Watch any recent investigative drama or TV show and you will notice this scene. A director walks into the room and looks at a massive wall-to-wall display of screens. Then, this director asks the team in the room to update the display based on specific queries like, "Show me the suspect's location," "Give me background information," and "Show me his network of business partners," and the display automatically adjusts accordingly.
Marketing executives are excited by the idea of the social command center as a way to organize many social streams into a single view. As described above, they envision a room full of interactive, responsive TV screens that show real-time activity across social networks, enabling instantaneous response and engagement with customers.
In reality, command center displays in business often are a collection of various graphs and charts, each displaying different readouts related to the business or marketing performance. Data is presented in silos, and when you want to pivot on a dimension, none of the displays respond to a single command. Each requires a different user to remote into a computer and navigate to a different graph, or change time and adjust other filters.
Imagine a massive wall-to-wall display that is filled with metrics, graphs, readouts, maps, conversations and posts. Then imagine using a simple interface from your phone to navigate and filter through data and watching the entire massive display of data respond to each of these simple commands. This next generation social command center platform should be designed with the following guiding principles:
Instantaneous Insight:
Consider how powerful it would be if brand executives could walk into a command center and seamlessly take control of the room, using their own smartphone or tablet as a remote control to navigate around different sets of social and marketing data to aggregate and visualize real-time consumer sentiment within the command center, right there on the screen.
Not only does this type of interface empower the executive to clearly see the ROI of social investments on the spot, but it turns the passive platform of the traditional command center-visualizing streams of data brought in by other platforms-into an active, responsive technology that can bring together data for everyone in the room to see with the swipe of a finger.
Holistic Viewpoint:
Social data is extremely powerful marketing tool. User-generated content provides a wealth of insight into consumer sentiment, and the real-time nature of social media ensures an ever-fresh stream of content for brand marketers to leverage.
However, social data is exponentially more powerful when viewed and analyzed in conjunction with sales cycles, campaign data, CRM trends and other marketing analytics to provide executives with a more complete picture.
The true power of the social command center becomes clear when it is viewed as an active marketing platform that can bring together disparate sources of third-party marketing data to reveal new insight and trends into consumer purchase behavior and engagement.
Growth Potential:
To provide the best ROI, command center technology must be able to change and adapt at a moment's notice according to a brand's needs and the natural evolution in the marketplace.
Solutions should be customizable to a brand's unique needs and circumstances. As such, brands must have the ability to add new dimensions on the fly, remove outdated elements and easily examine data from multiple sources in new combinations. This yields the most insight into consumer trends, and in turn, the most successful campaigns.
Today's social command centers must be designed with the future in mind. Brands that don't adapt and continue to view each social channel and source of marketing data in a silo will quickly be rendered ineffective in their campaigns and ultimately will be left behind.
However, a dynamic, responsive social command center solution that ties in multiple sources of data will deliver value that is beyond the sum of its parts, leading to actionable insight into consumer trends that drive campaign strategy.
Beginning this Sunday, Postano will be showcasing its new Command Center product at the SXSW Interactive Tradeshow. Stop by Booth #1045 to see it in person.