Marketers are entering a new era of big data, automation and the ability to drive business strategy by delivering real-time access to the customer, all thanks to social media and the internet. At Marketing‘s It’s All Social conference in Toronto on Nov. 20, Social Media Group CEO Maggie Fox will deliver a keynote presentation, Why Marketers Will Rule the World, explaining how marketers can use this new sea of data to gain a seat at the executive table. She spoke with Marketing‘s Russ Martin and offered a preview of that talk.
How can big data influence a company’s social media strategy?
Social media generates big data because of the countless customer interactions it allows—every one, thousands or hundreds of thousands a day, is a datapoint. Data, of course, without analysis, is useless. For example, knowing that 1,000 customers clicked on an unspecified link is meaningless, simply counting with no context.
Knowing that they clicked on a link to a story about mobile advertising that was posted to Twitter and shared several hundred times, paired with an additional data set (ie. a certain percentage filled out a lead form) is a goldmine of valuable information about audience location, content preferences and behaviour.
Replicate this several hundred times, crunch the data, and you start to get to the point where you can very accurately predict what kind of content will be shared widely and what kind of value you have to offer to engender a specific response. That’s predictive analytics, and that is the holy grail of big data.
Are clients prepared to invest in data?
It’s not real yet, but, like most things, as soon as the business value becomes apparent, investment will follow. Marketers who understand that figuring this out is a gateway out of the “just marketing” label, and a path to delivering significant value in the form of realtime Voice of the Customer data, will have a huge advantage. Those are the marketing leaders that will be taking a seat at the big table with the CEO.
What social data trends do you predict for 2013?
The emergence of the Marketing Technologist as a role that people recognize and aim for. Ambitious marketers will start to identify and work with some of the many emerging marketing automation and data-analysis tools and dashboards to deliver significant business intelligence and improve the performance of their campaigns.
To view the conference agenda, or to purchase tickets, click here.
