Companies offering tools for social media analysis – such as the Chat Reports service by Whitevector – are designed for one end purpose. That is to provide clients with social media data in the most usable form possible.
What the effective use of this data calls for, however, is resources from either an agency or an end client. These resources are what turn social media data into suggestions for the next step, or measures to be taken regarding a company’s online visibility and social presence.
To really get to grips with producing such suggestions for further improvement, a sturdy process is required to be found within each client’s organisation. Through this process it is possible to finally turn the resources needed for processing social media data into something that has substantial value through improved knowledge.
Vice versa, without a meaningful process for handling social media data, the social media analysis tends to remain at a nice-to-know-basis. While this is nice as such, all of us, our partners and our clients need to get to ‘need-to-know’ level with the data we provide. So, in essence, getting the most out of social media data requires organisational involvement and a process to handle it – in order to gain these need-to-know outcomes.
Once a feasible process for handling social media data is in place, we can see that there can be many different functions within each organisation that need to pull together. As a quick example, in a recent client case the functions that wanted their share of social media data went clearly beyond marketing and communications. Organisational groups including R&D, business intelligence, HR and management used social media data to understand their environment better.
Of course there are plenty of different organisations with different needs, but the point is that when multiple functions within a company want to use social media data for their benefit, that company needs 1) resources to distribute that data efficiently and 2) a process to do so and a process to refine and analyse the data. And this applies of course to the marketing and communications departments.
Finally, while very many companies have recently made the decision to ‘go social’, we would like to ask if this decision includes the allocation of needed resources and a few thoughts spent on a structured process that makes going social effective?
