Social Listening for US Brands—Deriving Actionable Insights from Conversations

© 2016 eMarketer Inc.
Social Listening for US Brands:
Deriving Actionable Insights from
Conversations
Jillian Ryan
Analyst
March 24, 2016
Made possible by

What Is Social Listening?

Listening is part of the larger social conversation
 Social media exchanges
are part of a dialogue—a
“push” and a “pull”
 Brands are comfortable and
familiar with the push
mechanism: marketing
 The pull element, listening,
can add value through
insights extracted from
social conversations

Monitoring owned social channels
 Social monitoring is passive
 Brands track conversations
that directly reference a
brand, either with a tag or on
owned channels

Inbound social interactions are plentiful
 Brands see a
higher ratio of
interactions on
Instagram and
Pinterest
 Brands see
minimal
engagement
ratios on Twitter

Listening broadens the umbrella
 Unlike monitoring, social
listening requires intent
 Brands must expand beyond
owned properties and seek
out relevant social
conversations
Image Source: http://www.twigsdesigngroup.com/

The experts define social listening:
“Social listening is looking
for conversations
happening outside of
owned channels. You
can mine all of that
data on social
networks and blogs
for actionable
insights and
information.”
—James Cooper, Director,
Social Intelligence, ICUC
“Social listening offers a
comprehensive view of
interactions outside
what brands see by
monitoring to find
conversations beyond
the brand and uncover
what the world thinks broadly
about your products, industry
and competitors.”
—Chelsea Marti, Director, Strategy
and Services, Sprinklr

Is Anybody Listening?

Two 2015 surveys indicated that half of
marketers used social listening
49%
used social insights
to make informed
decisions
(Source: Altimeter Group, Q2 2015)
49%
used social listening
to understand
customers,
prospects and
markets
(Source: CMO Council, Q4 2015)

Brands have
doubts about
social listening’s
effectiveness

Across seven
industries,
CEOs
worldwide say
social
listening fails
to generate
the greatest
stakeholder
return

Brands are
also unsure
how
actionable
social data is

Social listening data becomes actionable when it
answers a specific question
“Instead of saying, ‘Tell me everything every time
the word X appears on any social networks,’
companies who employ social
listening need to be more micro in
their ask.”
—Erik Huddleston, CEO, TrendKite

Even with
this, social
listening
challenges
remain

Sifting through the noise of conversations and
operationalizing the data are also key struggles
“Brands can easily be overwhelmed by
the volume of conversations on social
media. How do you start to even decipher and
prioritize and decide what actually is influential
and make decisions?”
—Andrew Caravella, VP, Marketing, Sprout Social

9 Use Cases for Social
Listening

1. Optimizing Social
Messaging and Advertising

Using social data in
marketing

Listening can help optimize marketing messages
“You can’t perform good marketing if you
don’t know your customers, if you don’t listen
to how they react to all of your marketing.
And the way that you connect the dots really depends
on the maturity of the brand. The aim should be to
use social data in real time to adjust
marketing investments.”
—Loic Moisand, CEO, Synthesio

MasterCard optimizes messaging through social
listening
“It was beneficial to understand
how our messages were being
received and listen to how
refinements performed better.
Based on the information
we were hearing online,
we had a more positive
product launch.”
—Marcy Cohen, VP, Digital
Communications, MasterCard

2. Real-Time Marketing

The real-time reality of social media:
58% of US marketers responded to timely trends,
news and events on social media. (Source: Wayin, June 2015)
49% of US marketers believed real-time responses
should occur within minutes; 26% said seconds.
US marketers used real-time marketing tactics to
form customer relationships (56%), promote events
(55%) and increase engagement and reach (49%).

Allstate uses social listening in real time
“We’re always listening for important ‘first moments’ that
Allstate can celebrate with our social community. We’ll
analyze the conversations and use real-time
marketing to join in the broader cultural
moments while they’re happening.”
—Lizzie Schreier, Director, Digital Engagement, Allstate

3. Enabling Sales via
Social Selling

Brands can comb conversations to find buying cues
“Over the past few years, the notion of
social selling has emerged. Brands
are using social listening to
identify product-applicable
purchase signals, like, ‘I want,’ ‘I
am going to buy,’ ‘I need to buy,” etc.
They are also digging into buyer
targeting.”
—James Cooper, Director, Social
Intelligence, ICUC

Social cues are paired with CRM data for more
targeted selling
“Business-to-business companies are more
innovative in the ways they employ it and
layer it with third-party data. Their use cases,
especially on the sales side, are more interesting and
have a deeper business impact level. With B2B it is
less about your brand and more about your category
or industry.”
—Amber Naslund, SVP, Marketing, and Chief Evangelist,
Sysomos

Century 21 does regional sales enablement
through social listening
“We’re looking for these consumer triggers by
putting social listening’s toolset in the
hands of our affiliated real estate
sales professionals, who are on the ground
transacting the business. Conversations on
social can identify sales
opportunities.”
—Matt Gentile, Director, Social Media, Century 21
[Editor’s Note: Gentile has since become managing director at
IMG Digital Group.]

4. Influencer and Advocate
Targeting Through Personalization

The importance of personalization and social:
Half of marketing executives in North America
believe that personalized strategies are critical to
realizing greater revenue and profitability from
customer engagement. (Source: CMO Council, Q4 2015)
39% of marketers worldwide used Facebook ‘likes,’
Twitter follows and other social activity as historical
customer data for personalization. (Source: VB Insight, June 2015)

Starwood Resorts uses social listening for
loyalty program personalization
“We use social listening coupled
with the robust targeting
capabilities that the social
media channels have to
identity key influencers that are
talking about the program and
personalize our message to them to
grow the voice of SPG 100.”
—Keri La Ra, Director, Global Social Media
Strategy and Digital Compliance, Starwood
Hotels and Resorts Worldwide

5. Customer Service

Response time is key for brands …
 75% of US internet
users use social
media to obtain
customer service
 Nearly 54%
expected to receive
a response from a
company within an
hour

… but companies aren’t meeting user expectations
 Education was the
industry with the fastest
response time: 8.5 hours
 Retail brands were the
most responsive overall,
replying to 21.7% of
customer social
interactions

Bad social customer service is bad business
“There is no return on ignoring customers.
In fact, that’s a negative return, so we need
social listening to find those conversations.
Plus, the cost of service for social customer support is
generally much lower than a call center.”
—Drew Neisser, Founder and CEO, Renegade LLC

Starwood Resorts has a global social listening
team scanning the web in 11 languages
“A few weeks ago a guest tweeted
that he forgot his belt at home.
To surprise and engage him,
we presented him with a belt
at check-in.”
—Michael English, SVP, Customer Contact
Centers and Electronic Distribution, Starwood
Hotels and Resorts Worldwide

6. Crisis and Reputation
Management

Social listening allows brands to see a mounting
crisis before it reaches a tipping point
“With social listening there are ways to
control and/or influence the origination
point.”
—Tim Hayden, VP, Marketing, Zignal Labs

Southwest Airlines uses social listening as an
early alert system
“In late 2015, we had a plane in Nashville
veer off of the taxiway after a safe landing.
Before our operational folks could get a
Southwest employee out to assess the
situation and damage, our social
listening team was able to show
them pictures that were coming
through customers on social media
who were sharing content.”
—Ashley Mainz, Social Business Manager,
Southwest Airlines

7. The New Focus Group

There are many advantages to doing social
listening for focus groups
“Focus groups are
dead. Brands can
glean product insights
out of social. The
unique psychographics
from social provides a
richer understanding of who
your customers are and
what they want.”
—Erik Huddleston, CEO,
TrendKite
“Focus groups are time
intensive, slow and
expensive. With social,
you can get all of
those insights from a
much broader
population almost in
real time, at a fraction
of the cost.”
—Brandon Andersen, Director of
Marketing, Cision

JetBlue Airways listens to amenities sentiment
“Social listening insights reaffirm theories
that we’ve had about our service
amenities, but also challenges and tests other
business strategies that might not be working.”
—Morgan Johnston, Manager, Corporate Communications,
JetBlue Airways

8. Benchmarking Competitors
and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against competitors is a healthy
success measure
The bigger the
company, the more
important to
understand what
competitors are
doing and how
users are talking
about them

Social listening
allows brands to
uncover what their
competitors are
doing, how they are
being received and
what the industry as
a whole looks like
from the social
sector
“Profiling conversations about
your competitors and their
products at a fine-grained level
with social listening can
help brands benchmark
areas where they have
made improvements or
where they have lost
ground in specific areas.”
—Mick Conroy, Head of Insights, ICUC
London (formerly Tempero)

Nissan uses social listening to track sentiment
around the auto industry
“This provides very clear brand
health mapping, so Nissan
knows in real time how they are
performing.”
—Loic Moisand, CEO, Synthesio
[Editor’s Note: Nissan is a Synthesio client.]

9. Guiding Rebranding

Social media is a testing ground for rebrands
“Through listening, companies can understand
what people are saying about a rebrand as
it happens, and then adjust any message.
Brands can also measure the impact and the noise
around a rebrand.”
—Matt Cordaro, Director, Customer Success, Hootsuite

3M Tracks reception of newly launched brand
identity
“From listening, we’re seeing from social
conversation based on public social data that
since the rebranding, 3M is actually
perceived as more science-driven, consistent
and disruptive. Our new branding reflects how people
perceive 3M.”
—Amy Lamparske, Head of Global Social Media, 3M

The Technology Behind
Social Listening: Today
and Tomorrow

Technology is the backbone of a social listening
strategy
 Platforms are based on text
analytics with a crawler
capability that brings in
data and identifies
instances of those
keywords
 Traditionally, this is done
through data science layers
on top of APIs and
custom-built algorithms

Finding the
right tool is a
big challenge
for brands

Technology hurdles remain
 Sentiment
inaccuracies
 The human
element vs.
automation
 Walled gardens

Plans to invest
more in social
listening are on
the horizon for
many brands

Retailers are a
specific business
category
planning to
implement social
listening
technology in the
future

Future innovations in social listening technology
“Increasingly, people are
posting visual content, and
text-based signals such as
tags, descriptions,
captions and so on won’t
help a brand recognize
logos and images. So
much visually rich
content is being
missed.”
—James Cooper, Director,
Social Intelligence, ICUC
“The biggest thing
in 2016 is the
emergence of
machine learning
and deep learning
techniques. Social
listening is really going
to start to benefit from
those capabilities.”
—Mick Conroy, Head of
Insights, ICUC

Social Listening Trends: A Review
 There remains confusion about social listening’s value and
definition
 Brands must have intent, with a clear question they want
to answer before they can seek relevant conversations
 Use cases are varied, but with the right filters in place,
brands can improve their marketing and learn from
customer feedback
 The technology behind social listening is the backbone of
any strategy
 The future holds more adoption and advances in machine
learning

Making Sense Of It All
Gain a deeper understanding of customers and prospects to
drive more targeted, efficient interactions.
Monetizing Dynamic Interaction
Execute impactful, social-engagement strategies that lead
directly to bottom-line results.
Responsive Engagement
Monitor social channels and discover the moments that
influence their decisions to engage relevantly in real time.
The Challenges We See
Understanding You
Today our customers are constantly
faced with new challenges and
business needs where turning
insights into action has become
more important than ever before.

Who is Sysomos?
Sysomos is the world’s largest independent
social media intelligence platform.
We help over 1,400 companies -
including 80% of the world’s most
valuable brands and 90% of the
Global Top 250 PR Firms –
understand and interact on the social
web and use real-time social data to
build better and smarter businesses.

What Makes Sysomos Different?
Social technology solutions are not all the same.
Sysomos isn’t just a listening tool. It’s a strategic set of applications that
supports the full spectrum of advanced social analytics & management needs.
Our Data Scientists and Ph.D.’s are at the center
of our product developments and our desire to move
our industry from descriptive to predictive analytics.
Processing vast quantities of unstructured data
and providing it to you in a digestible way is one of our
defining traits, and rivals some of the largest tech and
big data companies in the world.
Sysomos is a precision platform of
strategically assembled applications for social
research, analytics, and management - not a
catch-all marketing suite.
Sysomos is built on one of the most advanced
infrastructure designs, including 3-tier data
architecture and the use of leading virtualization
technologies for delivery of lightning-fast results.
We’ll never leave you on your own. Our Social
Media Specialists are our hands-on experts and
an incredibly valuable resource for you.

• Delivers better together user experience by
bringing together MAP, Heartbeat, Optimize &
Influence
• Single sign-on across all SET products,
enhancing ease of use and productivity
• Unified interface for all SET products
• Powerful integration across the products with
ability to share data sets (Twitter ID lists)
Find out more at sysomos.com/products/set
Integrated Social Platform

In March 2016,
Sysomos was awarded
Frost & Sullivan’s
Product Line Strategy
Leadership Award
for excellence and innovation
in advanced analytics
Find out more at: sysomos.com/emarketer
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Jillian Ryan
Social Listening for US Brands:
Deriving Actionable Insights
from Conversations
 Influencer Marketing for US Brands: The Platforms to Watch,
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 US Social Trends for 2016: eMarketer Predictions for Video,
Viewability, Buy Buttons, Messaging and More
 Worldwide Social Network Users: eMarketer’s Updated
Estimates for 2015
 The Evolution of Real-Time Marketing: What Marketers Are
Thinking—and Doing—Now
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Social Listening for US Brands—Deriving Actionable Insights from Conversations

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