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Develop a Social Analytics Program
Go beyond counting your likes: harness “the world’s largest focus group” for deep insights
about your customers, competitors, and employees.
McLean & Company is a research and advisory firm that provides practical solutions
to human resources challenges with executable research, tools, and advice that will have a
McLean & Company is a research and advisory firm providing practical
to human
challenges
via executable
research,
tools and advice that
clear andsolutions
measurable
impactresources
on your business.
© 1997-2013
McLean
& Company.
have a clear and measurable impact on your business. © 1997 - 2014 McLean
& Company.
McLean
& Company
is a division
of Info-Tech
Research Group
McLean
& Company
is a division
of Info-Tech
Research
Group Inc.
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Introduction
Social media business objectives are notoriously difficult to achieve if you
don’t have the right measurement processes in place. Spearhead a
technology-enabled social analytics program that tracks the right metrics,
captures customer insights, and marries social data with other sources of
customer and competitive information.
This Research Is Designed For:
This Research Will Help You:
 HR professionals interested in how analytics
 Understand the business benefits of using
can help boost their overall social media
success.
 HR, business and IT leaders involved in
social media governance structures (such as
a steering committee) with responsibility for
defining and tracking social metrics and
determining how to incorporate social insights
into existing business processes.
 Business analytics practitioners who need
specific guidance on which social metrics to
track, and how to go about analyzing them.
social analytics to accurately gauge the health
of your social media initiatives. Identify the
best social metrics for your particular use
cases, and what to look for in each metric.
 Pair social analytics with other sources of
customer intelligence to capture a 360degree view of your customers and business
environment.
 Create a Customer Insights Center of
Excellence (CICOE) to drive your social
analytics program to the next level.
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Executive Summary
•
Organizations must have a strategy in place for delivering real business value from social media, and a robust
analytics program is a critical component of a well-rounded social media strategy. Those who don’t do social
analytics will be at a competitive disadvantage given the importance of using analytics to understand the massive
amounts of social data that are generated each and every day.
•
Without a social analytics program, it’s virtually impossible to gauge the success of your social media efforts. Social
analytics are indispensable in gaining real-time insights across marketing, sales, and customer service. SMBs can use
social analytics to tap into the “world’s largest focus group” at significantly lower expense than traditional
forms of market research.
•
A variety of different social metrics are available to organizations, including volume, frequency, and sentiment
analysis. Sentiment analysis is particularly important: it gives you an idea about what is being said about your brand.
•
The greatest value from social analytics comes when organizations marry social data sources with other forms of
customer information, such as point-of-sales data, customer surveys, focus groups, and psychographic profiles.
Using social analytics to validate (or fine-tune) customer insights gained from other sources is a powerful method for
building a “360 degree view” of your customer base.
•
Integrate social analytics with your broader business intelligence (BI) program for maximum effect. A Social
Media Command Center can be used for customer engagement, but consider creating a Customer Insights Center
of Excellence (CICOE) to serve as a one-stop shop for both traditional and social customer analytics.
•
Internal social analytics allow you to gauge the sentiment of your employees, while turbocharging certain ideation
and feedback processes.
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The World’s Largest Focus Group
What’s in this Section:
• Understand the importance of using social analytics
to capture business insights and track the success
of your social media campaigns.
• Leverage social analytics as part of a business
intelligence program to make data-driven decisions.
• Use social analytics to capture customer and
competitive insights across all business functions –
and integrate it with other sources of customer data.
Sections:
The World’s Largest Focus
Group
Determine your Use Cases
Define and Interpret Metrics
Execute the Social Analytics
Program
Leverage Internal Social
Analytics
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Organizations must adapt or die: use social analytics to stay ahead
of the curve by taking the pulse of your customers and competitors
Social analytics has a twofold value proposition: it allows you to proactively
fine-tune your social media campaigns, while providing a unique window
into your customers and value chain.
Social analytics as a funnel:
• Social analytics is the practice of defining, collecting, aggregating,
and applying analysis techniques to data captured from social media
(i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.). Think of social analytics as
the funnel on the right, where information is captured, transformed,
and presented to decision makers.
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
Blogs
Etc.
Pinterest
• As the popularity of social media with consumers has exploded in the
last five years, interest in social analytics has skyrocketed.
Paradoxically, many companies are failing to create a social
analytics program, and fewer still are properly executing and
leveraging insights for core business processes.
G+
• All too often, social analytics is treated as a standalone initiative,
Data Repository
rather than being properly used in conjunction with other sources of
customer data. Creating information silos misses out on
opportunities for creating a “360 degree view” of your customers.
Forward-thinking companies are creating Customer Insight Centers
of Excellence, and even leveraging internal social data.
Transformation (BI/SMMP analytics) Layer
Presentation Layer
Savvy organizations are adopting formal social analytics programs, incorporating insights into missioncritical business process, and pairing them with other sources of customer data. They’re also using proper
social media governance structures to oversee analytics efforts, and taking advantage of Social Media
Management Platforms and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suites to conduct their analysis.
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Social data is the biggest source of customer information in
history: without analytics, you can’t make the right decisions
Social media is incredibly popular with consumers, and the volume of
conversations being generated is truly staggering. If you don’t tap into – and
make sense – of this avalanche of buzz, you’re missing out on key trends
and failing to adequately serve your customers.
• The volume of social data being generated is mind-boggling.
Social media has led to an explosion in the amount of information
that customers are choosing to share about themselves online. This
presents organizations with a goldmine of opportunities for customer
and competitive insights, but you need a formal analytics
program to make sense of all the information that’s now in the
social cloud.
• Traditional market research (in the standalone sense, at least)
is on the decline. Market research techniques like focus groups,
experiments, and telephone-based surveys are time consuming and
expensive. By using social analytics companies can tap into the
opinions and experiences of thousands of customers online.
• Market research is typically conducted at regular intervals, but it’s
almost impossible to collect in real time without significant ongoing
expense. Social media never sleeps: companies can use
channels like Twitter and Facebook to take a 24/7 pulse of
consumer sentiment. Information from social analytics, when done
properly, is transformational, enabling organizations to tap into an
almost endless “global focus group.”
With all of this data floating around in social
media, organizations can access deeper and
more accurate insights than ever before – if they
have the methodology and tools to do it.
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If you don’t use social analytics, you’re stumbling in the dark:
don’t base your social media investments on impulse
Failing to couple social media projects with appropriate analytics makes it virtually
impossible to measure the value. You have no idea if your spent resources are having
any effect, and if so, whether that effect is the one you’re seeking. Employing a formal
analytics program provides insight into what’s working and what’s not.
want it to or not. According to MediaBistro.com, over 175 million
tweets are sent each and every day. This translates into a vast
amount of unstructured data just waiting to be harnessed by
analytics-savvy organizations.
• Unstructured social data can be used for a variety of business
cases: from gaining insights for market segmentation to rapidly
identifying product defects or common complaints. However,
harnessing this goldmine of information won’t occur on its own. A
systemic process must be in place for capturing insights. This
involves aligning the right people, processes, and technology to get
the job done.
• Not having an analytics program in place also makes tracking
the ROI of social media initiatives difficult – if not impossible!
An analytics program is imperative to provide managers with the
tools they need to measure and benchmark their success, both for
the social media program as a whole and for specific campaigns.
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Cautions:
• Social media continually creates data whether companies
Don’t react without research!
Social media has traditionally
been treated as an “intuitive”
undertaking – decisions around
social media have been made
with little quantitative and
qualitative analysis, oftentimes
with not much more than a quick
glance at the relevant feeds and
a Google search or two. The
inferred strategy of many
organizations is that this cursory
review is sufficient to manage
their social initiatives – it’s not.
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Social analytics is an emerging practice with rising adoption:
surpass competitors by capturing insights before they do
Adoption of Social Analytics
McLean & Company Insight
No Plans to Monitor
Forty-one percent of organizations are currently
monitoring social media with an analytics program,
with 24% planning to do so in the next 18 months.
If you are diving into social media, a social analytics
initiative must follow close behind.
34%
Planning to Monitor
24%
Monitoring
41%
0%
20%
40%
60%
Source: McLean & Company; N=90
Social analytics isn’t just the
logical next step to a social media
project; it is key to its success.
It was found that when organizations
adopt an SMMP, placing a greater
emphasis on the platform’s social
analytics features has the strongest
bearing on the success of the project.
*Each bar represents a statistical estimate of the impact each
factor has on the overall SMMP success.
Source: McLean & Company; N=36
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Ensure your organization has a “data-driven” mindset, or you
won’t realize the value from investing in social analytics
Don’t underestimate the impact of organizational culture on the success or
failure of a social analytics program: end users and decision makers must
embrace pragmatic use of social data.
• There are two broad approaches to decision-making:
◦
◦
Intuitive: Decisions are made based on the intuitions or “gut
feelings” of managers based on their training or prior
experiences. Decisions can be made quickly, but lack
empirical support and validation.
Data-driven: Decisions are made based on specific, concrete
evidence gathered from multiple sources and analyzed
through various statistical methods. Beware of “paralysis by
analysis,” but overall, the quality of data-driven decisions will
exceed that of the intuitive approach.
• Managers need to understand that implementing an analytics
program will be significantly easier if the company already
values data-driven decision making in other areas of the
business. If your organization has been apathetic towards using
data to drive management decisions, or have little-to-no formal
business intelligence program in place, you need to be
prepared to elaborate on the benefits from a cultural angle.
A successful social analytics program
requires a culture that uses data to solve
business problems, rather than just intuition.
You’ll usually have a good feel for how decisions are made in your organization. If your company has a
history of putting substantial data analysis behind management decisions, you’ll be well positioned to
leverage social analytics. However, if your company has traditionally favored the intuitive approach, you’ll
need to develop proof-of-concept projects highlighting the advantages of formal social analytics.
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Apply insights gleaned from social analytics to objectives
across the company to achieve the best return from the project
Social analytics should be leveraged in a cross-functional manner: not just for
HR but also for marketing, product development, sales, and customer service.
Brand Health Goals
Innovation Goals
Revenue Goals
(Marketing and PR)
(Product Development)
(Sales)
Customer
Satisfaction Goals
Social analytics helps by:
Social analytics helps by:
Social analytics helps by:
Social analytics helps by:
• Tracking brand
awareness.
• Comparing
competitor metrics.
• Performing sentiment
analysis.
• Providing customer
demographic
information.
• Providing word
associations that
reveal what features
consumers value and
desire.
• Tracking product
problems customer
complaints frequently
address.
• Collecting consumer
opinions on pricing
and product
decisions.
• Determining the
channels through
which products are
best received.
• Identifying common
complaints.
• Tracking peer-to-peer
support.
• Revealing holes in
the customer service
knowledgebase.
• Permitting proactive
service capabilities.
Work with the
marketing and PR
departments to
achieve these goals.
Work with the product
dev department to
reach these goals.
Work with the sales
department to achieve
these goals.
Work with the
customer service
department to achieve
these goals.
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Social analytics requires the right technology stack: a best-ofbreed Social Media Management Platform is a must
Social Media Management Platforms (SMMPs) are solutions (typically cloud-based) that offer a host of
features for effectively monitoring and managing your organization’s presence in the social cloud. SMMPs
give businesses the tools they need to run social campaigns in a timely and cost-effective manner. SMMP
functionality falls broadly into three categories: account & campaign management, in-band response, and
social monitoring/analytics.
End Users
(e.g. marketing managers)
Account & Campaign Management
SMMP
In the social analytics aspect of social media
management, organizations identify trends expressed
through social media. When undertaken successfully,
businesses can use this information to make better
strategic decisions in terms of PR, marketing, customer
service, and product development, and HR can better
leverage social media for recruitment purposes.
In-Band Response
Social Monitoring/Analytics
SMMPs mediate interactions between
end users and the social cloud.
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apply HR best practices
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impact of HR

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& technologies

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culture
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