Social Media and Brands
| Stories TravelOne interesting characteristic of stories is their ability to travel from person to person and get to their destination point virtually unchanged. I call this stories surfing people and this is in contrast to the notion that people ‘tell’ stories. Stories can also randomly occur or re-combine so that their source is unknown, but this is another story.Re-telling or the need to re-tell is the mechanism that is being used by a story teller who wants a story to travel.Understanding who re-tells and how will help the story teller construct the story so that it can surf to meet the story teller’s objective rather than the need of the re-teller. Both may benefit but the original story teller’s purpose is still met even though it may not be known to the re-teller.Plenty of filters have to be overcome In education and sales processes.
Stories Drive Market Intelligence Our approach to market intelligence combines competitive intelligence and business intelligence provides fast and simple market visibility. How is this done? We monitor stories associated to buyers, sellers, partners, products and services and compare them over time to enhance market visibility. Stories are the raw material for visibility and our unique contribution minimizes the considerable perspective risk when applying stories to future insight. Consider how a story depends on a storyteller for its delivery and a story listener for its interpretation. The amount of story ‘overlap’ or how closely the teller and listener interpret the value of each story determines the market impact of a story. Taking multiple simultaneous perspectives provides future insights. Two people listening to the same story will probably ‘hear’ at least two different stories and value each version differently according to the time and place where they first heard it or the time and place where they explore it again. Understanding the implications of multiple and often simultaneous story perspectives is key element of market visibility. See www.neuropersona.com |
Myths: Market Intelligence and Business Intelligence
While Europeans have a clear understanding of the difference between Competitor Intelligence (external) and Business Intelligence (internal), North American software and services vendors have blurred this simple distinction in order to maximize their sales of products or services.
Transactional systems, typically accounting based, tend to drive Business Intelligence and provide a valuable historical backdrop to past transactions of an enterprise. Recently Customer Relationship Management or CRM systems have attempted to provide context to the quantitative data provided by accounting and data mining systems. Competitive Intelligence tends to be focused on market research of documents or observations that depend on monitoring external activity. However, the past may not accurately reflect current market changes that will impact our future.
Consider Enzo Ferrari’s reason for excluding a rear view mirror in his race cars, “What is behind me, I do not care.”, and how most accounting and marketing models rely extensively on the past to provide visibility for the future.
Explore how we employ best practices, techniques and tools to navigate the myths of market and business intelligence and create free value by acquiring insight as a by-product rather than having vendors exploit our client’s data and knowledge in return for invoices. Some vendors bill thousands of dollars to provide such ‘insight’ and hundreds of thousands of dollars for more insight.
And finally people are the source of stories and Social Media done well helps people find and create stories that suit their needs, current and future. Social Medis trumps Brands because stories lead market intelligence after all you can’t measure a story that you haven’t heard.
Cheers,
Nick
Brand Wars 
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