Time to integrate conversations online

The (very first) Social Intelligence World event was a sign of significant maturity in the field of social analytics. Such that practitioners and vendor platforms are wanting more and more to position themselves in the market research and insight space. Not for them anymore a focus on simply counting Likes and shares, undertaking crisis monitoring and measuring the extent of positive and negative sentiment. And that’s significant, in the sense of what the ambition ought to be in respect of social analytics, and the budgets that ought to be allocated on the part of those wishing to invest in / pay for this as a service offering. On the part of those wishing to learn and derive brand benefit from social intelligence. Margie Strickland (Synthesio Ipsos) noted that in recent months we've seen huge great platform turmoil - with privacy issues, fake bots and fake news. And brands courting controversy with their media campaigns - triggering praise and backlash in equal measure. (e.g. Nike and Colin Kaepernick). As well as explosive social movements – making use of personalised hashtags (i.e. #MeToo). And yet, "...brands are barely scratching the surface in terms of utilising all of these social media conversations that are going on." said Strickland. However, getting past "scratching the surface" doesn't equate to just rolling a few more sleeves up. Kelly McKnight (Join the Dots) was instead insistent that it requires us to now start properly merging and combining our various research approaches such that social intelligence is just one further key input into what we use to help businesses make the right marketing decisions. "Right now, market research is *missing* social, and we need to figure out how best integrate it... how to seamlessly integrate different insights streams into a single, coherent story."