The new online world and communication landscape has made consumer and market data ubiquitous. Marketers of all stripes have unprecedented access to consumer information and are looking to action that data in almost real time. The reality is that clients and agencies have always had access to data, but the real target is insights, not anecdotes.
Introductions – my name, role and responsibility at SmG.
Today , thanks to social media we live in a data democracy where more data is being created and it is more accessible than ever before. But data without insight has no value. Insights, not anecdotes impact business performance.
Last year, the world created enough digital data to fill a stack of DVDs that would stretch from Earth to the moon and back. According to some estimates, the stack of DVDs will reach Mars by the end of the decade.
For marketers, social media represents opportunity - instant access to the voice of the consumer and the ability action information in real time.
Most marketers have felt the pressure to react or respond to customers in social media. And sometimes they should. But not all comments require a response.
In a focus group, a market researcher wouldn’t hinge your entire marketing strategy on the opinion of one outspoken participant. And you wouldn’t make a decision on the basis of a single tweet, either.
Continuing with the focus group analogy, there’s value in things like selecting the participants and creating a discussion guide. And when the groups are done, you don’t just get transcripts of what was said that day. The value lies in the report that ladders the data into insights.
The same thought process applisto social media data and research. Clients who run and gun with the data without taking the steps to achieve genuine insight risk misinterpreting the conversation and introducing their own bias.
The biggest challenge for anyone that’s dealt with social media data, is the data. It’s dirty. Unstructured. Sometimes it lacks context. And there’s a lot of it. How can a marketer overcome these hurdles?
Technology can help. Text analytics is a relatively underutilized research technology. It can be used to find patterns in large volumes of data and text.
Using text analytics it’s possible to move beyond broad, inaccurate measures like sentiment to get to the real prize, an aggregated view of what people are saying about products and services.
One of the things we should be looking to find is consumer advocacy. To what degree are people likely to serve as advocates or influencers of your product?
Long before social media came along, Fred Reichheld wrote about the Net Promoter Score, which measures peoples likelihood to recommend product. Reicheld proved that a 12% increase in a company’s NPS would translate into a doubling of growth.
Reichheld’s study took place in an offline context, but I think the same logic applies to social media. Now its possible to use text analytics to measure social media advocacy, or people’s spontaneous willingness to recommend to their friends online.
While the weak ties of social media probably mean that there is a lesser correlation between recommendations and company growth, each brand must track online advocacy and define its potential impact on business performance, hence helping to solve the social media ROI problem.
Another place where marketers can look for insight from social media isFacebook. All of the information that people enter into Facebook, through their personal profiles or actions, contributes to one of the largest, and most accurate data bases in the world, and it is continually being updated.
Today, we have the tools to leverage the rich, dynamic data of Facebook to create better brand experiences, both online and off. It’s possible to harvest your facebookfanbase to create custom customer segments with detailed, demographic and psychographic profiles.
In capturing these insights, the online experience can be customized to deliver the most relevant content based on one’s Facebook behaviour. Never before has consumer insight been so actionable and real time.
The insights gleaned from Facebook data can also be used in an offline context. Partnerships is just one example. If you were a bank, and found out that 75% of your Facebook fans also liked to shop a particular store for clothes, it creates all kinds of marketing and product opportunities.
In summary, social media has helped democratize data. But data without insight is of little value or consequence. There are established methods to acquire true insights, that will allow you to truly move your business using social media.