Delivering Insights That Matter Through Social Media - Consumer Insights Generation

One of the promises of social media measurement is your ability to potentially better understand your consumer and what is important to them.  So lets take a step back and start asking ourselves a few key questions:

How are the consumer segmented by the advertiser
What are we using to help them better understand their consumer
Why would social media even apply here

So generally speaking segmentation that is applied by agencies is a set of proxied entities that are diluted every time that they are proxied.   Allow me to explain this a bit better....

The client generally starts with sales data or some proxy for sales data such as Homescan data or Scanner data (these are generally cpg oriented but you get the idea).    They then crosstab this information with behavioral or attiudinal (sp) so they can cluster together different attributes and land on a segment that they feel represents their consumer or a potential consumer.  

So when proxying these FURTHER into social media what you are attempting to do is leverage the publicly available NPII data from social profiles in conjunction with the "conversations" they are spawning to attempt to find the match.

Now the biggest issue with profile data is the time capsule issue that occurs with profile data.   The time capsule issue infers that the person I was when I last updated my profile is NOT the person that I am now.  There is a massive decay in the value of some of the "interest" data that appears on social media profiles.   Now the way around that I have found is to use a semantic later to identify "interest" based entitities that are being spoken about with a high emotional appeal and use that to solve the profile issue.  

Ok.  Let's assume we found the "set" of people and content that we feel matches to our consumer segment (non trivial) we can now focus our energy on identifying high value analysis' that help us decompose this consumer so we can leverage the information for social media insights.   I will begin talking about all these information slices in the following posts.

Check out my next post on this subject