data

Are You Listening In The Right Place ?

No matter what industry / which stage of the business you are in, the classic 5W+1H (Who/What/Where/When/Why/How) questions apply to every step of the way. Before we continue, I am going to assume you already know the “Why“, if not, please go back to your business plan and find out why you started the business in the first place.

O.K., so here we go;

Who – you want to know who are/were your customers and who will most likely be your advocates for the products/services you are offering. Have they always like it, or been referred by their family/friends to try it, or they are the gold mine — meaning they are haters-turned-lovers?

What — you want to know what people are mostly talking about; is it you as business owners, the products/services you offer, or they are talking with/about your competitors? What is the context, i.e. sentiment analysis?

Where — you know you have to start somewhere, you know you have to listen to your customers and clients and you know you have to do something if they say good/not so good thing about your business. The question is, where (which channel)? You should tailor your message to different channels depends on your market; only 13% of people online are on Twitter, most people won’t like/join Facebook Fan pages if asked to access their and their friends’ personal information, can be overwhelming sometimes, Tamara Littleton, CEO of eModeration, has a great post here which gives the reasons why Ten is the magic number.

When — this is not about the time of day, it is about when the event occurs that triggers people to talk. Were they inquiring before making the decision? Did they have great experience and simply want to spread the words or they had unbearable encounter that maybe a better solution can be offered? Can you avert the crisis and turn into opportunity?

And all the above goes back to the question of WHY, so does the cycle starts all over again. WHY they want to talk about you and to continue the conversation? WHY they buy your products/services and keep buying more? WHY they prefer to talk on specific channels? WHY they decide to talk at that moment?

So you ask, how do I start this listening? What tools can I use? Tool is just tool; you need a human mind to interpret the data and information you have collected. But if you insist to know, given the cost of accessing legacy platforms providers (Radian6, Sysomos just to name a few) creates barrier for small business owners, , I’d say DIY by using Google Alert and/or Social Mention; the brilliant Jay Baer has great resource here , or a recent article from MarketingProfs “5 Free & Easy-to-Use Listening Tools for Monitoring Social Media” can also help you.

Here are some sobering numbers about the real use of social media, from @jasonfalls. EVERYONE should read this http://izmy.us/uF1 . The DIY tools are good enough until your brand gets about 300 mentions per month, and then you’ll want some more analytics.

So, are you listening? In the right place ??

IBM Has Just Wrote The Elevator Speech For Me

My head is spinning, in a good way. Given the way how internet and technology have evolved, everybody is overwhelmed by data and information overload, need to tackle this critical issue quickly, staffed with IT guys, however not much talk on how Information Professionals play the important roles in this whole process. Then I heard the IBM commercial on the radio, even though it’s still selling the system to midsized businesses, what it does is “basically turn data into new intelligence, uncover insight and take action, set you apart and outsmart competitor“. Bingo !!

A recent McK Quarterly article “The Internet of Things” mentioned by putting the internet of things to work, we monitor the behavior of persons, things, or data through space and time with all the information and analysis; another special report from The Economist touched on managing information “Data, data everywhere” discloses the shock (maybe not surprised?) fact : the business of information management — helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data — is growing by leaps and bounds. In recent years Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics. This industry is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole.

Let’s say you have all the infrastructure, i.e. technology, software, and IT staff in place, but where is that smart trend spotter or dot connector who can turn all these beautiful information into something that’s meaningful and actionable to make impact to the bottom line? We can teach people very easily where to look for these tools and how to use them, the trendspotters/dotconnetors are people who are intuitive, always on the hunt to satisfy their curiosity. I really like this website, Information Is Beautiful, the question is then, how do you optimize them to have long lasting, sustainable results?

My head is spinning fast and furious, happily. You can have all the data and information available, and at the end of day you still need someone to press the button.

IBM Has Just Wrote The Elevator Speech For Me

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Are You Listening In The Right Place ?

IBM Has Just Wrote The Elevator Speech For Me

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