Forrester’s excellent new report, “Five Ways Interactive Marketers Should Use Social Data,” is a must read for brands interesting in effectively integrating social media intelligence into their organization. Translating social intelligence into action is pehaps the largest impediment to widespread enterprise adoption of social media. But we’re working hard to change that.

One item that caught our eye — and is dear to our heart — was this:

Most listening platforms are ill-equipped to inform marketing strategy. While many listening vendors promote their ability to assist marketers, most simply don’t know how to translate social data into effective marketing programs. In fact, we found that just two of the nine best-in-class vendors in our most recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation of listening platforms were able to provide deep strategic marketing insight.

The full report is here.

How Converseon Turns Social Data into Action

As an increasing number of brands are finding, simply having social data pumping through a dashboard to a few analysts simply cannot drive the real value of social intelligence across the organization for competitive advantage. The next generation of social intelligence is fusing deep levels of intelligence with business knowledge and experience to unearth those game-changing insights and get them deeply embedded into the parts of the organization that can take action on them. That is why we say social intelligence is increasingly becoming the impetus for redesigning business processes.

So how does Converseon so effectively translate listening into effective marketing programs?  WIth five not-so-secret ingredients:

1. Providing more intelligent data. The ability to apply human intelligence to coding and analyzing conversations gets to better, more accurate levels of sentiment and other advanced metadata, such as emotion. It also untangles sarcasm, slang and more to get to insights not obvious to machines alone — nor to brand analysts who are often stuck trying to analyze inaccurate and spammy data. Better data + better social intelligence = better insights. It’s a simple but far too overlooked equation.
2. Offering deeper, expert analysis. Converseon’s services teams create a 360 degree view of this intelligent data. Social intelligence has many dimensions and has to be analyzed as such. Our team includes linguists, cultural anthropologists, market researchers, media folks, PR specialists, social media strategists and more. They are all evaluating the intelligence for deeper meanings beyond the obvious; for insights that are transformative and for practical ways companies can take action on the data.Further, this analysis isn’t just academic. It’s grounded in expertise from some of our leading experts who have actually executed within big, complex organizations and understand the associated challenges with that. In short, it’s deep analysis, filtered through strong practicality.
3. Aligning social to business KPIs. Where social listening can fall flat is by listening in the abstract. We help ensure translation to action by first determining business and marketing/communication goals/metrics and then aligning our listening to meet those goals. This is “listening with purpose.” And given our ability to custom configure metrics and intelligence to specific brands, the data is aligned specifically to the organization. We don’t do abstractions.
4. Providing associated frameworks and consulting. This is where management consulting and social intelligence meet: helping brands make social intelligence work within the enterprise by reducing frictions, aligning processes and creating enabling capabilities so that it can be acted on. This includes governance/policy, training, process redesign, integration with other analytics and systems, and more.We have created over the last decade — yes, decade — the most comprehensive database of precise best practices and metrics so that brands can see exactly where they stand in their readiness to be effective in social, and where they stand in context to competitors and others in the industry within the conversation. Context matters. Simply looking at data through a dashboard for particular brand or company is like looking at the world through a straw. It lacks the larger perspective required for intelligent action. We provide that.
5. Having experience and engagement services. We have provided social media engagement services for 10 years — since 2001. We haven’t just followed best practices in engagement; we’ve helped create them. We’ve pioneered many new approaches and strategies. We’ve collected awards and recognitions, including best Social Media Agency (SAMMY). Our team lives and breathes social. So while we don’t have to do engagement services for brands using our social intelligence, our intrinsic knowledge of social helps us filter our insights and recommendations through that filter. We think it is fair to say that no other social intelligence capability in the market has the depth and longevity of social consulting and engagement services.

And experience matters:  Interestingly, Neilsen was the other company cited, and it also has an experienced pedigree going back to its Buzzmetrics days. We were pioneers in the early days of social together, and that is paying off.

We’re working even harder to advancing our leadership here of this category by advancing our services/consulting, increasing our data intelligence and by creating new applications that can be effectively used by marketing organizations to better understand, act, manage and drive results from social intelligence.

We thank Forrester for bringing attention to this issue, and to why we believe the market is in high demand for next generation listening solutions that transcend just monitoring dashboards.