Posts Tagged ‘Ken Burbary’

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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How To Plan a Global Social Media Initiative

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Putting together a social media plan in general, is not all that difficult for many companies.  This is not because setting up a social media plan is necessarily easy to do well, just that most companies have low expectations and therefore low levels of execution and most importantly integration.  The other part of this is there are really no right or wrong ways to build a social media plan.  Ultimately, if it delivers enough value back to the organization to off-set the costs of time and capital, then the company can/should claim success, right?  One difference is in the company’s tolerance for incremental success vs. transformative leadership.  Often, social media is a way to achieve both, depending on the ability of the enterprise to adapt and execute in new and different ways than are comfortable or proven in the past.

Whatever your reasons for deploying a social media plan, just makes sure it maps back to your corporate objectives.  A plan and executables without demonstrable value back to key objectives will not be well received, funded or supported for very long.

What is not discussed often enough is the difference of having a social media plan for a local geography vs. a social plan across the globe.  First there are simply more small to medium sized businesses who only need local or country specific penetration, next, social is just now becoming “socially acceptable” as a key differentiator in the c-suite.  This new focus and attention is sure to stretch even the most senior social planners at global companies.  While trailblazers like Dell’s Vice President of Social Media and Community Manish Mehta are paving the way for global practitioners, there are still very few and far between.  Why is it so hard?  Developing a plan and developing a plan at scale at two completely different animals.  A few key reasons are:

  • Sheer volume of potential conversations
  • Vendors with a lack of multi-language support
  • Having enough quality personnel
  • Too many point systems and platforms
  • Differing behaviours of social usage (online, mobile, short messaging, etc)
  • Lack of proven governance models (managing risk, escalation procedures, training)

There are not a lot of good examples in the market on how to tackle a global social media plan and pull it off.  As companies attempt this, it requires some know-how, a lot of creativity, perspiration and follow through.  There are not a lot of people who know that as well as Ken Burbary.  Ken is the Vice President Group Director, Strategy & Analysis at Digitas and will lead the discussion on this topic for #sm95.  The topic and questions are as follows:

Topic:  How to plan a global social media initiative

Q1 – How is social media consumer behavior evolving globally?

Q2 – What model should companies use to manage social media initiatives globally? (centralized, decentralized, hybrid)?

Q3 – How can companies understand consumer social media usage across different markets & countries?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, January 25 at noon ET.  Follow #sm95 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 corporate | 2 Comments »

Social Media Data Management – Privacy, Security and Retention

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

People in general are jumping on social networks at an amazing rate.  They sign up, add a few photos, post some thoughts, invite friends, take a survey, click on a couple of ads pozing as games and before you know it, that individual has a lot of readily available social information they have volunteered.  Knowingly or not, every click that is made tells more and more about the user.  By joining these networks are you giving up your right to that data?  The privacy camps say its your data and you control it.  The social networks are showing (by their actions) that by signing up and using the site for free, you are effectively paying for use of that social network by providing you data to use.  Whether anonymized of not, that data is extremely valuable to the right advertisers.  Those advertisers have proved they will do about anything to get it.

A few examples: Google states that it does not use your data (search, email, now phone) however their recommendations of people to connect with is eerie.  Facebook uses your data to match advertisers up with.  While they may not give it out (or maybe they do http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/facebook-shared-personal-data-with-advertisers-without-user-cons/19485873/).  Anyone with a Twitter feed can find out quite a bit about a person if they were capturing those streams and feeding them into a database.

Are you “paying” to use social networks with your data?  Our moderator this week is a highly sought after social media professional who is a long time contributor to this group.  Ken Burbary is the lead digital and social media strategist for Ernst & Young and is moderating this week’s session on social media data privacy and what companies are actually doing with the data.  Ken brings a wealth of knowledge and, working with highly regulated companies, he brings a hands on perspecitve of the topic.  The topic this week is:

Topic:  Social Media Data Management – Privacy, Security and Retention

TOPIC QUESTIONS

Q1)  What customer data do companies collect and use from social media platforms and web sites?

Q2)  How are companies securing and protecting social media data that that they collect?

Q3)  What purposes are companies retaining social media data for? How are they using it?

Please join us this Tuesday 6/15 for a lively conversation on the value of personal data to companies.  The event starts at 12 noon eastern and run for one hour.  As always, the first question will be asked at noon and then every 20 minutes.  Follow along by tracking #sm64 from your favorite Twitter client or simply use our event page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live we look forward it!

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Social and the New Model For Market Segmentation

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

So you know by now that we attempt to shake things up a bit and challenge people to think differently about topics and their impact on business.  Our topic this week is no exception and with the skills of our moderator, we are going to test those limits.  This week’s discussion is around market segmentation and how social can change how we approach it.

Market segmentation is more than what markers do with homogeneous products before deciding which actress to use in the commercial to best reach a desired consumer group.  Market segmentation is defined by Wikipedia as:

“A market segment is a sub-set of a market made up of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar product and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function.”

This is a good start as a definition, however this does not even begin to scratch the surface.  How do we take this to the next level?  To explore ways by which to re-imagine consumer grouping, we must get past the traditional segmenting like demographics, geographics, income, even behavioral.  For many marketers, they look at data models that break out behavioral with layers of demo and geographics mashed in.  This modeling then determines a budgeted ad spend for a period in time like 3 or 6 months where the messaging is developed, pricing assigned and commercial created.  The problem is that by the time the ads hit, the data models have shifted and the intended groups have moved on.  Now with peer reviews and endless product content the real-time web is heavily influencing consumer preferences  that continue to change with increased velocity.

Savvy marketers have been using insights for more than just marketing also.  Saavy marketers use segmentation for product development, pricing, marketing channel, and even customer retention.  Using the last example, customer retention, the segmenting considers factors like profitability, strategic fit, product version and longevity.  Can you service your customers differently with better targeting for profitability or would you be more proactive with customers who were ripe for renewal or upgrades?  Now consider going beyond your internal gates and imagine the results if you combined internal factors along with external or social listening capabilities.  Maybe that customer who is really loud socially is a drain on your profitability.

So what this means is that the social web is having a profound affect on preferences, therefore insights that are not derived in near-real time are simply missing the mark.  If we open our research and insights departments to the social web, how can they can they use these tools that have never been considered before?  Every company will find different value in different social instances, however there are some great new possibilities that are emerging:

  • What if you titled the buckets of your listening tools with Underserved, Disenfranchised and Contemplators.  Could you use that insight to build better products or price more according to near real-time inputs?
  • What if you targeted people who played Mafia Wars on Facebook or joined relevant fan pages.  Could you use those applications for consumers to self segment themselves and find commonalities?
  • What if you targeted people who used certain hashtags (#) on Twitter or similar platforms.  Could you infer commonalities from everyone who tweeted #farm, #beer or #sweets?

Understanding and using social segmentation is challenging.  The pace at which social moves and the pace by which people flutter around digitally are simply exhausting.  Marketers like General Mills and Coke are early adopters of social segmentation and blazing a trail for others to follow.    This week’s moderator Ken Burbary is going to help us sort out this topic.  Ken manages the social media duties for Ernst & Young where he develops these types of solutions for their respective clients.  The topic this week is:

TOPIC: Social and the New Model For Market Segmentation

Q1) Is traditional market segmentation still relevant?

Q2) What should be more important for Brands: social segmentation or engagement?

Q3) How are you segmenting your customers with Social Media?

Please join us Tuesday 2/23 at noon EST by using #sm48 on Twitter or follow our LIVE page

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