Reverse engineer for optimal social media strategy, says expert

Reverse engineering on business decisions is the best way to implement a solid social media strategy, Robert Wollan, global managing director at US consulting and technology services firm Accenture's (NYSE: ACN) sales and customer services practice, told BNamericas. "You want to reverse engineer your biggest decisions back to what you need to make a better decision," he said. "We find that many companies look at social media and analytics as sort of this big new mound of data that they have, and ask: what can I do with it? That rarely gets you to a good outcome." "You need to figure out what your most important business decisions today are, and how having better, faster, more transparent data would allow you to make a better decision. Then ignore the noise." The results allow companies to increase their focus on keeping customers loyal, for example, he added. While firms have traditionally focused on the process too late - performing exit interviews when the customer wants to leave or cancel a service - the shift is now towards why customers stay, figuring out what keeps the customer and amplifying that message back to the rest of the organization. Companies have stumbled with the concept of social media because they fail to tie the related findings back to operational decisions, he said previously. But the companies that take social media listening and apply it to their operational decisions have a much better understanding of what impacts the customer.