With all the social media and influence measurement tools available today, the communications sector should be understanding more about what makes us happy and productive, and what motivates us to participate in social conversations.

Unfortunately, the reverse seems to be true.  Understanding about what makes an authentic engagement, and what constitutes a satisfied and committed social community is as unclear as ever[1]. And the reason for this comes down to a misunderstanding of the differences between insights and inference. Read More »

In amongst the good, the bad and the ugly of this year’s Technology for Marketing and Advertising exhibition at Earl’s Court (The ‘ugly’ being in the form of huge queue lengths to get into any of the seminars), I was lucky enough to get into a fantastic talk by Mark Zablan, Managing Director of Experian, and Simon Wilkinson, Head of Global Consumer Marketing at Dr Martens. The theme of the 40-minute presentation was ‘Big Data’, and how to filter that down to the ‘Right Data’; the stuff that will help you pinpoint and focus exactly how and what you serve up to your consumers, both offline and in digital. With a continuing focus on content marketing in social, it was a pertinent discussion around how to refine and target this content to create ‘sticky’ consumer experiences based on informed data.

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I really care about databases.  It may not make for great dinner party conversation, but a well-maintained database has always been essential to marketers who want to understand and connect with customers.  Social media has taken this information gathering to a whole other level and I hold all kinds of data on myself now. Millions of us are going about our daily lives collecting data on all kinds of platforms that would make marketers giddy with excitement. Read More »

An interesting pilot project here completed by HP shows that data from social media can be merged with company data (ticket sales, customer demographics et cetera) to predict customer behavior with up to 90% accuracy.

The pilot shows that collaboration between marketing and IT departments is critical to unlocking the business value of social media.  The system used can correlate social media conversations about specific product features to actual customer transactions in real-time. Read More »

A really interesting talk here given by Genevieve Bell, who leads a group of anthropologists at chip firm Intel, who was speaking at the the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this week and gave a great talk about what would happen if “data were a person”.

Her talk, called, naturally enough, ‘The Secret Life of Data’ looks at some of the different stories and secrets that exist within data. Read More »

Infographics are transforming the way we see data, shifting us away from boring, stuffy tables and towards beautiful graphics which communicate complex ideas in a clear and simple way. If you’re a real data visualisation enthusiast, get ready to drool over Visual.ly. Read More »

There has been a lot of talk of social media being the death of email, especially with the latest developments at Facebook. Sorry, I just can’t see that yet. At Jobsite we are currently sending out over 5,7m job alerts per week (a year on year increase of 33%) which result in over half of all job applications made. And social media delivers not even a fraction of that. What I can see however, is that social media enhances email and email enhances social media -another proof point of the increasing convergence of media channels. Read More »

PepsiCo brand Gatorade is taking its social media strategy very seriously indeed – so much so that it has built a mission control centre replete with screens beaming out brightly-coloured visualisations of what people are saying about it on the likes of Twitter. Read More »

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has reacted to public and media condemnation over the use of its members’ personal data by promising to add privacy controls to the site in the coming weeks. Read More »

This is rather worrying – Facebook and MySpace have been sending people’s personal data to advertising companies, breaking promises to consumers that they do not share information without consent, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Read More »