Business social intelligence is a relatively new strategic paradigm that most successful companies are now turning their attention to. The fact that social media has come to stay is no longer news. Philip Kotler, a marketing icon years ago predicted that business social intelligence would be the backbone that would hold the success of every organization.
In this new business era, for a sustainable strategy to be developed, useful insight must be obtained from the social interaction of an entity. Lots of information about a company is imbedded in social media. Strategic intelligence is easily gathered by analysing what people are discussing about a company and its products in various social media platform.
Google would not have spent the kind of money it spent to buy wildfire, a social media and web intelligence company.
When you look at the business landscape in modern era, you will notice a pattern where people do businesses with companies according to the popularity of that company. I have seen people seeking friends’ opinion about a company and its product on a social media website before making a decision to buy or not to buy a product that they actually needed.
This tells the whole story that people are now becoming more social animal as the day rolls bye. For your strategy to have the right focus and direction, it should be laid on the intelligence and information that has been gathered through business social intelligence.
One of the most common ways of gathering this business social intelligence is to launch a survey on selected social media platforms. This is either paid survey or free survey. The aim is to get an idea of what people are saying about a company. Through this avenue, useful business insight is gained about what customers really want from a business.
Listening to the conversation that is going on about a company online is not enough, relevant action must be taken to implement necessary course of actions that will help the organization realise its intended objectives. Companies now deploy specialised software and experts to analyse what has been said and then take action.
Business social intelligence is similar to online brand management where management employ the service of brand management companies to automatically feed any discussion that is going on over the web about a company. The only difference is that the brand management companies do not offer the extra service of proffering useful suggestions that would help an enterprise make strategic business analysis.
If the strategy that is being developed and soon to be implemented in your company does not factor in the effects of social media and business social intelligence, this is the right time to have a rethink before it is too late.
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