Social Media’s Big Opportunity: Intelligence and Insight

Jeremiah Owyang has an interesting post today about how Twitter could seize on a huge opportunity be creating a CRM (customer relationship management) system that would let companies track and respond to what people were saying on Twitter.

His thesis is Twitter is becoming an increasingly important customer service tool but it’s becoming more difficult for companies to track everything being said. The solution is Twitter creating and offering their CRM system to help companies “track and manage the conversations within the 140 sphere”.

This approach makes sense and it could be the business model that turns Twitter, well, into a business.

But I think what Jeremiah is touching upon is only a part of the story.

The reality is all social media platforms have huge challenges and opportunities when it comes to providing value-added services that help companies monitor, measure and understand the conversations taking place.

It’s not just Twitter but blogs, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube, et al that need powerful analytics tools so they can provide services to companies looking to take advantage of social media activity by doing more advertising and marketing.

Right now, social media is the Wild West when it comes to marketing and advertising. The growing sentiment, for example, that social networks don’t work for advertisers because users are there to communicate rather than look at advertising. This approach, however, suggests many companies just aren’t getting the intelligence and insight they need to make smart advertising decisions.

Meanwhile, companies are looking to do more advertising when it comes to social media. A new survey by the Aberdeen Group found that 63% of companies plan to boost their social media spending in 2009. A key part of providing companies with incentives to actually spend more on social media – as opposed to saying they plan to spend more – is giving them actionable data to make decisions.

Owyang has picked up on what I think will be one of the key online trends over the next few years as companies look to spend more online but do so with more information and insight at their fingertips.

More: For additional thoughts on the Aberdeen study, check out Online Media Daily.

Technorati Tags: advertising, social media, twitter