CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH?

Comforting opportunities in uncomfortable truths

Change is challenging.

It’s one of those rare things in life we can all take for granted yet many of us aren’t as good as we’d like at embracing it.

But with every disruption comes the opportunity to innovate. To make the most of a world transformed by mobile, social, intelligent ‘wearables’ and Big Data, every executive, manager, advocate or practitioner needs trusted social ‘intelligence’ at their fingertips.

At Verifeed we’re often surprised by what we learn from social conversations. You may learn something you didn’t know about your customers. You may identify markets you didn’t know you had. You may learn earlier than your competitors what trends are resonating and why. You will find influential believers to amplify positive and profitable outcomes.

But with the good news sometimes comes the bad: Some of those ‘surprises’ may not) be what our clients want to hear.

Maybe all those Tweets, Pins and Posts your team churns out each day simply aren’t resonating with anyone. Maybe your customers are using your product in a way you did not anticipate. Maybe a competitor has seized on a trend you didn’t see coming.

As uncomfortable as it may be to face the negative, think about the cost of not knowing – and worse, not acting fast on what you’ve learned.

There’s thinking…and there’s knowing.

Ever heard of Vegemite? The Australian company was spending millions to market their spread … as a spread. Makes sense, right?

What they didn’t know, until they started monitoring social conversations, was that their customers were NOT using Vegemite as a spread – but instead as an ingredient in a range of recipes: soups, salad dressings, dips, sauces, casseroles, even cake.

It was as if Vegemite was throwing millions of marketing dollars each year into the trash, and lighting a match.

But what they discovered – for a fraction of the price – was that they had a lively, active and engaged community of influential and creative people finding ways to make the Vegemite product better. The company could learn about their customers – what they liked to cook, what their interests were, where they lived, what they cared about. They could start to personalize their messages with targeted customization on social networks, making their ‘believers’ feel special and rewarding them for best recipes and more. The numbers told the story: Vegemite reduced its marketing spend while boosting sales.

The consequence of not knowing is costly. The opportunities in knowing are vast. The value comes from acting strategically on the intelligence unearthed, and then measuring your progress.

One of our big name clients, a large nonprofit, discovered from social conversations how its traditional telemarketing practice was alienating Millenials – and reducing its effectiveness, potentially for a whole generation, in enabling mission success. In one month, more than 3,000 Tweets – amplified to millions of people – were complaining about being called repeatedly by the organization. “They call me more than my friends,” became a meme.

The obvious answer was to simply stop calling Millenials. Well, stop telemarketing altogether. How many people answer their phones anymore?

But ‘acting on the truth’ in this case would mean eliminating, or retraining, a whole department.

Changing the way you do business is hard, perhaps costly, especially for a long established organization.

The Cost of Inaction

But the price of inaction is much steeper: What is the consequence of alienating an entire generation from your mission, product or service?

We unearth clues in the data to transform negatives into positives. How best to communicate with angry customers to turn it around. Our nonprofit client had an opportunity to turn angry people at the end of a phone line into happy iPhone and Android app users.

At Verifeed, we only work with people who can “handle the truth” – that is act on it and use it to measure their progress. Social intelligence is a strategic asset that informs all parts of any business, campaign or organization. Where Verifeed brings value is in translating the intelligence we gather into valuable outcomes.

We work closely with our customers to assure creative, high-impact, and cost-efficient ways to make the intelligence (and your influential believers) work for you. We provide action plans for easy implementation – and the means to track your progress in real time and over time.

It may be that our analysis and patterning of social conversations identifies markets you didn’t know you had, and consumers who want what you provide – they just don’t know you yet.

Millions of women were Tweeting to each other about how to teach their kids about money. Some of them were stay-at-home moms, others were entrepreneurial and executive moms, and others were rural Tea Party ‘home schooling’ advocates. They all wanted their kids to learn about financial responsibility, savings, debt and investing, and they all were struggling with it.

This is exactly the intelligence our customer SavingsSquirrel wanted to know. A new platform for kids to collaborate on using their allowance money for social good, SavingsSquirrel had little more than an educated hypothesis about its addressable market. “We learned about markets we didn’t know we had, in the UK and beyond,” says founder Dave Conley, “and Verifeed could tells us everything we needed to know about each potential customer – they’re interests, challenges, lifestyle, location, even what phrases were resonating and who was influencing opinion and buying decisions”.

SavingsSquirrel squeezed maximum value out of Verifeed by swiftly acting on the intel. Variously it translated the resonating phrases from the most influential social conversations to an effective Google AdWords campaign, and found beta testers and early customers via targeted social outreach to the specific influencers we identified by name and segmented by persona, interest and location.

However comforting – or discomfiting – it is to be ‘in the know’, know that social intelligence can spell the difference between profit and loss, fame and shame. It pays to listen, learn and leverage.