Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

A four-step process for generating useful knowledge from social data.

Big data is great. But we should consider that we've actually had more data than we can reasonably use for a while now. Just on the marketing front, it isn't uncommon to see reports overflowing with data and benchmarks drawn from millions of underlying data points covering existing channels like display, email, website, search, and shopper/loyalty — and new data streams such as social and mobile engagement, reviews, comments, ratings, location check-ins and more.

In contrast to this abundant data, insights are relatively rare. Insights here are defined as actionable, data-driven findings that create business value. They are entirely different beasts from raw data. Delivering them requires different people, technology, and skills — specifically including deep domain knowledge. And they're hard to build.

...Here's a four-step marketing data-centered process that doesn't stop at the data, but focuses instead on generating insights relevant to specific segments or affinity groups...

[Good suggestions for social media measurement from the Harvard Business Review - JD]

Social media managers looking to prove their ROI of what they do, today have a new option for tracking social analytics, thanks to the official public launch of a service called Ohtootay.

Crazy name aside, the solution lets companies track their efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. But one of its more unique features in this crowded space is something which allows businesses to track their posts all the way through to website conversions, even when the original post didn’t point directly to their e-commerce site....

One of the platform’s standout features is its competitor comparison tool. That is, it can track what your company’s performance looks like versus competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even the iPhone App Store, Android app store (Google Play) and Facebook’s App Center. “In some senses, Ohtootay is compete.com for social media and mobile apps,” Mark [Otuteye] explains. “And we believe that angels, VCs and social media managers that are armed with this kind of data will be way more effective decision makers than their peers who only navel-gaze at their own data in isolation,” he says....

[Moving beyond the last click with a promising social media measurement tool - JD]