Big Data is one of today’s hottest topics, particularly within the Marketing, Sales, and IT communities. Forbes and Gartner are focused on it. Even Dilbert is weighing in, evidence that Big Data has clearly gone mainstream. Given all this buzz, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and uncertain about the next steps to capitalize on this opportunity.

Within organizations, difficulty gaining cross-functional support coupled with barriers to establishing new infrastructure to support Big Data can further contribute to this feeling of uncertainty. What can you do today to make a measurable impact on your business? Here are 5 ways Radian6 from salesforce.com can help deliver immediate insights and value from one of the most relevant, available, and actionable sources of Big Data—social media.

1. Gain a deeper understanding about your customers – Radian6 recently unleashed additional Insights providers which enable you to learn even more and interact intelligently with empowered customers. Easily identify key demographics and understand emotional sentiment.
2. Identify and engage your top influencers – Do you know who your top advocates are? You should. And you should also regularly engage with them based on their reach and ability to impact your brand. What can happen when your top influencers have a negative customer experience? You may have heard about the Southwest Airlines debacle this month. Here is another great blog from one of my colleagues, I Hate Your Contact Center x 156659, emphasizing the importance of reach. Why not reap the positive rewards of connecting with your social ambassadors?
3. Become a leader in customer support – Social is replacing the phone and email as the first line of customer support. Are you listening? If not, your competitors are. Customer expectations are evolving when it comes to social and a tool like Radian6—with its capabilities to isolate potential support cases—combined with a CRM like Salesforce can help you integrate social support into your contact center.
4. Get a leg up on your competition – What are your competitors doing in social? How do you measure up in the industry? How do your customers feel about your competition? Who are your competitors’ key influencers? How can you capture their attention? Radian6 can help answer all these questions and more.
5. Generate new sources of leads and improve campaign effectiveness – Conversations are happening in real time around your industry and your products and services. Radian6 can help identify intent to buy and route these requests. It can also help with analytics to maximize ROI for your marketing investments in demand generation. These capabilities can be further enhanced by integration with your web analytics and marketing automation platforms.

Radian6 is a powerful tool that can help you make sense of the Big Data in the cloud. Want to learn more about its capabilities? Check out the Radian6 blog. Need help getting started with or optimizing your integrated social strategy? Contact Bluewolf today!