When my colleague, Scott Briggs, presented this analogy of Social Intelligence as today’s “Moneyball” opportunity for business at Social Media Masters Tour, Toronto, I was intrigued. Not knowing much about Moneyball, (aside from Brad Pitt’s involvement in the new movie) I asked Scott to clue me in so I could share his thoughts with you:
Metrics to Win
In the late 1990’s, the Oakland A’s, faced with a common business problem of limited resources, decided to flip the process of choosing new players on its head. Instead of using the traditional methods most MLB teams had been using to measure player success, they created their own darn metrics – banking on finding winning players who would be overlooked by their rivals. They predicted they could use this strategy to win while spending less money, since they would avoid a bidding war with more well-financed rivals. Their new way of measuring player success would be just as accurate, if not more so, and would save them money.
The A’s, against the advice of “traditional” baseball minds, implemented their strategy and began winning games, slowly igniting a revolution in the way baseball players were evaluated. Their strategy worked (though arguably better for the Red Sox, who went on to apply this strategy to win two world series). And the rest, as they say… is history
Extracting the Gold
So what does a Major League Baseball team (or a Brad Pitt movie, for that matter) have to do with marketing success or social media? The Oakland A’s developed a strategy that applied new data in non-traditional ways to gain a competitive advantage. Similarly in the social space, many brands are measuring, but a select few brands have become truly sophisticated in the way they use social intelligence to drive business strategy. Just as Moneyball looked beyond how players were evaluated by utilizing new data and metrics, while social intelligence looks beyond how business decisions are made today to add insights never before available.
Social Intelligence provides businesses the best opportunity they have to gain a competitive advantage. There is untapped potential that the data collected from all those social networks can provide to businesses, that goes far beyond where social media is typically applied today in marketing and communications.
Do you agree with Scott’s analogy? Is your company using social media as a predictive tool to measure product success or any other advanced application of social data?
Want to learn more about how smart brands are moneyballin’ their way to competitive advantage using social media intelligence? Join Scott Briggs for our upcoming webinar: Moneyballin’ – Mining the gold from social media with Social Intelligence. Scott will share some of the advanced techniques that brands are using to move from simply collecting data to truly analyzing and drawing insights that are fueling smart business decisions.