Part III: Social Intelligence Drives the Shaping of Online Content
The DigitalEYE Media team wants to know: are you content with your content?
“Content is King, Search is Queen and Filters Are Their Offspring,” wrote Raymond Blijd in the January 26, 2011, Intelligent Solutions Blog.
The model suggests that the Web functions as a sort of royal/commercial domain in which content is an irresistible attention-getting, attractive ruling force that pulls in new business. And, therefore, successful conversion of website visitors and members of online communities and social networks into paying customers is the true power behind the throne.
This then would make Social Intelligence gathering the work of automated algorithmic cyber-spatial James Bonds—licensed to distill.
The challenge: those offspring filters – blocking the king’s messages and causing them to go unheard.
Popular filters include friends and family “word of mouth” recommendations and referrals, “thought leader” and “influencer” advocacy, sharing within social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and bookmarking through services like Digg and Reddit.
Smart online consumers on the hunt for value and satisfaction easily tune out advertising, barely disguised sales pitches and other information they consider intrusive, irrelevant or worthless. The proliferation of online filters makes it mandatory for businesses to assert their brands in ways that cause consumers to welcome – not reject – communications from a brand because the messages are compelling, persuasive and easy to share.
Social Intelligence enables marketers to identify effective social content filter strategies that help leverage the filters to a brand’s own benefit.
“Social media content has to be relevant, useful and entertaining to have any impact on audiences, and considering the size of the online audience, connecting to the right people at the right time without getting lost wouldn’t be possible without the kind of feedback provided by social media analytics,” says DigitalEYE Media president Gary Brewer.
According to Brewer, “Social intelligence helps shape social content messaging and drive performance—engagements like clicks, comments, replies, sharing, retweets, mentions. Especially website visits and requests for information…with email addresses included to add to the marketing database. That’s a strategy that can map to the client’s bottom line.”
Know Your Customer’s Interests
The ideas is that when you know what people are saying, what they think and feel and what interests them, you can create content that gets results.
Quality brand marketing content in the form of blogs, social media posts, search-optimized articles and so on has become a driving factor in attracting new customers and building brands.
And it’s Social Intelligence that guides the best investments in various forms of content, according to Sarah Thompson, strategic account director for social data measurement company Networked Insights.
“It can tell you the style of the content, whether it’s video or written words to use in videos,” Thompson blogged. “It can reveal what an audience likes. Social data can also tell you how the consumer wants to engage you on product releases, promotions and contests.”
Martin van der Roest is CEO of Cadence9, provider of a hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) content marketing platform for enabling an organization’s content and social media marketing strategy. The Cadence9 tool includes content management, publishing and engagement measurement functions.
“The social behavior of prospects and customers will vary across industries,” says van der Roest. “Ultimately, though, the organization’s challenge will be to orchestrate a unified marketing and messaging campaign that drives inbound and repeat customer opportunities. What works for a B2C will most likely not fit into a B2B business model. Devising the best approach demands that companies better understand their customers.”
The information contained in online content can only be made relevant if it’s first made intelligible, comprehensible and clear, according to DigitalEYE Media’s Brewer.
Part I: Social Intelligence—BI Meets Social Media Data
