Archive for July, 2011

Welcome to the Big Data Era, How do Marketers Cope?

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

You may have heard a term being thrown around referring to the significant amount of data that is being produced most often called “Big Data”.  Here is a loose excerpt from the recent Future of Digital conference that explains the concept of big data pretty well:

“The explosion of data or ‘Big Data’ will give marketers the potential to mine data, discover new trends and learn more about the behaviour in their target market. If you took all the data in the world, cut them onto DVDs and stacked them on top of each other, you could reach the moon and back. This storage capacity equates to 14 Exabytes, where if you captured all the words ever spoken and digitized them into text, this would only occupy 1 Exabyte!

Labels on products will soon be talking over the internet as more sophisticated labels are attached or embedded into products. This could give business more insight into how and where their products are consumed. Big Data is about to get even bigger.”

The days of marketing via web, mobile and social by “gut feel” is over.   It’s not a matter of what you think your customer might like, it has to be what your customer is telling you they want, individually.  To stay competitive, Marketers need to begin adapting their marketing systems and their departments to include marketing analytics across every aspect.  Consider this: in order to make an offer (web, mobile or social could be display, search or even your very own web page) to a prospect, a marketer would take into account previous web visits to my site, recent posts made socially, checkins via mobile social and recent web surfing patterns before they visited you site.  From all that activity plus appending demographic and geographic information based on the IP address that is attached to the digital prospect, the new digital marketer will determine within milli-seconds what you should see when you come to my website.  For instance: A web prospect visited the product pages of my site last week.  After leaving my site, they went to two other competitive sites to their product pages.  On Twitter, they ask they network which is the best stereo system (you sell stereo systems) and then they come back to your website again.  This time you recognize their IP address from last week, append their geographic information (Manhattan) and adjust your homepage on the fly that compares your stereo favorably to the industry and has a big buy button on right on the first page.  Conversion goes up 120% and you start to gain significant ground on the web compared to your comeptitors.

This scenario is not fictional.  It is happening everyday, in real-time.  It’s not happening a lot right now but it is happening and will happen much more in the near future.  How does your marketing stack up?  To learn more about this topic we brought in the VP, Group Director at Digitas, Ken Burbary to work through this conversation.  Ken is a long time industry expert  and thought leader in the emergence of marketing analytics.  The conversation this week will follow the following topic and related questions.

Topic: Welcome to the Big Data Era, How do Marketers Cope?

Q1:  What types of data (digital, social, mobile) do marketers need to capture, track and analyze to effectively understand consumers in this era?

Q2:  Who (which group/function) should be responsible for the planning, collection and analysis of consumer data?

Q3:  How long will companies and organizations have to wait for the “big data” phenomenon to kick in and realize the benefits?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, July 26 at noon ET.  Follow #sm120 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Develop Your Social Business

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

As the practice of social media continues to grow, companies are striving to evolve their operations and incorporate social media on their journey toward becoming a social business.  Just what is a social business you ask?  Not the business practices around societal needs, but the business designs that incorporate new models of intreractive communications using social tools, social media and social networks.  As employees and customers drive the need for open, transparent, realtime interactions, companies struggle to keep up with the demand.

While companies are still trying to understand the new phenomenon of social media, practitioners of social media are trying to understand business.  Many social media practitioners got into the field as it emerged from public relations and corporate communications.  While practictioners understand how social tools work and how to become a conversation evangalist, most do not have the ability to connect social media throughout business in a way that executives understand.

Executives make their mark by executing plans against managed risk better than most.  Sure there is leadership and specialties in finance, managment, marketing, etc but when you boil it down it is still about getting the job done more efficiently with less risk on the behalf of the shareholder.  Then comes social media with the promise to be more connected to customers, be more transparent and have better relationships.  Traditional executives cannot even begin to understand how to put their arms around this.

Everyone gets that people’s expectations are changing in the ways they want to communicate, purchase and relate to companies.  Businesses understand that it’s here and not going away.  There is still a missing translation layer of what companies need to do to meet the changing expectations of customers and employees in a way that is executable and that manages risk.  Thus the desire to design the organizational framework to match the changing needs of individuals, or, designing a social business.

Companies today are simply not set up to be a social business.  They are still designed the same way they were set up in the 1950′s and 60′s where experts hold-on to specialized information and company messages are funnelled through the marketing communications or executive ranks.  Lifting that veil involves a risk tolerance that is simply too high when compared to the benefits.  This post is designed to address the risk side of the equation not the benefit side just yet.

In managing risk across the enterprise, you need to have some staples in place like governance (where the accountabilities lie), escalation procedures, training for employees and purpose that maps back to objectives.  Your systems need to be proven to scale, you need to provide some consistencies in approach across departments and geographies.  Designing a social business is more than simply being conversation evangalists.  To help flesh this out further is our host this week Maria Ogneva (aka @theMaria).  Maria spends her time evangalising the business benefits of integration and social execution for the leading micro-collaboration platform, Yammer.  The discussion this week will cover the following topic and 3 questions:

Topic:  Develop Your Social Business

Q1:  What does it mean to have a social business?

Q2:  List some steps you need to integrate social into existing processes.

Q3:  How do you know when you have a Social Business (as defined before)?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, July 19 at noon ET.  Follow #sm119 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Posted in B2B, corporate, social media | Comments Off