When done successfully, social intelligence brings your day-to-day social data outside of the marketing silo and influences decisions made across the business. Sprout Social’s very first Social Intelligence Summit brought together industry leaders for a series of discussions focused on that idea, from spotting early signals to turning them into real business action.

Jay Schwedelson, founder of SubjectLine.com and CEO of Guru Media Hub, kicked off the summit with his keynote address on real-time social signals in marketing. His message was a blunt one; that marketing teams should stop guessing and start knowing. His agency runs around 40,000 campaigns every year, and he argued that your customers and your competitors’ customers are already telling you what you should do next. All social media marketers have to do is listen to them, then turn those insights into action faster than anyone else.

His first example focused on competitor complaints. Schwedelson suggested pulling the last 90 days of comments on three competitors’ posts and sorting them into buckets. Potential buckets included but weren’t limited to pricing, product failures and missing features. The next step is to pick a complaint your product solves or does better, and put out an us versus them post. The beauty of this is you don’t even have to name the competitor, if you’ve done your research correctly it’s something that people are already feeling, so they’ll naturally associate the negatives with the competitor. Though the origin of this is social, the profile of the people engaging are almost certainly already customers or considering buying, so this is mid-funnel or even lower-funnel work.

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