Rob Key is CEO/Founder of Converseon. He was the former head of the Innovations Group at a division of Young & Rubicam and member of the WPP.com board. Rob founded Converseon in 2001. It is a full service strategic social consultancy that provides the listening, organizational design and activation services to help large brands harness the value of social media across the enterprise.
Listening is developing very quickly. Where do you see it going in the next few years?
We see growth in social intelligence. We’re actually trying to have the industry try to deliniate between conversation monitoring and conversation mining, which we think are different animals. Conversation monitoring is simply monitoring for key words that show what people are saying about you right now. Mining and social intelligence are putting people into the data to help answer key fundamental business questions that simple monitoring solutions can’t provide.
We’ve seen many companies over this past year who were doing the basic monitoring are now asking themselves a few basic questions:
- How do I take this intelligence to actually move my business to meet objectives?
- How do we infuse this across the organization so that it can be acted on?
- How do we organize our brand around the social intelligence?
What we are finding is that as the social people and social intelligence are flowing through the organization, companies are really recognizing that they aren’t organized to react quickly enough to the data to make an impact. So social intelligence is rapidly morphing into business process redesign.
At Converseon, the way we’ve handled this is by building a management consulting firm, led by Chris Boudreaux formerly of Accenture, to create overarching frameworks within organizations to help social intelligence and media have a single uniform systematic approach that cuts across the organization. This affects things like governance, policy and training. We were recently were noted by Forrester as a leader in the Social Listening category in the Forrester Wave.
So we’ve actually found social intelligence as a foundation for us. We’re now competing in business transfomation with companies like McKinsey who has a partnership with Nielsen, for example, and other more traditional management consultants. That is a significant part of our business going forward because that is the only way, at the end of the day, that social intelligence can really boom a business, by helping to transform businesses from the inside out to organize around this intelligence.
What would you say is the mindset a brand needs to harbor before they can effectively utilize social intelligence?
They have to first understand that conversation mining and social intelligence can actually impact business outcomes, things that keep the C-suite up at night. Things like product development, R&D, improving services, customer care, and compliance. It doesn’t come naturally for some senior executives to understand that this thing called social intelligence and social media can help meet those business goals that are KPIs that govern the entire business.
So the first place we start with is understanding what a business is trying to achieve. Everybody has KPIs within the organization. For example, customer care might measure performance by first call resolution or reduction in call center costs. Once we understand what the business is trying to achieve, we then configure the social intelligence and metrics backwards to fulfill those business objectives.
There isn’t a lot of recognition that the power of social media and inteligence can drive ongoing sustainable competitive advantage in the market. What often happens is companies have the mindset that they have to do ‘this listening/monitoring thing.’ This is really just Listening 1.0. You know, just turning on the dashboard and looking at the general conversation that people are having about us. To me, that was good for the time but now you need to mature that to the next level. These are the deeper business conversations that are starting to happen.
The mindset needs to be: How do we get serious about this?; How do we actually infuse this into the enterprise?; and How do we drive a real business value? A surprising large number of companies are coming to that recognition. We’re seeing that happen across the board in pharma, financial services, CPG, B2B, everywhere. The first generation is over, been there done that. Now the second generation is much more interesting, more profound, and more powerful.
You mentioned pharma. How do you think brands in their situation, being a highly regulated industry, fit into listening and word of mouth marketing?
I think everybody is sitting at the edge of their seats for the FDA to come out with more guidelines around all of this, but I don’t think the FDA will come out with that level of clarity for them. What we do know is that there are things that are pretty safe for pharma to do around issues as opposed to talking product.
On the listening side, one of the key areas is adverse impact reporting and knowing what that means within the company. How is that handled in an effective way within internal structures and policies. That’s an area where we spend a lot of time working with our clients to help make sure they’re protected and have complete guidelines around this. But also, pharma and financial services are starting to use conversation mining and social intelligence from a compliance standpoint.
Converseon is proud to be the only vendor in the Forrester Wave that has full Twitter fire hose access. We were able to negotiate that partnership about a month ago. This data has become incredibly important with 160 million users and Twitter being the heartbeat of the social conversation. Most people don’t realize that through the regular APIs, they’re getting between 5 and 10 percent, maybe 20 percent on a good day of the overall Twitter conversation. We have 100 percent. That’s critical for regulated industries to understand compliance about how they can ensure employees are keeping within the bounds of policy and regulation. This is absolutely essential from an insurance, pharma and financial services standpoint.
On our blog, we recently published an article that spells all this out in much finer detail about why Twitter fire hose is essential in regulated environments.
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