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Sima and Menaka Gopinath, Lead of Social Intelligence and Communities at Ipsos, sit down to discuss the use of social media in social intelligence to help answer business questions.
Opposite Ends of the Spectrum
As the market has matured with social intelligence, there’s a lot of amazing things happening in the social intelligence realm for insights, but it’s not being leveraged as broadly it could be.
On the flip side, the people who are using social listening tools across the board in marketing and digital functions probably could be getting a lot more insight out of it.
The data is already available, but there are so many ways to use it more strategically.
Defining Social Intelligence
This can be many things to many people, but from the perspective of Ipsos, it’s about leveraging the datasets for insights.
From a classic research sense, most clients are using a social listening tool and at the baseline, they are listening to what people are saying about their brand and maybe listening to their core competitive set. From the purposes of Ipsos, this is not necessarily social intelligence, as much as it is social listening, which is still an important aspect of marketing.
How one uses the dataset to address a core set of business objectives from an insights perspective is at the heart of social intelligence.
Social Intelligence and Use Cases
Some of the core areas where a lot of Ipsos’ work is done is in market understanding and category landscape.
Understanding what your category looks like can be a difficult question to answer these days, so what social data can provide from a very consumer-centric perspective is how people are talking about the “need” or the “occasion”. You don’t have to start from the perspective of brands. This is a different way of approaching market landscape work.
Cultural trends and forecasting and foresight against what is bubbling up and what is worth focusing on versus what might just be a flash in the pan is another area where Ipsos is using social intelligence a lot.
Approach in Market Engagement
In the context of market landscape, there are different ways of approach, as Menage explains in a high-level overview.
This is ultimately driven by what consumers are organically saying about these brands in the social conversation.
Imagery is a critical part of the analysis, and video is an emerging area in terms of the technology capabilities for analyzing, but in terms of what is done with it is gaining in importance.
Contextual research is always presented along with custom research to help provide clients with a bigger picture of what the data represents.
