subject: The Importance Of Incorporating Social Media Into Business [print this page] Now that more than 75 percent of online Americans are participating in some form of social media through blogs, forums and sites like Facebook and Twitter, companies need to understand what consumers are saying, why they"re saying it and how their dialogue has the potential to impact business.
As part of its 2008 North American Technographics Survey, Forrester Research found that 37 percent of U.S. online adults are "critics" who contribute to online forums, post product reviews or comment on blogs. Twenty-one percent are "creators" who develop and upload original content, and 69 percent are "spectators" who read blogs, forums and review sites. Not only do these percentages represent tremendous growth over 2007, but it"s highly anticipated that the 2009 report will reveal even further increases. Witness the effects of Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, CNN, and the Iran protests on the volume of Twitter participation in recent months.
As the chorus of conversations the proliferations of social technologies that enable participation grow, companies must make sense of the new channel for consumer interaction. Organizations need to think less about social media as just "consumer chatter" and more about how to understand, digest and invest in the science behind what consumers are saying- and most importantly, participate with "their" consumers where they have congregated.
How Visible Technologies Can Help
In theory, a brand could turn on RSS feeds or do Google Alerts and monitor real-time search engines in an attempt to read every mention related to their brand, but when you"re dealing with literally hundreds or thousands of unique conversations going on every single day, that task quickly becomes overwhelming. A company would need to have employees manually poring through day and night to find insight and determine what may need to be interacted on. A company like Visible Technologies can help by taking this vast sea of unstructured conversations and through automated layers of collection, ranking and sentimentation, identify key issues and influential conversations for organizations. Once a company has structured data that pinpoint where to focus their efforts, they can then direct those conversations to people in their organization who can best engage in those conversations.
