Today’s guest post is from Debi Kleiman, the Vice President of Product Marketing at Communispace, who will be speaking at Social Business Edge. A leader in generating insights via private online customer communities, Communispace has created more than 350 customer communities for industry leaders such as Kraft, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Hallmark, Best Buy, Microsoft, MTV, GlaxoSmithKline, and Hilton Hotels Corporation.

There’s too much data.  Way too much, and it’s not helpful. There, I said it.

Social media monitoring, web analytics, quantitative market research, trackers, clickthroughs and opens… your ecosystem produces a firehose of data, but not a whole lot of meaning.

How about some insight instead?  Insight – what we’re really after – can create new businesses, grow existing ones, solve problems, tell stories and deliver real value to your organization.  Businesses today are drowning in data and missing real insight. But they don’t have to. The same forces that are converging to bombard us with more data are the same ones that will help us. Customers today want to participate with businesses and brands more than ever before, which creates a real opportunity to use that connection for insight.

It’s great that your customers can give you feedback on products using the ratings and reviews, and being alerted to their dissatisfaction on Twitter is important. But what if I told you that you’re missing the heart of what really matters to your customers? CRM expert Denis Pombriant calls this “CSI approach” to customer intelligence badly reactionary, and he’s right. How powerful would it be to truly understand your customers in a way that allows you to be relevant to them, right out of the gate?

This is what the insight discovery process is all about – actively engaging with customers in an ongoing, intimate dialogue over months and years through private insight communities, so they let you into their lives and mindset – the insights, big and small, will blow you away.

Brands that have harnessed the power of customer-driven insight know that the rich, meaty center of their customers’ needs lies in their hearts and minds. And it’s hard work to get to that place where they’re willing to share it with you, but the payoff is certainly worth it.

Here are a couple of examples from our experiences at Communispace:

• A leading financial services company tapped into the mindset of Gen X using a private online community over six months and learned that 90% of what the company is saying in the market is irrelevant to them. (That 90% is not data, just my rough dramatic insight.) The intimate and comfortable environment of their private online community enabled members to tell their personal stories, hopes and fears in new way and provided insight into how to reach this skeptical generational cohort. Through a variety of activities in the community, the company was able to learn from Gen Xers not only about their perceptions of investing and financial services firms but also their life priorities, their savings goals and important messaging cues.  The members evaluated new product concepts for relevance and appeal, as well as started their own conversations so that the company could hear what’s important to them. By deeply understanding Gen Xers, the company found that their challenges are more about successfully maintaining a checking account rather than setting up their 401K, for example. Insights like these helped to create products and messaging that were more relevant to Gen X – things like a high yield checking account, special features for savings accounts and new pages on their corporate website that spoke directly to their needs. Overall, their deep exploration into GenXers lives translated into significant ROI in the form of an entirely new base of Gen X customers who appreciated finally being understood by their bank.
• A top technology solutions company used their private online communities to explore what “value” meant to their customers in a recessionary environment and how that affected what they were buying and why. Busy professionals who already bought millions of dollars worth of technology from this company were more than willing to help them develop new offerings that better address their changed priorities in a rapidly-shifting economic context.  By creating different value-add marketing and promotional programs tailored to speak to what affected community members the most, the company built stronger, more durable customer relationships and generated $70 million in new revenue in one year.

A truly social business will take advantage of this motherload of insight by connecting important elements of the ecosystem, and using that to create value. It’s not easily acquired, but private insight communities have proven to be a way to bring emotions to life, and to discern meaning beyond the numbers.