If you were to sit down in any one of these seats in the below picture, could you decipher what was going on in a reasonable period of time while at 38,000 feet?  What if your life depended on it?  Without some serious help, probably not.

What would you do?  Nothing?  Start pushing any button that blinked red?  You’d be taking action without a clear understanding of the implications of your decisions.  You’d find out soon enough if you guessed right though.

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This picture accurately depicts the amount of data that marketers have coming at them today.  Like the above picture, the data sources are almost overwhelming and more often than not, it can put the untrained or uninitiated into data overload.  Unlike the trained pilot who has a standards-based plan that goes along with anything the gauges tell him, most marketers are blind to the implications and root causes that are driving the information they receive.  Instead, they look for red blinking lights.

Unfortunately, when any light starts to blink, most respond with the same urgency as another and miss many tell tale metrics because those metrics are buried in with a host of less important ones…if it isn’t blinking, it isn’t important.  The the airplane’s cockpit jammed with all the gauges, dials, knobs, buttons and displays, finding what you need to optimize your social efforts either requires a team of highly trained professionals, or a more intelligent interface.

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Having an intelligent dashboard that knows how to properly display what’s important to you rather than just showing everything can mean the difference between success and failure.  With respect to this, here are a few things that I regularly hear:

1.  Most activities look the same in terms of their level of importance.  I don’t have any way to normalize this.

2.  Information is grouped by originating source (i.e. Radian 6, Adobe, Google Analytics, Jive, etc.).  It isn’t integrated by topic or area of importance (i.e. ‘Hydraulic Systems’ if you are a pilot).

3.  I have no way of directly linking my information to key strategic imperatives (i.e. ‘Collision warning, pull up!)

4.  I have very few ways to show the direct benefit to my stakeholders of our social initiatives to the overall business enterprise (i.e. ‘This morning’s flight from Chicago to Dallas has taken 1.4 hours and we will be arriving 18 minutes early.  For those of you with tight connections, you will have plenty of time to get to your gates without sprinting’).

For several years now, we have been tracking these issues carefully, as well as, being able to effectively measure them.  We have come to learn that knowing what you are measuring and its relative importance is as important to tracking it in the first place.  We built SPI to solve these problems.

We know that being able to make the information easy to understand and actionable is critical.  So we invented SPI (Social Performance Index).  For the first time, brands can effectively track important interdependent value metrics such as:

  • Social Influence Scoring
  • Engagement Indexing
  • Brand Advocacy
  • Content ROI
  • Community Optimization
  • Cost Deflection
  • Social Adoption
  • Channel Comparison

 

We think that like the evolution to a digital, smart cockpit that makes pilots more effective and efficient, SPI will provide the same value to marketers and those throughout the enterprise who rely on them for critical insights and effective action.

If you are a marketer and rely on multiple data and information streams, SPI will most assuredly increase your effectiveness.

To learn more about SPI, take a test drive or hear what other brands using SPI are saying, drop us a note at info@simplfimarketing.com/comblu

Steve Hershberger

Steve Hershberger