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Web Business by Ken Burbary

Digital Marketing, Social Media, Web Technology

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Introducing the Social Analytics Lifecycle

October 22nd, 2009 · View Comments · Analytics, Conversation Monitoring

For several months, social media measurement and analytics pro Chuck Hemann and I have been thinking and talking about the many benefits of social media monitoring, a.k.a. listening to the online voice of your customers. Historically, most of the discussion on this topic centers around using monitoring as a reputation/crisis management tool, but that’s just scratching the surface of the potential uses and benefits. Instead we believe that the ever growing gigabytes of data generated as a result of social media participation is a customer data goldmine, waiting to be tapped.

Strategic Listening

Companies need to start thinking about taking advantage of the tools, technologies, and data available to drive improvements across many aspects of their business. If you work in product development, strategic planning, corporate communications, marketing, advertising, customer care, sales, or any discipline that touches the customer experience, then it is imperative that you begin using the insights from the social web to better inform your strategies, improve your products/services/business operations, and improve your customer satisfaction.

Over the last month I’ve worked with Chuck to create a new graphic that helps illustrate how social analytics (discovery, collection, analysis and segmentation) of data from the social web can make its way through, and be used by the different business functions that exist in most companies.

Social Analytics Lifecycle

Click the image to download a higher res version on Flickr

This version of the Social Analytics Lifecycle is just the beginning, as we expect it to grow and change after discussions with other companies about how they should go about implementing strategic listening programs. We’re excited about the possibilities, please enjoy this visual representation and let me know how you’d like to see it evolve.

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  • Great thoughts here. How are they holding up in 2010? Will you be returning to the bloggin world anytime soon?
  • This is really a nice post.Social media is need in today's world.The people who are new to this business are taking help of social media.
  • Ken,

    Nice work - does a great job of showing how social media monitoring services can be used and leveraged across many departments for multiple strategic and tactical reasons.

    cheers, Mark
  • Any new stuff coming to the blog soon? I miss your helpful insight!
  • I read your profile today and it was so good to me.i feel you are the only one missing in my entire life so i decided to stop on and let you know that i am interested to be a friend first.When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something
  • Ken,

    The chart - and thinking - that you and Chuck have created has much to do with moving things beyond just social media monitoring. While it's great to know what people are thinking and talking about, the next question to answer is what does the data mean and how do you act on it. Acting could mean engagement, changes in strategic direction or new campaign but it's all about capitalizing on the data to improve different aspects of the business.

    Mark Evans
    Director of Communications
    Sysomos.com
  • wonderwhywill
    I'd be interested in learning the difference between a simple monitoring solution (SocialMention, TweetDeck and even Radian6), compared to a "listening" solution like Networked Insights Social Sense, CollectiveIntellect and Sysomos.

    I guess my understanding is the monitoring solutions basically are a "fancy" (or not so fancy, depending on your experience with them) mention counting application, while the listening platforms are much more robust in the data, analysis and discovery you can gain from the them.

    I would like to hear your thoughts on deciphering between the two please...

    Thanks
  • Chuck and Ken great article! I would love to share this article with some of my clients with your permission of course.
  • David - feel free! Thanks for the kind words. Looking forward to hearing what your clients think of it.
  • David, feel free! We're happy to hear it and please let us know how it goes and if you need some assistance.
  • laurenvargas
    Great work, Ken and Chuck! You are correct, social media is an enterprise-wide movement. The tool is only one step in how we filter and delegate conversations. We are talking and reading about how we do this, but so many people are visual learners. You did a brilliant job demonstrating the flow of socmed throughout organization. I would be interested how it also impacts the behind the scenes departments like legal and human resources....but that is another can of worms to be opened later.

    Lauren Vargas
    Community Manager at Radian6
    @VargasL
  • Thanks for the comment Lauren. You're thinking along the same lines. We've discussed the ripple effect that social data has on other departments in an organization and are thinking about future visuals to show that, along with a decision tree that can used to help direct the flow of social data to the appropriate teams.
  • Hey Lauren - great feedback, and thanks!
  • UrbaneWay
    Ken, Good Morning
    Not sure if I am on the right track here, consistent with your point, but we have been talking and consulting with apartment operators that are entering the Social Media Space to view and focus on The Larger Community, meaning,

    ) How Many Monthly Web Visitors do you have Per Unit,
    2) How many Facebook Friends do you have Per Unit
    3) How many MySpace Friends do you have per Unit
    4) How many Twitter Followers do you have Per Unit,

    Your Community Must Be Larger Than Your Apartment Community.
    Once you have documented these new metrics, you can then start to understand just how large your Community must be in order to provide enough rental and leasing activity from these non traditional medians to keep your asset full. As you see these new metric numbers starting to climb, you can get clearer on What To Drop, and can begin to watch Your Cost Per Lease Start to Decline.
  • jonnybgood
    Hi Ken thanks for visualing distilling what we've been arguing for about 5 years now - great job. This applies as much today as it it did before the current Facebook/twitter explosion (which is where social media began for many in this area).
  • Hey Jonny - glad you found the post useful. Totally agree that the general premise could apply to more traditional communications as well.
  • jonnybgood
    HI Chuck - good point and certainly applies to trad media- but I meant was the whole of the social media range: blogs, forums, message boards, thematic portals, user groups, audiovisual sharing media, discussion strings in "trad" online media (newspaper, mags, TV etc). My point is that many people are blinded by FB/Twitter (the trees) and cannot see beyond to the forest, let alone the myriad varieties of social networks that exist in different markets. e.g. Orkut in India or Nasza-Klasa in Poland
  • Excellent reminder, and one I talk about often with clients. The social web is much bigger than FB/Twitter, which is why we added some text to the visual to ensure people understand what we mean by social web (blogs, forums, social networks, photo/video sharing, etc...).
  • You won't get any argument from me.
  • As I intimated over Twitter, very interesting attempt at something exceptionally difficult articulate. It would be interesting to see, as it progresses, links or separate articles that discuss and bring the theory into a more grounded discussion. In lieu of that, an explanation of the visual representation at some level would be nice.

    For instance, what do you mean by segmenting data then informing corporate communications/helping them drive strategy? I can provide an example-- so I will, but I'm sure you could do the same, and I've love to hear you tie it all together.

    My anecdote: PR came to me a few weeks back asking me what the relative influence of a source was/how much time they should dedicate. By querying my SM database, I found all the articles they had written about us and how many times, on average, each of those articles were repeated in other Blogs, Tweets, Forums and the like. I then compared and contrasted that data with a few other sources, and made a recommendation (in this case that they were not nearly as influential as some other sources).

    Now, I don't actually know what they did with that information, but hypothetically, lets assume they used that to prioritize their efforts on a handful of sources, and that because of SM monitoring, they were able to best target the real influencers, thus moving along your visual representation from start to finish.

    In short, I know you know what you're talking about, and I'm sure you have plenty of great ways to tie this all and the links are blindingly obvious in your own mind, but I think for those who are a bit skeptical, or dazzled by the sheer amount of hot air in the Social Media world, that concrete examples of your tiers would be very helpful.
  • Hey Ken - always enjoy our discussions. Hopefully people find the graphic/discussion of use.
  • Likewise. A pleasure collaborating with you again Chuck!
  • Great work!!
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