‘I’ve got my tool, why should I bother with more demos?’

Good question. You’ve likely done your fair share of demos so why bother with more?

Let’s say you live in the promised land and your social media intelligence programme is awesome. The insights are flowing, the buy-in is there, the platforms are doing their thing, there’s no frustration.

In most organizations, social data success doesn’t last or is hard to achieve in the first place:

1. The data seems to suddenly dry up.
2. The tool functionality stops working in the same way.
3. The questions being asked stop bringing the insights.

Sound familiar?

There is often a misalignment between the impact social intelligence promises and what businesses are achieving in the long term.

The thing is, social media moves fast. The only way to ensure long term success is by keeping up with advances - both in technology and approach.

That’s why we’ve created a free event to show you behind the scenes of 14 demos and 14 case studies.  

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Why bother to demo regularly?

Another great question, here’s ten reasons:

1. No technology is 100% perfect. Actually, we find that many organsiations have at least three tools that they use to get social insights. You need to see what’s out there to plug the holes and increase your efficiencies.
2. Restrictions and changes in APIs (*hello Facebook) mean data sources aren’t guaranteed. Finding new ones is essential.
3. New solutions to boost analysis are coming onto the market (for example, Relative Insight specialise in advanced language analysis, Symanto view the data through a psychological lens, and Codec concentrate on culture).
4. Keep up with new functionality so your projects continue to bring in insights (a lot of vendors have had major updates to their platforms recently, take Talkwalker's new look for example or the visual analysis at YouScan).
5. Keep up to date with new ways to report that may even save you some time (like with Websays and trends dashboards at Digimind).
6. Niche tech is small but powerful and can give you access to exciting new data sources, future proofing your strategy (Pentos will be intro’ing their specialist TikTok tool next week and Buzz Radar will demonstrate the power of their psychographics based audience analyser).
7. Tools are updating constantly at the moment as the market matures and consolidates so it’s important to see how this impacts you (like the Brandwatch / Crimson Hexagon merger and what’s new with their Consumer Research platform).
8. New partnerships and integrations are being forged to make social intelligence stronger (take the Audiense and Pulsar partnership to bring you more in depth insights about audience segments and the behaviours surrounding them).
9. As much as we might hate the thought of it, AI is hotting up and can’t be ignored (like Converseon and their approach to AI for tracking and understanding Brand Purpose).
10. Then there’s the stuff you just didn’t know you could do or didn’t think was possible (like predictive analytics across at Black Swan - trends anyone!)

Creating a process for keeping up

For social listening to produce real insights, the technology must be a good fit for the business, and the business must continue to evaluate what’s right for them.

“We often see people disappointed in their choice of technology, because they maybe don’t have a good enough understanding of the methodologies or haven’t been exposed to the different options. More needs to be done to help practitioners wade through the different tech options, their strengths and their weaknesses.”

Dr Jillian Ney, The Social Intelligence Lab.

Changing times means new functionalities

Dr Jillian adds,

“with Covid-19, social intelligence has a particularly important role for brands and organisations. Not only are people spending more time on social media, but we’re limited with other research methodologies to find out more about changing behaviour. The tech is there that captures what people are thinking, feeling and doing in the moment, a very exciting and perhaps critical capability for brands in these times.”

We’re urging researchers to shop around, refresh their knowledge of the industry and look beyond functionality. We’ve insisted that all the demos at our tech demo day be totally case study focused, with clear use cases and problem/solution.

A rare opportunity to see the tools side by side. You can join us, for free, here.

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