We recently attended #SMWF - Social Media World Forum in London. Read key take-aways on current and emerging trends in digital and social media from world leading and innovative brands.
Will McInnes, CMO of Brandwatch, shared new trends in social data and a few examples of how his company has provided new insights by blending social data with data from other sources to provide a competitive edge.
He said that while social data is relatively new, it would become another standard source of information currency that will flow through every part and of the organisation.
According to Will, to achieve success in blending social data you need:
1. Great quality social data you can access and manipulate
2. Great quality and interesting data from other sources
3. An analyst or data science resource
An example of successfully blending data presented by Will was a popular ice-cream brand that had always run marketing campaigns around the assumption that ice-cream consumption was linked to sunshine and outdoor activities. “By blending social data, sales data and weather data, Brandwatch found that customers were talking about consuming ice-cream on social media when the weather was rainy and cold,” said Will. “People were cocooning and talking about snuggling up and comfort eating ice-cream on social media.” The client was able to leverage this insight in their new marketing campaign.
Proving ROI of events is always difficult, but Will argued that by blending offline registration data with social data before, at, and after an event, social posts can provide new evidence and insights as to what drives brand favourability. “This blending of offline attendance data with online social data can give companies an edge over competitors,” said Will.
Another Brandwatch client, a large retailer in the US, bought social data on the top 20 brands they stocked in store. They matched the names of people talking about any of those brands on social media against their own large email database. As a result they were able to send emails and present relevant online content to these people.
“Get away from just social data,” said Will. “It’s about fresh, timely, authentic and unprompted business opportunities. Social data can be strong it if is weaved in with other data sources. Learn quickly and experiment.”
While currently social data is mainly sourced through analysis of text, Will said that soon more insights will come through understanding the visual aspect of social footprints. “Currently most marketing is visual,” said Will. “We need to recognise photographic content without tags, comments or labels.”
With permission and appropriate guidelines Will said that wearable data will also provide an interesting future data source. “We are beginning to collect personal streams of information. The granularity of information available is incredible. Smart blending of social media with other data sources can give your company a competitive edge.”