Before we enter a restaurant, we research it on Yelp. While checking in on Foursquare, we take a picture of our meal and post it on Instagram. After the meal we post on Facebook, our thoughts on the food, customer service, ambiance, etc.

The consumers nowadays are becoming more vocal about the brands they use and the new ones they want to try. Social media has made our voice louder and more powerful. Some brands listen and some do not. In the blog post Social Listening Takes Courage, (And Why It’s Worth The Effort) by Resource.com; they discuss why it is important for brands to listen to us.

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Tapping into the voice of the consumer 10 years ago meant a focus group, a survey panel, a series of one-on-one interviews. Even five years ago, tapping into the voice of the consumer might have meant a laborious endeavor of compiling consumer feedback forms served through a .com experience or examining a still young and much less structured Facebook platform for actionable data. Today, tapping into the voice of the consumer means something different and doing so unlocks not only more data and better data, but an almost endless sea of authentic, unfiltered consumer feedback.

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and a host of other touchpoints, brands now have the ability to not only hear the authentic voice of the consumer, but dissect it. Consumers talk about where they check in, what brands they like, what brands they hate, what they’re looking forward to. They post pictures, links and videos. They participate with brands, developing one-to-one relationships within their touchpoint of choice.

That participation, through community management, is an important step in tapping into the voice of the consumer, but brands are now moving beyond simple participation, instead leveraging the massive power of the broader conversation across any number of touchpoints to build better consumer profiles, create better content and make better business decisions. At Resource, we call that Social Mission Control—a living, breathing social media command center that mines the social conversation, making use of the reservoir of social raw material out there (tweets, Facebook comments, blog comments, forum posts, etc.) to learn more about consumers in an authentic way.

Getting to the point of acting on unfiltered social conversation is not simple. It takes courage on the part of a brand to tackle the complex process of listening for data, curating it into something actionable and then acting. For Resource’s Social Mission Control, that means listening across a wide range of data sources and exploring an unimaginably deep social conversation through the right blend of art (human touch fueled by knowledge of brand, consumer and social community) and science (bringing the right tools and processes to the table). Together, that art & science, the backbone of social intelligence, can cut through the clutter and deliver actionable insights that fuel everything from content creation to public relations to customer service to long-term brand planning.

We believe, at its core, that the power of Social Intelligence stems from the consumer, a consumer that is continuously engaged through community management, delighted through relevant brand content that taps into the broader social conversation, and addressed as the backbone of any long-term brand or initiative planning. Achieving that vision requires innovation, process, people and a true connection to the Shared Passion between the brand, its consumers and the broader social community.

Within Social Mission Control, people, tools and content are all viewed through that lens, organizing what we listen to and how we listen to it. This is Shared Passion in real time, ensuring that the needs, passions and thoughts of our brand’s consumers are continuously heard and acted upon, all through the unfiltered and authentic consumer voice that makes social what it is.

Consumers provide the gift of their feedback every day across Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the social web. Brands can now tap into this known, quantifiable, minable data stream to make decisions based on consumer sentiment, activity and content. Social Mission Control takes that perspective and adds the combination of art & science that produces actionable, meaningful, impactful opportunities for our brands to engage consumers. Are you listening?

Follow Resource on Twitter @Resource.

To see more blogs by Resource’s Thought Leaders, click here.