Social Media Intelligence: From Infancy to Adolescence and Beyond

Dr. Ranjit Nair, CEO, Germin8 Social Intelligence

Social media platforms have enabled companies to engage with their customers like never before, and
building a social presence has become one of the first steps that any company takes, in many cases even
before they launch their website.
Social media intelligence is an umbrella term for various social media analytics tools for social media
listening, social media measurement and social media engagement. These tools promised companies
that they would help them know their customers better, learn from feedback and engage better, based
on analysing data generated in social media.
Like many technology applications, social media intelligence has followed Gartners Hype Cycle to a T,
with the Peak of Inflated Expectations from customers and investors occurring in 2012 and 2013. A lot of
this interest, as is the case with all technology investment, was based on herd mentality, where people
followed their peers in other organizations in the fear of not being left behind.
This meant that their investments in many cases were unwarranted and were inevitably followed by
buyers remorse. According to Gartner, social software began its slide towards the inevitable Trough of
Disillusionment in 2015. However, contrary to what one might think, this is actually good news for the
field.
The trouble began because measuring the ROI for social media intelligence was difficult for companies.
For instance, how much did revenue increase because of knowing the customer better or did churn go
down because engagement in social media got better? It is difficult to attribute the success on hard
metrics like revenue growth, churn and life time value based on measuring soft metrics like fan growth
and content engagement.
For social media intelligence to be seen as adding value, it was necessary for the field to mature in three
ways A. Use cases needed to evolve, B. ROI needed to be better defined, and C. Technology had to get
stronger. Let us look at how all three are now happening.
A. The first major change has been the emergence of strong use cases:
1. Social media analytics is replacing traditional market surveys in many instances and the results
are impacting decisions in board rooms. Instead of designing and conducting a survey and then
tabulating the responses, which is slow, expensive and open to manipulation, companies are
relying heavily on understanding unsolicited customer feedback in social media.
Right from measuring customer reaction to company policy changes to measuring customer
satisfaction on products right after launch, customers are using social media intelligence to
quickly understand the pulse of their customers and then recalibrating their decisions if
necessary.
2. Many companies have embraced social media platforms as a legitimate channel for customer
support. With the help of social media intelligence tools for customer support they are able to

address customer complaints, queries and leads in social media, much like they would in a call
centre.
These tools provide collaborative workflows and intelligent ways of dealing with influencers and
priority issues, resulting in higher customer satisfaction at a fraction of the cost that similar
support would have cost them if done via a call centre. If done well, customers who have just
been served can be converted into brand advocates.
3. Companies have realized that their social media engagement should be thought of more as a
loyalty program than as a customer acquisition vehicle. Hence, their efforts have shifted
towards getting their existing customers to engage with them in social media and then putting
out the right content targeted to these customers.
Social media intelligence tools help both with finding customers in social media as well as in
measuring how effective a companys content strategy has been in terms of engaging its
audience compared to its competitors.
B. The second change has been the measurement of ROI has become stronger through the definition of
metrics that correspond to business outcomes and use cases as opposed to soft vanity metrics. If the
use case is customer support, the metrics are time taken for resolution, cost per resolution, churn for
customers who were attended to in social media, etc. If the use case is building customer loyalty, the
metrics are LTV of a fan or follower, churn among fans and followers, cost per engagement action, etc.
For each of these metrics, social intelligence tools provide analytics that will help you figure out what
you could do to improve on that metric. Thus, they have moved from being merely descriptive to being
prescriptive. For example, it might suggest a different time of day to post a particular kind of content, or
different content type that works for a target audience category.
2015 has seen several large enterprises launching full scale social command centres, which are physical
rooms with large video walls tracking KPIs derived from social media, manned by cross-functional teams
from marketing, corporate communications, customer service and business intelligence. 2016 promises
to see many more such social command centres getting launched.
What you will have noticed is that these metrics are measurable only if social intelligence tools are
integrated with each other and with external data sources and systems, which bring us to the final leg
technology.
C. There have been two powerful technology trends that have helped social media intelligence mature
integration and machine learning.
1. Instead of social media intelligence tools being used in silos, companies are seeing value in
integrating these tools to each other and to their internal systems. Common integrations include
integration of social media customer care with CRM and integrating social media marketing
software with web analytics.
Probably the most ambitious of these integrations would be to build a single unified view of
each customer that integrates social media and other customer communication channels like

email, voice and chat, with CRM transaction data and marketing automation tools. If done
successfully, this will enable companies to achieve the Holy Grail of marketing, namely
personalised marketing or marketing to the segment of one.
2. While Machine Learning has always been an integral part of social media intelligence, its usage
has increased many fold beyond solving diagnostic problems like sentiment identification and
theme detection to more predictive and prescriptive problems.
For example, companies have begun building models that predict when some content or
campaign has gone viral, or to prescribe how to allocate their media spend based on how
content is faring in social media, or to identify customer churn based on signals from social
media.
While some of these models can be productised, many will be custom models built by the
companys data science team and will often require an integration with non-social media data.
All of these trends augur well for the social media intelligence field because they point towards the field
achieving maturity in a three to four year period. The air is now clearing, strong use cases and
technology solutions that add business value to customers have emerged and most importantly,
customers are asking the right question: how soon will my investment pay off and what will be the ROI?

About the Author: Dr. Ranjit Nair is the CEO and Co-founder of Germin8. Ranjit is PhD in Computer
Science from University of Southern California and is passionate about Artificial Intelligence, Analytics
and Product Development. Germin8s Social Intelligence tool suite helps companies become more
customer centric in terms of their offerings and communication and comprised of tools for social media
listening, measurement, customer care, social media profiling and most recently social command centre
software. Germin8s technology has been successfully deployed at some of the largest banks, telecom
companies and CPG companies in India.