One on One with North Highland's Alex Bombeck

It's no secret that analyzing and parsing through the massive pile of data companies accumulate through the natural course of doing business has become a huge industry. But very often in an organization's social strategy, the left hand is not talking with the right. This could mean key insights are going by unnoticed, which could mean customers slipping away as their needs go unmet. To bring all the parts together, North Highland recently launched its Social Insight Lab to harness the power of social to make sense of the data, and make it profitable for clients. Alex Bombeck, President of Sparks Grove, North Highland's marketing division, sat down to explain how it works.

Consulting: How did the Social Insight Lab come to be?

Bombeck: My background is global advertising, and as the Chief Digital Officer at a global ad agency I had teams that ran social community management and we worked closely with clients to develop social programs. Social was really taking foot in customer service and risk mitigation. These are great, but are typically all done by separate organizations: customer service handles their end, risk mitigation is usually corporate communications, and they look at that to make sure people aren't saying anything negative, or if there's an announcement what the fallout—or positive—benefit of that announcement was. But none of this was being handled in a single contiguous way that was going to give true business insight and really help the organization itself. The intent behind the Insight Lab is the ability to marry these data points to begin to get new insights. It gives us the opportunity as an organization to actually get access to those sets of data in a single location that we use in the way we look at our clients' challenges.