by The abundance of social media data has created an opportunity for businesses to develop a deeper than ever understanding of their customers, competitors, and markets. With the huge volume of conversations taking place online every single day it’s now possible to uncover powerful consumer insights, in real time, on virtually any topic imaginable.
But this is still a nascent discipline, so how do you know whether your business is making the best use of social intelligence? Are you lagging behind competitors, or leading the pack? Maybe your entire industry is out of step with those already adopting best practice in this space, but it’s difficult to get a clear understanding of where exactly your organization sits on the spectrum.
That’s why we built the Social Intelligence Maturity Model.
This model looks at a range of factors relating to how your business is already using social data and consumer insights and gives you a score that indicates how advanced your social intelligence implementation is.
You can then use this information to understand whether your organization is at risk of falling behind competitors who may be further along this path, or if you’re already performing well and can use this to your advantage.
How the Model Works
Based on your responses to a short online assessment, the Social Intelligence Maturity Model will place you into one of three categories:
- Exploring: Still in the early stages of social intelligence adoption, trying out different use cases within your business.
- Competing: Routinely using social data to identify consumer insights, with processes and frameworks in place, but still room for more advanced application of the technology in your organization.
- Disrupting: Leading the pack with sophisticated and innovative applications of social intelligence across multiple areas of your business.
The category your business is placed in will depend on the overall score which is calculated from the responses you give to the model’s assessment questions. These questions have been carefully designed by a team of market research, social data, and consumer insights industry experts to accurately assess how an organization is using social intelligence.
There are nine questions in total, covering three pillars of social intelligence maturity:
1) Application: which common social intelligence use cases a business is already using social intelligence for, if at all.
2) Adoption: how widely used social intelligence is across the organization’s different teams, and how many employees are working on it.
3) Execution: how sophisticated the application of social intelligence is within an organization, and how well consumer insights are used to benefit the business.
The assessment can be taken online and completed in a few minutes, although before you start it’s a good idea to make sure you have a full understanding of how social listening/intelligence is used in your business. If possible, have somebody with a comprehensive knowledge of your social listening program participate so they will be able to answer all of the questions accurately and in detail, to ensure the model has the best information to work with.
Some example questions from the assessment include:
- For your business, what percent of markets / business regions are included and involved with the social listening or intelligence platform, relative to total markets served?
- Which of the 17 sources and data types do you track (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, Reddit, Tik Tok, Twitch, Naver, Kakao, Vkontakte, Sina Weibo, WeChat, Red, Taobao, Youku, Douyin)
- How do you share AI/CI within your organization?
Rather than simply looking at an overall score based on question responses, the model takes into account how a business performs across each of the three pillars. This can tell us different things about a businesses Social Intelligence Maturity, and the recommendations for how to proceed will depend on not just the overall score, but the individual performance within each pillar.
For example, a business might have good Application and Execution scores, but low Adoption. A likely explanation for this is that a small core team (or even individual) is using social intelligence in a sophisticated way, but is working in a silo within the organization. The opportunity, therefore, is for that core team to spread its expertise more widely across the business so that other teams, which might not even be aware of social intelligence, can take advantage of the resource.
What is the Social Intelligence Maturity Model for?
We built the model to help both our existing customers and those who might not yet be working with us or any other social intelligence vendor. For our existing customers, it helps them to understand where they are in their journey and what they need to do to improve their use of social data, while those who are not yet using social intelligence are able to use the model to identify a starting point where they can begin to build out their capability in the most effective way.
Get Your Social Maturity Score Today!
The first step is simple! Just click here to start the assessment in your browser, and you’ll be presented with a series of nine questions that should only take a few minutes to complete. We recommend you answer the questions with somebody who is very familiar with your organization’s use of social listening tools.
Once you’ve completed the assessment, you’ll be given your Social Intelligence Maturity Score, and we’ll email you some recommendations that are tailored to your results. If you’d like to speak to one of our social data experts about next steps after that, we’ll be happy to help.
