If knowledge is power, a marketer having access to copious amounts of social data on their brand’s customers and prospects would have to leave them feeling pretty pumped up wouldn’t it?
It doesn’t.
So far, it has way too many of them feeling frustrated, anxious, and frozen with indecision. It presents them with a fire hose of riches they know is available, know they should be taking advantage of, but that they aren’t sure exactly how to structure, manage or incorporate.
Asked what things they feel unprepared for most over the course of the next 3-5 years, 71% of marketers cited the explosion of data. Coming in 2nd at 68% was social. So you can imagine how they feel about their ability to maximize the explosion of social data! And that’s at today’s data levels, in which Facebook brings in about 500x more data daily than the New York Stock Exchange. The volume of data will be “exploding” from there.
Why do you need to figure out the social data conundrum? That’s the way you’re going to achieve the “right person/right content/right time/right place” marketing dream we so often read about. A couple of free Oracle assets, the webcast “Mining Data for Social Insights,” and the white paper “The Value of Social Data,” can be the start of your tapping into the fire hose of data and turning it into actionable info.
And make no mistake, such data can lead to effective real-world action. It has done so in charitable/social services, it has done so around disaster relief efforts (after super storm Sandy, the Red Cross pulled in 2.5 million+ social posts, isolating almost 300 passed on to operations for action), and it can do so in marketing as increasingly mobile consumers expect relevant, location-aware, needs-based offerings from brands.
This hyper-awareness of the customer is also going to serve you in terms of knowing what kind of content to create so time isn’t wasted producing and pushing things they couldn’t care less about. And it will help focus your engagement efforts on the social users who can do you the most good, influencers that get you in front of the most people. Both benefits brought to you courtesy of effective social listening.
Being presented with today’s social data possibilities is like getting a brand new Harley Davidson as a gift when you’ve never ridden a motorcycle in your life. You know it’s cool, it’s shiny, it has a lot of power and can really take you places, but you’re going to have to get on it and learn to ride it first. Sure, that’s awkward at first, but it’s the necessary first step to the smoother ride ahead.
@mikestiles@oraclesocial
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