Turn Tweets into Turnover

Stay connected to customers in the race for big data patterns

Big data. It heralds complex spreadsheets full of percentages and ratios, and marketing managers squinting for patterns in a torrent of numbers. But striving for the big picture can leave businesses missing the small stuff—the insightful Facebook comment on shelf placement, the Instagram photo that shows a product being used in an unexpected (and possibly profitable) way. Questrom Professor in Management Susan Fournier says marketers should balance big data with “social listening” by “attending to the context and meaning of posted thoughts.”

Writing in Harvard Business Review with Bob Rietveld, cofounder of the analytics firm Oxyme, Fournier suggests “the beauty of listening to social-media chatter is that one picture or one comment can have an outsized impact on your consumer knowledge and, as a consequence, your profitability.”

It could be as simple as following online product fan pages or industry discussion groups; perhaps even sending an internal email with the day’s best—and worst—customer comments. You need, Fournier and Rietveld write, to “think like an anthropologist...learning to appreciate the value of the stray remark and synthesizing bits of information into a higher-order sense of what’s going on. That’s how you make the most of social media as a tool for peering inside people’s lives as they’re being lived and discovering what consumers are really thinking and doing.”