Social media is changing the way we interface with the web. Rather than searching (i.e. Google) for content, we are starting to read more and more content distributed from our social networks. As this trend continues, social intelligence will become increasingly important. This isn’t about just tracking brand mentions and daily volumes. Social intelligence will be leveraging social data for compelling insights and foresight as not yet common.

Social data has many unique elements that lend itself to insights.

• Highly Responsive: Can collect & respond to any timescale
• Specific: Can relate to specific activities to conversations at a defined point in time
• Highly Predictive: Social conversations are leading indicators
• Longitudinal: We can look back & track forward
• In Context: Feedback is pure & customer generated (not contrived)
• Provides unique access to competitor activity
• Can provide a 360 degree view of a customer (not just about their relationship to your brand)
• Highly Scalable: Provides access to high volumes of data & a global dataset

The immediate evolution of social intelligence will be about finding compelling insights and foresight within the social dataset. That is why different industries have been acquiring small social monitoring tools companies. They want “access to the data” to come up with these insights that is relevant in their industry. In the end, the successful social monitoring tools will mature to offer not just the data but also a framework that  visualizes these insights and foresight in meaningful ways. When industry consolidation happens at that point, these companies will be at a much higher valuation.