Building "Social" Into the Fabric Your Business

In today’s new age of communication, incorporating “being social” into the fabric of how you listen and interact with your customers is absolutely necessary. Everyday online there are tens of millions of people expressing what they want, need, how they feel, what they intend to do and how they are going to do it. The way people are communicating is changing and companies that are receptive to that, are embracing those conversations, turning them into valuable opportunities of positive brand interactions.

It all begins with the concept of listening. By utilizing the right tools, companies have the ability to take a set of unstructured data and extract dozens of things like people, places, geography and events, to find out where conversation is taking place, who is participating, the words being used, and what it all means.  It’s figuring out what you know about your customers to identify what they need and what’s important to them. Taking those insights and implementing meaningful, actionable strategies to respond to those people in real time, makes it worth the effort. It goes beyond listening to understanding and from understanding to insight.

If companies can change the way they listen, understand, and respond, they can change the way they build advocacy around their brand.  

Nearly 60% of impressions about brands are developed before ever making a purchase. - Karen Quintos, Dell CMO 

Identifying where conversations are taking place and getting involved to create positive connections will spread positive brand awareness and advocacy across the social web.  It’s no longer a one way monologue, but rather a dialogue that allows you to give the empowered social consumer what they want, when they need it.