I like the simple process outlined by Sony’s analytics agency Tempero on how they create actionable insights for clients:

Our process for insight is as follows:

• Liaise with each client to create a clear brief and need for the data
• Choose the most appropriate monitoring tool (different briefs need different tools)
• Create and test the search queries
• Review the data and manually clean it up (software tools are generally less than 60% accurate in terms of sentiment and classification)
• Analyse for patterns, trends and useful information
• Roundtable discussion with management team to assess the findings
• Create the output as defined in the brief
• Present to the client
• Amend and add additional information as required and re-submit

I think that the issues of information overload are also worth considering when evaluating your own social analytics needs. Bear in mind you have social savvy customers who make decisions based on word of mouth as well as sales literature. But what is the value of understanding how customers make decisions? It’s about understanding how customers have a simple way to (cut through all the marketing and advertising and) help decide if it’s what they want, explains Brian Solis:

“Based on the work of Robert Cialdini, I analyzed six universal heuristics and the role they play in consumer decision making in social commerce. Referred to as “thinslicing,” consumers tend to ignore most information available and instead ‘slice off’ a few relevant information or behavioral cues that are often social to make intuitive decisions.”

So imaging how powerful a tool you would have if it was able to direct social marketing efforts based on an understanding of customer behaviour around ‘thinslicing’, for example with the movie industry?

While Radian6 can provide such a technical capability to gather sentiment and identify influencers, and an agency like Tempero can provide the actionable insights, as a client you still need to be able to look at the data and find and interpret what’s really valuable, to consider “investing in the value, productivity and efficiency of consumer decision making” to quote Solis once more.

You need to be able to work with the tools and your analytics resource whether in-house or agency to properly  tap into the hearts and minds of your customers, and get them engaging with your brand. As social media consultant Jeremiah Owyang says you need to: “Live in the same behaviors that customers and consumers are.” 

I suggest a thinslicing approach enables that to happen, to optimise how you engage with the twists and turns of the ‘purchasing journey’, as well as existing social analytics to track the ROI process from engagement to conversions.

To be able to overcome the ‘analysis paralysis’ you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, to be able to ‘thinslice’.