Here is a brief excerpt from an article written 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, obtain subscription information, 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 are [two] 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.

Listening and mapping

As the manufacturer’s example implies, spotting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts. One global beverage company is considering including social-media awareness in its hiring criteria for some managers, to build its network and free its management team from “well-rehearsed habits.”

Weak signals are everywhere, of course, so deciding when and where to keep the antennae out is critical. One such situation involves a product, market, or service that doesn’t yet exist—but could. Consider the case of a global advertising company that was investigating (for one of its clients) a US growth opportunity related to child care. Because no one was offering the proposed service, keyword searches on social media (and on the web more broadly) wouldn’t work. Instead, the company looked to social-media platforms where it might find weak signals—finally discovering an online content service that allows users to create and share individualized newspapers.

In the child-care arena, digital-content channels are often curated by mothers and fathers, who invite conversations about their experiences and concerns, as well as assemble relevant articles by experts or government sources. Analysts used semantic clues to follow hundreds of fine-grained conversations on these sites. The exercise produced a wealth of relevant information about the types of services available in individual markets, the specific levels of service that parents sought, the prices they were willing to pay, the child-care options companies already sponsored, the strength of local providers (potential competitors), and the people in various communities who might become ambassadors for a new service. This wasn’t a number-crunching exercise; instead, it took an anthropological view of local child care—a mosaic formed from shards of information found only on social media. In the end, the weak signals helped the company to define the parameters of a not-yet-existing service.

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Here is 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.