While it may be difficult for brands to control every conversation across the whole web, with the right Social Intelligence tools and a Social Media Command Center, they can strategically interact with consumers and achieve business results. A Social Media Command Centre is a dedicated feature or mode within your Social Listening tool that lets you monitor real-time social data around your brand.
From crisis management via identification and escalation of potential negative issues online to managing important real-time marketing campaigns, brands setup command centers for a number of reasons.
Chief among the reasons to implement a command center, however, is using them to catalyse the process of embedding social into an enterprise. This means that organisations can display social data in lobbies of headquarters, regional branches, executive and C-suite offices, marketing departments and other key physical places of business operation to showcase a brand’s digital footprint, in real-time.
Getting multiple teams, locations and departments exposed to the discussion made by real people – their customers – will help each to better understand what the company reputation is really like.
Instant feedback about what customers are talking about, which trends are emerging, the latest customer complaints, the top press hits and news stories, how competitors are faring – this data is all displayed widely across the company, in a stunning and meaningful way.
Some setups will even empower marketers or other staff to customise what displays on which screens, and where, giving them the ability to escalate different data points and messages to senior staff or particular teams.
Here are 8 ways how a Social Media Command Centre will help you track your KPIs, and connect socially to business impact:
1. Brand Health Monitoring
Your Social Media Command Centre will provide you with the social data that will help you measure success. You can monitor how well your campaigns are doing and your share of voice within your field. With a KPI driven Social Media Command Centre, you and your social team will always have the ability to see in real-time how your brand’s perception in comparison with your competition. Your Social Media Command Centre will also arm you with real-time social data around spikes in negative sentiment around your brand, so you can get ahead of any crises before it escalates.
2. Enterprise-Wide Data
A Social Media Command Centre is not only useful for your social team to measure success, but it can also play a huge role in providing social data across the enterprise. For example, a business can have an enterprise-wide command center screen for non-social teams to use, so that they can get a sense of what’s being said about the organization that day on social.
3. Track & Optimize Event Sponsorship
When brands sponsor events, a Social Media Command Centre helps sponsors easily identify and tune in to all the data around a specific event in a way that can connect back to meaningful business metrics and KPIs, thus helping them know if they are getting the most out of their involvement. This set-up works particularly well for brands who have recurring events. For this case figure, there is usually a screen where the event is live-streamed, while the others present how it is experienced by people watching it at the venue or from another location. This model has become increasingly popular in professional sports associations.
4. Showcase your brand’s digital presence
A command center can be a great opportunity for a brand to make its employees, partners, and visitors more aware of the level of discussions it generates on social. In this case, the screens are usually placed in a public place, such as the atrium of a building or an open-space office, so as to allow many people to stop by to take in the digital presence of the brand.
For this type of social media command center, the level of complexity of the data visualizations should be low, as the goal for the command center is to be easily understandable for people with little social media knowledge. The visual effect is paramount: the goal is to wow visitors and employees and get them to share pictures of the display.
5. Product/campaign launch: optimize your message
With the release of the next iPhone, the social response will be instant. People will be commenting on its new features, complaining about the ones that disappeared and comparing it to similar products. All the conversations surrounding a product launch are opportunities for the brand to interact with its customers, get more insights into their users’ experience and optimize the message of their marketing campaigns with real-time feedback. A command center will allow to centralize all these insights to analyze them and react accordingly at the different stages of the launch.
6. Crisis management: detect crisis signals in real-time
Here’s an example for the French railway (SNCF), who have a specific social room to monitor the different ways the SNCF brand can be mentioned online and beyond. Just imagine how many annoyed travelers can tweet at the same time if several trains programmed to leave for the seacoast get canceled at the same time! This set-up allows the French railway company to detect the early signs of a crisis, wherever it gets sparked, from the blogosphere to social networks, and react instantly to control its spread.
7. Customer service: find new ways to interact with the audience
This command center set-up brings up not only the social messages explicitly mentioning your brand but also those linked to topics of interest, which will allow you to engage with new segments of audiences and draw them into your brand community. A great example of that trend is the Hilton Hotels chain, which uses the Twitter account @HiltonSuggests to provide declared tourists all over the world with local tips for their stay.
8. Business insights to refine strategy
MasterCard employees use a social media command center to identify in real-time their most effective advertising messages in over 60 markets and guide their ad spend decisions. The advantage of this command center approach is that it gives Mastercard better access to data rather than fighting to collect it from other partners or departments.
References
http://webbiquity.com/tag/social-media-listening-command-centre/
https://www.business2community.com/social-media/social-media-command-centres-coming-age-0776017
Tags: Konnect Insights, SM Command Centre, Social Media