When you market reacts badly to something you’ve done, it is because you should have known not to do it in the first place.

It is just that simple.

That is why Monitoring isn’t enough – it may be for your PR agency, but not when you are running a business.   

We helped the New York Times track the TeamConan meme on social media, but honestly, I’d rather have helped NBC engage the market before they started making decisions. Imagine the press we would have seen if NBC had found a creative way to have an open conversation with the market around one simple question “what should we do with late night”.

So, let’s assume NBC has been monitoring – what is the upside now? How do you put the genie back in the bottle?  

This is where monitoring fails. All the alerts, charts, graphs and data visualizations in the world can’t undo your bad decisions.

So, let me propose a radical solution – use justSignal, not at your PR agency, not just in your marketing department, but as a tool to make the voice of the market an important part of every decision you make. Take the data and build it into your product management, customer service, marketing, and billing decisions. Where you don’t have the data – engage the market. Ask them what you want to know – start a conversation and make a better decision.

You might say, “but I’m not NBC – my company will never be a trending topic on Twitter no matter how bad a decision we make” – and you are probably right. The thing is, companies rarely go out of business because of one bad decision – they usually go out of business because they make hundreds of them – every year – decisions that move their product or service farther and farther away from what the market wants.

Great companies own their markets because they make better decisions, consistently. Decisions better tuned to the needs of their target market. Starting today, you can have the information at the tips of your fingers. You can have real insight into the needs of your target market – and the ability to engage them in an open conversation about how you can help. Sounds good, right?