The Importance of Measuring Social Business to Fuel the Customer Experience

This is a cross post from @CMS Wire posted here.

Social business is about connecting users, partners and customers through purposeful conversation and collaboration and most importantly; it’s about integrating or weaving social media into our existing business functions to help build a more collaborative infrastructure.

Social Business Driving Engagement

While often hard to measure, social business has productivity impacts that can be felt by IT, Sales, HR and many other areas in the organization — see Infographic (reg required) — but the real impact, and where the ROI can be best shown, is the increased engagement your internal and external audiences have with the communications initiatives that you invest in.

The key to measuring this increased engagement is ensuring you have the right tools and strategies in place to help monitor, react and respond to these initiatives in real time.

By analyzing real-time visitor and social interaction information (both inside and outside the firewall), organizations can help to optimize online initiatives and identify actionable trends within their visitor base, and capture user events that are specific to business goals.

The Impact of Social Analytics

The power in using Social Analytics is enabling the business to use the data to make recommendations to the business about how things are working, or not, and how they can be improved upon, both for your users and your customers.

Social analytics, from an external view, provides a window into things like how people perceive your brand and how they are responding to your corporate products, services, and marketing messages.

Internally, social analytics provides a window into things like; what is the most engaging content on my intranet; how many people are commenting on our blogs; what the tone of those comments are and who the most influential people in my community are.

Social Analytics can become the vehicle that helps your business translate data into insights. It can help improve your customer experience by writing better targeted content, can provide sentiment analysis, create higher converting sites and reshape a user’s site navigation to improve the overall online experience — just to name a few!

For a concise summary of cross-department benefits, download the Infographic here.