4 step guide to creative thinking: Step 2. Listen.

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Data is everywhere. It’s all around us. Every time we land on a website, send a tweet, register our Starbucks loyalty card or sign up to a Facebook competition we are leaving trails of data and brands are desperately waiting to capture as much of it as possible with the aim of better understanding who we are and how to market to us.

As a creator of ideas you may not think that data is important to you, but think again. Data allows us to better understand consumer behavior, map customer journeys, and profile audience values and motivators, in turn forming insights that then inspire creative opportunities. To quote Paul Doleman from iCrossing “Data leads to insight which inspires and powers the creative process”.

These days 37% of the global population is online (2.4 Billion people) and they produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data and send 140 million tweets everyday. http://bit.ly/19pwOUq It is for this reason that social listening platforms such as http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/ and http://www.sysomos.com/ are becoming essential business tools for a number of reasons.

Firstly the ability to track conversations taking place online in relation to a specific topic or keyword by interrogating tweets, blogs, forums and web content and deriving insight and understanding more efficiently than ever before. Allowing creative thinkers to get to those creative eureka moments even faster.

Secondly social listening allows brands to uncover powerful insights about their audience that traditional research methodologies can’t. By understanding the real time conversations taking place, a brand is able to ascertain a sweet spot for them to talk, balancing both what the brand wants to say and what the audience is already talking about. Making it more relevant and engaging.

A nice example shared on the day, which used social listening to drive towards a simple but engaging creative campaign idea, was that of Heinz Soup. Social Listening identified a connection between conversations taking place around being unwell and soup, so they developed a Facebook campaign whereby you could personalise a can of soup for one of your friends and send it to them when they were at home unwell. Get Well Soup was born.

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