Here is a brief excerpt from an article co-authored by Martin Harrysson, Estelle Métayer, and Hugo Sarrazin for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. As they explain, snippets of information, often hidden in social-media streams, offer companies a valuable new tool for staying ahead. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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As information thunders through the digital economy, it’s easy to miss valuable “weak signals” often hidden amid the noise. Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do. Sometimes, companies notice them during data-analytics number-crunching exercises. Or employees who apply methods more akin to art than to science might spot them and then do some further number crunching to test anomalies they’re seeing or hypotheses the signals suggest. In any case, companies are just beginning to recognize and capture their value. Here [is the first of] a few principles that companies can follow to grasp and harness the power of weak signals.

Engaging at the top

For starters, given the fluid nature of the insights that surface, it’s often useful to get senior leaders actively involved with the social-media sources that give rise to weak signals. Executives who are curious and attuned to the themes emerging from social media are more likely to spot such insights.1 For example, a global manufacturer whose high quality and low prices were the topic of one customer’s recent social-media post almost certainly would not have examined it but for a senior executive who was a sensitive social “listener” and found its implications intriguing. Did the company have an opportunity, the executive wondered, to increase prices or perhaps to seek market share more aggressively at the current prices?

To find out, the executive commissioned research to quantify what had started out as a qualitative hunch. Ultimately, the low-price perception turned out to be an anomaly, but the outsize perception of the product’s quality was widely held. In response, the company has started funneling marketing resources to the product in hopes of building its market share by capitalizing on its quality and differentiating it further from the offerings of competitors.

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At most companies, weak signals will be unfamiliar territory for senior management, so an up-front investment in leadership time will be needed to clarify the strategic, organizational, and resource implications of new initiatives. The new roles will require people who are comfortable navigating diverse, less corporate sources of information.

Regardless of where companies observe weak signals, the authority to act on them should reside as close to the front lines as possible. Weak signals are strategic enough to demand top-management attention. They are sufficiently important to the day-to-day work of customer-service, technical-development, and marketing teams to make anything other than deep organizational engagement unwise.

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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

Martin Harrysson is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, where Hugo Sarrazin is a director; Estelle Métayer, an alumnus of the Montréal office, is an adjunct professor at McGill University, in Montréal.