What are the implications of social media trends for MI

Social media has changed the way people communicate. In general, there is a greater willingness to openly share knowledge in the public domain.

People with similar interests tend to cluster into different online communities for information exchange, and no longer feel like they have to be an expert to express their observations and opinions through blogs and forums. News alerts and images can be sent via smart phones to captive audiences instantaneously.

Field signals that have been captured through social media, as well as the social technology platforms, can be useful as an input to the intelligence process.  The willingness andcapability for sharing market signals has improved.

This directly impacts what I consider to be one of the toughest aspects of the market intelligence process – collecting and sharing information efficiently and rapidly.

It also allows for more collaborative types of information gathering. This is all good for intelligence purposes, provided you can manage the information.

Social media applications will increasingly play a more important role in the analysis part of the intelligence cycle as well.

What are the most useful social media platforms for MI, and what are their pros and cons

Blogs are an excellent source of continuous information on industry issues, customers and competitors. The quality of information however is not always high and there can be many blogs, sometimes hundreds, on any topic. So it is challenging to find the right ones to track.

LinkedIn is a very popular networking site that has made it easier to identify sales leads as well as experts from all over the world. It is sometimes possible to even get an indication of a competitor’s future direction through the projects and work that employees present on their profiles or their latest professional networks.

These days, profiles from LinkedIn can be used to conduct network analysis, such as how the employees for a competitor are linked to specialist research companies, new business partners or even their best customers! It is interesting to note that employees are not always very careful with corporate information that should not actually be in the public domain. LinkedIn communities can inform competitors and be a hassle for employers themselves. As such, companies have started to provide disclosure policies to employees on how they can participate in social media and how to comment on professionally related issues.

We have also seen how companies can pull out material from YouTube in order to increase the knowledge of the competition. One automotive company features competitor commercials taken from YouTube as the opening screen of their intelligence portal. This is to help their staff see what their customers watch in different markets, and encourage them to think about how they can position their brands. This is also a way of making market intelligence more visible to the company, to make it an integrated part of everyday business life.

Wikis can be useful as internal platforms for developing shared knowledge and competitor profiles, as people might be more open to providing their own knowledge in this format. The knowledge management aspect of intelligence hopefully has much to gain here.

Social media applications can also play an important role when it comes to analysis. Crowd forecasting is where using social media for market intelligence gets more advanced. It allows you to balance expert perspectives with that of a wider audience for a more balanced view of where a trend is heading. Crowd forecasting is not the easiest to implement, as people will initially need time to get used to the process, but is helpful to go beyond general information ‘shuffling’ and to reach conclusions in more specific and tested ways. It is also a powerful way to enhance the co-creation intelligence process, meaning that people from around the company combine their intellectual capability to conduct analysis.

Companies with more advanced intelligence programs are integrating these applications at the moment. But I believe that the vast majority of companies are still looking at how social media can improve the information collection process. This is quite a hot topic in the “Intelligence Best Practice Benchmarking Workshops” that I am running with companies today.

What precautions should one take while utilizing social media for MI

First, social media platforms are in general not validated sources. The communications can be based on hype or unqualified rumours. What you read may not always be the truth and could even be information that is intentionally misrepresented. You can be misled to think something is going to be a new trend, a real issue or a hot topic, when it is not.

Also, the volume of information is increasing dramatically and needs to be collected, filtered and summarized. In the future, we will see more applications designed to summarize, rate and link information from social media sources so that the material is digested before it is analyzed by a person. But one must keep in mind that these sources are complementary to, not replacements for, high quality sources such as industry experts, professors and think tanks staffed with PhDs.

At the end of the day, you must also be able to wade through the rumours and disinformation, and decipher what is useful information for market intelligence. This is an area for worry for MI managers.

What new developments do you think will benefit market intelligence

There are tools that help structure, sort, filter and analyze the information from social media. One example is blog rating websites and we expect to see more ‘self-policing’ communities or filtering mechanisms.

Social media techniques will be used more and more for internal corporate processes. For example, wikis will be used to communicate and share information as an internal application within the organization or a network of partner companies.

In the future, there will be more interconnections between internal systems. Corporate intelligence portals could be integrated with customer relationship management systems, so you can track customers who change jobs or companies that recruit employees to manage a completely new application area. This might be indicative of business opportunities for your organization.

In many ways, social media has made market intelligence more accessible, if you know where to look and how to integrate it into your own intelligence process.

This article and others from GIA’s World Class Market Intelligence practice can be found at www.globalintelligence.com/insights-analysis/bulletins/568//

Why? Because social media users seek genuine communication, not marketing spin. Nowhere is that more apparent than on social networking sites like Facebook. To make the most out of your efforts to market with social media, you’d do well to get some advice from a marketing firm or, at the very least, read a few tips on how to use these sites.

Using Facebook and Other Social Networking Sites for Marketing

According to O’Reilly Media, Facebook demographics have shifted. Once thought of as an online hangout for high school kids and university students, it is now increasingly the networking site of choice for older groups.

In January, 2009, O’Reilly released its 2009 Facebook Demographics and Statistics report. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is users aged 35 to 54. The growth in this demographic is off the charts – 276% in the last 6 months of 2008.

Users aged 55 and over are also discovering Facebook. This demographic jumped by 194% in the same time period. The younger crowd is still there though. The number of 25 to 34-year-olds using Facebook doubles about every six months.

Clearly, there are abundant marketing opportunities here. But you need to know how to approach your audience right.

Social Media Marketing is All About the Soft Sell

To start marketing on Facebook, create page for your business. Once you have established this page, you can build a list of fans. Fans can follow your business and receive updates whenever you add something to your page. The key is to add information of value so people don’t feel they’re being given a hard sell.

Use notes to tell people about upcoming trade shows or conferences you will be attending. Use the mini-feed to keep people connected to your blog. You can talk about new and exciting things in your company, without sounding like you’re selling.

Keep it interesting with photos and video clips. Not only will you promote your company, you will give your business real personality, and allow visitors to see the people behind the company name.

Create a group if you really want to personalize your contact with users. People join groups with specific interests, and moderating a group can help you reach a specific audience. Keep in mind that the group is an entity unto itself, and not a page about your business so it needs to be handled accordingly. Messages sent to the group are delivered directly to member’s Inboxes, so ensure that what you are sharing is of real value to people.

Keeping Up with Social Media Marketing

Herein lies the real challenge with social media marketing – upkeep. You cannot let your page get stale. But between writing blog posts, moderating a group, managing RSS feeds and just keeping up with the communication you generate, social media marketing can be very labour-intensive.

If you need help planning or managing your social media marketing strategy, a training course or online marketing consultant can help.

And remember, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. If you don’t handle your social media marketing right from the beginning, you could end up doing more harm than good. Take the time to learn how to do it right, so you can reap the benefits for a long time to come.