As a former email marketer, I love a good subject line, and just today I saw one that got me thinking: "Time to rethink social media 'war rooms.'" The email was for a short video interview, but it was the subject line that sparked my thoughts. This is a topic that we have discussed internally quite a bit, because we believe that social communication is about people-centric engagement and not about war with or through media. It is certainly not about command or control of social conversations. So I'd like to spark some thoughts for you around how you approach your dashboarding and interaction.

By thinking strategically through engagement beyond just listening, we looked to the types of dashboard information that can help provide deeper insight and meaning around people's intent and our success in delivering to that want or need. We dug into our own tool bag and utilized a number of the key solutions we have that provide detailed analytics into real-time conversations and listening, sentiment, behavior, and even psycholinguistics.

To begin our journey, we have brought a large physical "center" to key events. It's made up of multiple large touchscreen monitors that allow attendees to interact with the data that is being captured live about the specific event. The engagement is both physical and specific and carries out to the socialverse.

Response to this type of visualization of people-centric engagement has been overwhelming. I believe it's because we're getting beyond the basics of social media and are really looking holistically at how people are engaging by examining a series of powerful analytics. Analytics that can help us serve people better. Analytics that can help us create real, valuable insight for the business. Analytics that can help impact the bottom line. We are bringing to life this insight with powerful visualizations that people can make sense of and react to-drill into for deeper understanding.

So what are some of the things that you should think through as you approach the creation of a center of engagement for your brand?

Social listening - for customer service, sentiment, product innovation, trends
Web analytics - to understand behavior, ensure customer experience, measure interaction and revenue
Real-time benchmark data - so you know how you are performing against your peer competitors
Cognitive analytics - for powerful personality profiling that will help to better serve customers based on their personality traits to improve conversion rate, acquisition rate, revenue, and profit
Business intelligence - for deep comprehension and analysis of how the above translates into bottom-line business results, and insight into trends over time
All including visualizations to help drive rapid insight and action from your engagement response team

At the end of the day, to think strategically you need to put your prospects', customers' and peoples' needs front and center. You need to listen and watch to the cues they are giving you. The tools to do this are changing rapidly. But please remember that your intent should not be to wage war with media or to command social, it should be to engage with people. After all:

"Social media and technology are not agents of change. They are just tools. We the connected people are the agents of change."

- Stuart J Ellman, President of 92Y at Social Good Summit 2012

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Michelle Killebrew