Social intelligence is more than just capturing online data. It's a framework to measure and analyze data that human experts turn into insights you use to inform your strategy and take action. The framework gives you knowledge to make more data-driven decisions moving forward.
Let’s break down how it works.
A framework of data and dashboards
To build the framework, we identify your goals or the challenge you’re trying to solve to create research questions. We gather foundational information about your campus, such as your mission, vision, and values.
Your partnership team takes all of this information and your dedicated analyst develops a customized query that drives the data and insights in your unique dashboard. For some clients, we achieve their research goals via capturing online mentions of their organization across social media, news, forums, and blogs. For other clients, we develop a proprietary method to capture online mentions related to their research questions. This method delivers mentions from specific audience populations or about specific topics or themes, and is a great way to glean industry-level insight.
The dashboard is populated with online conversation from communities and industry publications via the method that best answers your research questions. Typical dashboard metrics include:
- Total Conversation Volume: The number of times your organization is mentioned in online conversation indicates how many people talk about you, and how much they’re talking.
- Earned Conversation: The portion of the online conversation that doesn’t come from organizational accounts (i.e., students, journalists, alumni, prospects, the public or community). This is tracked as a percentage of total volume and as a total number. Increasing earned conversation volume over time might indicate an increase in word-of-mouth about your brand. If on campus, you may also want to understand how much of your earned conversation is related to athletics to understand its impact on your brand.
- Voices: The number of individuals who contribute to conversation about your organization. Unique authors can indicate a healthy community with diverse experiences and perspectives, and a shared affinity for your organization. As you develop more brand advocates, the number of voices in the conversation should increase.
- Custom categories: Based on your research questions and areas of interest, the data collected is segmented into unique categories, whether by audience, topic, theme, content source, time period, sentiment, and more.
Transforms into strategic insights and action plans
Once we create the dashboards and gather the data, your partnership team digs in to understand what the data tells us. They support and coach you through new ways of using and incorporating social insights into your work so you make progress on your goals, connecting data, ideas, and people on your team and across the organization to our work.
The American College Personnel Association (ACPA)—College Student Educators International
ACPA wanted to better understand their current brand awareness and audience perceptions, identify ways to support student affairs professionals, and use data and insights to inform the creation of their new strategic plan.
Data and dashboards
- Analysts leveraged online conversations across a three year period to identify ways ACPA could better serve its members and the industry at large
- Measured brand awareness and audience perceptions
- Identified brand differentiators to diversify its service offerings and grow membership
Insights and action plans
- Provided an action plan with direct recommendations to increase brand awareness, differentiate market positioning, and grow membership over time
North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University needed support with enrollment targeting to improve their funnel for undersubscribed colleges and engaging prospective students throughout North Carolina. They wanted to improve brand awareness, build team capacity, and develop an enrollment marketing strategy informed by the needs of their students.
Data and dashboards
- Measured brand awareness and perceptions for the university and growth colleges with emphasis on admissions audiences
- Measured conversations for colleges with enrollment opportunity, based on each college's custom needs around understanding their admissions audience
- Leveraged a year of conversation to surface transfer population barriers and opportunities to ease their pathway experience
- Identified opportunities to grow belonging through student involvement and mental health
Insights and action plans
- Amplified opportunities to operationalize insights in new ways amongst campus teams, such as highlighting new ways to strengthen information and knowledge sharing to maximize market exposure
- Applied competitive insights to college marketing strategies and maximize unique aspects of each college aligned with audience interest
- Coached colleges on marketing and communications best practices to enhance efficiency and effectiveness
- Recommended targeted social media tactics in order to increase demand for growth majors and colleges
- Engaged with senior leaders and college teams to deliver insights and custom action plans
Quinnipiac University
Quinnipiac University uses social intelligence for brand management. In April 2023, they had the opportunity to leverage their first national men’s ice hockey championship.
Data and dashboards
- Enabled communications and athletics staff to measure conversation volume and assess the impact of a high profile achievement
Insights and action plans
- Supported collaboration across multiple campus units by identifying key audience priorities, perceptions of university brand, and extended storytelling opportunities
Applying the insights
As an extension of your team, we work together to apply what we’ve learned and use it to inform your strategic decisions, support cross-campus collaboration, and grow closer to your audiences in ways that matter. Throughout our work we’ll regularly assess where you are in reaching your initial goals, define what you need to keep making progress, and make adjustments as needed to ensure you have the right expert support and insights to be successful.