ESSAYS
DR WING YEE LEE BUSINESS ANALYST MANAGER AT ADOBE
information is going to give you a better sense of how a customer interacts with your various channels. And in the future, if we really move to electronic money and contactless payments, that will be another way to link a person’s profi le.”
INTO ACTION
So, big data is the sum of all those interactions – digital or otherwise – that a consumer has with your brand. But once that data has been acquired, how can brands start making sense of it? “The key thing to ask yourself here,” says Lee, “is what can you action?” As an example of actionable insight, she points to a Facebook app designed to elicit ‘likes’ and track users’ interest in a particular computer brand. Using that information, she says, the brand in question was able to create a new target for their Facebook ads. “They were getting 43 per cent lower
cost per ‘like’,” says Lee, “so that was actionable information; you gain insight from users’ Facebook engagement and those insights can be applied to your Facebook advertising. When looking at data, you need to be asking questions which you can actually do something about. In search and display, for example, if you are seeing a particular increase in the search volume of particular keywords or products, are you synchronising your display with it? Maybe you should. Once you’ve captured that data, you always need to think what you can do with it; what marketing or advertising can you action?” A fi rst step in answering that question, says Lee, is to properly interrogate your data.
“In terms of analysis, interactive
graphs and charts can really help you visualise your data,” she says. “These are options marketers should really consider, and they might involve working more closely with analysts and mathematicians. As I say, big data enables you to create more synchronised campaigns. In theory, you can act on
up-to-date insights very quickly. But in practice, of course, there can be barriers. If your organisation silos social, mobile, display and so on, it makes execution a lot harder. If you know it’s going to be really hard to push a synchronised campaign based on your insights, then you may have less incentive to really dig deep into the data because you know it’s not going to be actioned. That can be a serious challenge in some organisations.”
e
SOCIAL SIGNALS Nowhere are we, as consumers, leaving a thicker data trail than on social media. How, specifi cally, does Lee this sector fi tting into the big data equation? “Historically, it’s been
address to enter a competition. So you’re giving the user an incentive to provide just one or two pieces of information, but it’s information you don’t easily get elsewhere at such a low price. That makes social media a unique source of information. If you get what you are tracking right, you can get some quite granular information from social.” Finally, how does Lee anticipate the ways in which we collect and manage data developing over the next couple of years?
“One thing right now is a political THE KEY
hard for brands to deliver ROI from social media,” she says. “However, technology is democratising data and with the analytical products now available, brands can track social conversation trends and fi nd out who specifi cally its infl uencers are easily.”
A further benefi t of social media,
explains Lee, is that “You get the sense there of what users are doing, and that’s very important. The good thing about this data is you know it’s specifi c to you. When you’re buying user profi le data from third parties it’s more generic. Social media data is specifi c to your brand. Even if you don’t put in a terms- of-service box (by which users permit sharing of some of their information), you can still have a very simple box where people can input their email
43 issue 17 may 2013
THING TO ASK YOURSELF
WHEN LOOKING AT DATA IS WHAT CAN YOU ACTION?”
culture within companies where everything is very siloed,” she says. “That can prevent execution. But this will be challenged more and more. Secondly, there are technical barriers – and the general human fear of doing something new or going beyond the comfort zone. Marketers may feel they’re not very good with IT or working with complex maths. They may need to work more closely with analysts and
mathematicians – that’s a relationship companies may need to explore. And technical staff need to be able to communicate topics like JavaScript, regression
analysis and the wide range of measurable metrics to people who don’t know what they mean.” So, while the sheer volume of data out
there may seem overwhelming and unstructured, the key to making sense of it relies on something marketers have always understood: it isn’t (just) what you know that drives success. It’s how you put it into practice.
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