Here’s the final key insight from PR+MKTG Camp East: From Listening to Predicting: Trends in Measuring the Business Impact of Collaboration

A. Measuring Impact:

A major focus at PR+MKTG Camp East was the role of collaboration in executing an integrated engagement strategy.

Intuitively most of us know aligning marketing, PR, customer service and sales should positively influence engagement strategies. But while greater collaboration for its own sake can benefit an organization, its true value (and the greatest challenge) is impacting business performance and objectives.

Many variables can influence the performance of your engagement strategy including:

• Quality of the implementation of your engagement strategy
• Quality of your service/product (the purpose for engagement)
• Company culture (what is the tone have you set to encourage customers to engage, and how so?)
• Target audience (how receptive is the target audience you want to have promote or discuss your product/service)

To better measure collaboration’s direct impact on engagement, we need to better understand how these variables interact with each other and function independently of one another.

Listening tools

And that’s where our brand monitoring and listening tools come in. They are the first step in the analytical process of determining the interplay of engagement and collaboration.

Listening is a critical component of any engagement strategy. Companies like Radian6, Alterian and PR Newswire are investing in social media analytics tools to understand efforts to bring customers into the conversation. They also serve to help companies follow collaboration’s impact on enhancing brand/reputation, increasing sales and improving the customer experience.

Consider metrics like sentiment, content, influence and willingness of customers to tell others about your brand, product or service. Companies can track the progress of their internal collaborative efforts by measuring changes in these performance indicators.

B. Predicting

Listening is the first phase in measuring performance. The next phase is making predictions based on the listening.

Ayush Agarwal, CoTweet

That was the point of Ayush Agarwal. He is Head of Products for CoTweet, which helps teams manage one or more Twitter accounts by providing tweet assignments, notes, and on duty status. He was also a speaker in the PR+MKTG Camp East session that explored ways to measure the business impact of integrated communications. He believes that:

1) Five years from now, social organization analytics are going to dominate all data for companies.

2) Going forward, social media outlets are going to be predictive.

Predictive analytics is not new. The discipline optimizes marketing campaigns and website behavior to increase customer responses, conversions and clicks. It’s about predicting future probabilities and trends, by applying a filter to users’ online interactions. Predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities.

Ayush sees the day when such tools will help in making real time predictions – exploiting both historical and trending data to spot problems before they become crises, or better yet, identify opportunities ahead of the competition. Think of it as correctly guessing where stocks are heading in real time before the rest of the market goes on a frantic buying or selling spree.

Predictive analysis puts an even higher premium on listening. Ultimately, it’s about impacting ROI as it happens.

It will really get interesting when companies can apply predictive analysis to collaboration and determine which collaborative efforts will most directly benefit engagement strategies and how.

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