Pave Your Road to Engagement with Insights

I thought of titling this post “Pave Your Road to Engagement with Bricks of Insight,” but I thought that would be pushing the metaphor, which works much better in the lavish infographic below than it does in print. To be sure, the road sign in the infographic reads “success,” but that success is realized through engagement. The story this infographic tells is one of integrating social business into your enterprise in a strategic way in order to gain a competitive edge. You may have heard this story before, but now more than ever, tools such as engagement centers are opening up new opportunities for communication and innovation.

Note that the infographic depicts a cycle: there is no single set entry point into this process. To put it succinctly if perhaps over-simplistically, engaging with customers gives you data which you can turn into insights for building better strategies which let you better engage with customers, etc. The engagement center “machine” is in the middle of the cycle because it is your hub, your way of visualizing engagement, monitoring and analyzing sentiment, and gaining insights not only to build better marketing and PR campaigns but even to drive innovation in products and services.

I’ve been to a number of conferences where IBM Social Business has had a presence and without fail the biggest attraction in the booth if not at the show is the IBM Engagement Center. What draws people in is the EC’s mesmerizing visuals, but what really gets them excited is when they hear exactly what the EC is showing, and what’s going on behind the scenes to make that happen. The IBM EC utilizes Watson Analytics, Cognos/SMA, Bluemix, Softlayer and other IBM solutions to take data from the cloud and make it meaningful, tangible, accessible. It’s the perfect marriage of social business, cloud, mobile, data and analytics technologies.

Once people understand the EC better, they start to see the crucial role it has to play in an overarching social business strategy. Indeed, they get a better sense of what social business itself is (the most commonly asked question I’ve heard in the social business booth is, “What is social business?”) and how it can give companies a competitive edge through key insights. Those insights are the bricks that will pave the path to engagement, and that same road leads to success.

from Social Business Insights Blog http://ift.tt/1FDI69M

via IFTTT