Editorial Articles

Colin Shearer, WW Industry Solutions Leader at IBM will be among the speakers at TFM&A on 28 - 9 February 2012. He talks to Figaro about the importance of analytics within social media

With the popularity of social media sites, on-line conversations and discussions have become a potential goldmine for marketers looking for insights into how their customers think and feel. Fundamental when looking at social media is understanding what's being said – how topics are linked and the sentiment they convey. 

Predictive analytics is something more advanced marketers have been using for years. That means examining customer data and taking something as simple as a campaign response, looking at the people who responded and from that using algorithms to build a predictive model that helps target the next wave of offers or products.

Now, what's interesting for us, and for many brands and organisations, is how social media and predictive analytics come together. There are really two aspects to this. One is that when you're running multiple campaigns, you can track the social reactions - the buzz - and through collecting that data you can do a 'what-if' analysis. So, what if we took brand 'X' and promoted it using this, this and this tactic? What would be the buzz and how would people react? That's something organisations are starting to move towards.

The other fascinating thing we've seen is using predictive analytics to try to work on advocacy. Imagine all your online bloggers arranged on two axes. What activity do they show talking around your products and services and how favourably do they view them? You have positive ones. You have the people who are negative, and somewhere in the middle are people who are neutral, or who are sometimes positive and sometimes negative.

In exactly the same way that you can predict how customers move up and down the value chain, so you can apply predictive analytics to advocates in order to work which inert ones have the capacity to become active. You can see how the moderately active ones who may only touch on some aspects of your business have the potential to move up and become advocates. And you're looking at which of those advocates are showing predictive signs of declining activity, so you can support them. This is almost applying the techniques of CRM to advocates - tracking social media and then using predictive analytics to decide who to touch and who to help move and in which direction.

The best marketers already have lots of insight into their customers through direct interaction. They now have the potential to reap wider discussions among those customers – and where traditionally they've segmented their customers in terms of a relatively narrow scope of data, they're now able to bring a much bigger lens, and build a much richer picture of their customers, then tailor their offering and target much more successfully. This isn't something you can do with an Excel spreadsheet. You need advanced and packaged analytics to go out and understand all this unstructured data, but once you've got that, the opportunities for marketers are very interesting indeed.

Colin Shearer was talking to Jon Fortgang