Big Data Steps Up a Gear

Last week, I attended Brandwatch’s Master Class event in central London. Having nosed around some elements of their data and social media management tools, I thought this would be a great way to understand better their offering. I was really interested in its potential for publishing specifically and more broadly for brands (which let’s face it most companies in this space design their platforms to support). Also, I’m not going to lie - there was free food (and socks). 

It’s really easy to get a little blinkered as you get more and more into social data specifically. The tendency is to think all marketing and comms teams at every major brand must be moving to this method for a better understanding of their consumers. If you stood in the room and surreptitiously looked at the lanyards - you would have seen everyone from IKEA to Vodafone. But when you talk to brand agencies or people in publishing you will find that they’re still relying on industry data or survey companies to do most of their analysis - and they are not thinking at all about the potential of social data beyond some day to day work. In fact, many of the people in the room that day, I would guess, are still largely thinking of Brandwatch in terms of brand share of voice, reputational management or social media platform tools. And those were the main reasons they were there.

Brandwatch clearly designed the day to show them the combined power of their data tools. The jury is a little out on how many of those teams in the room were ready to invest in data analysts that would be able to leverage it or marketing teams that were up to the challenge to use it and incorporate it into their work. Let’s face it, given the state of the economy and freezes on hiring just getting on with business as usual are more of an imperative right now.

“A trend is sustained change in consumer behaviour within a particular market or audience”

Nevertheless, we saw some brilliant case studies and demonstrations of how to use the platforms to present stories to teams about consumers that were really relevant to growing a business. We also had a few glimpses of new data to come like Podcast audiences and *some* public FB data. Plus new elements are to be added to their advertising/all-in-one social media management platform - like LinkedIn.

My two favourite presentations were the final bigger-picture ones. Both looked at trends data. The first looked at micro fashion trends through the lens of social data and brand share of voice. They looked at “preppy” fashion as a trend and were able to track its movement from a couple of niche brands into the high street and posited that some brands (Nike) were quite close but not in the trend and so could be. ASOS were in the room I noticed so… y’know. Although I still hope all their trends meetings look like this.

So what does this mean beyond brands? And what about creative content industries like publishing? A couple of caveats here for those of a nervous disposition. No, I don’t think you can publish based on “computer says yes”. Can you take some info from social media or trends to *support* a case to publish (mostly in non-fiction) a largely unheard-of author or idea? Absolutely, it’s already happening. Could it better inform metadata decisions or books that are almost entirely search-led? Absolutely. Will there always be wild cards and is gut instinct important? Absolutely. Gaining consumer insight via data (social or otherwise) can also really help you stand back from a project and see it more clearly in terms of positioning. And it can help you keep on top of fast-moving audiences and how to reach them in a shifting media landscape.

The final presentation - nervously introduced it seemed by the sales head (a bit of theatre maybe?) - was brilliant. This was led by Paul Siegel who has some very obvious nerdy enthusiasm for the subject. And this was all about spotting and predicting trends that are emerging. He spoke about information theory and used Wordle as an example - if you are strategic with that first move (and if you have to, the second) - you’re more likely to get to an answer. If you can run an algorithm that can work predictively (like predictive text) and it’s clever enough - it can predict where a trend is going. It’s a complicated problem but, he reassured us, they were working on it - and we could expect a product sometime next year.

The business cases were not really shared in detail - although for publishing certainly - they’re quite obvious. There was a mention of social content - jumping on trends as they emerge for leverage for your brand on social, maybe product development. And we were left with some hints as to where to look to know you might be onto the next big thing. And then we were done. All in all, a pretty interesting day.