data are easy to collect and volume metrics are easy to compute, so metrics like the number of Twitter mentions or the number of Twitter followers are over-emphasized. Rather than going after the low hanging fruit, we need to shift our focus from measuring what’s easy to measure to measuring what matters. In other words, what are the metrics that will influence our strategic decision making? And our ability to define these metrics will depend on a firm understanding of opinion science.

Organizations have also struggled with integrating the intelligence gathered from social media data with other sources of data that marketing researchers have relied on for decades. Many organizations are faced with multiple research reports produced from traditional focus groups, customers surveys, in-store sales data, and social media. In several cases, the social media reports don’t align with other studies, especially when the social media metrics are not adjusted to accommodate the various biases we know exist from the opinion science research. When faced with these conflicting reports, organizations tend to favor the tried and tested offline methods over the very new and untested social media metrics. But organizations shouldn’t give up on social media intelligence quite that quickly, especially while social media tools are in their infancy. An integrated research approach that includes both the traditional offline methods and social media intelligence can be very effective, timely, and cost-efficient. The key is to track the right social media metrics and integrate social media intelligence efforts with other marketing research programs. Integration would involve the alignment of social media metrics with the offline metrics in such a way that the multiple sources of marketing intelligence complement one another. Social media intelligence can be used as an early indicator of general problem areas and offline methods can used to investigate further as a follow-up study.