A couple of weeks ago we featured a video from the Forrester Marketing Forum that asked the question “Is data the secret sauce to marketing innovation?” I wanted to share my own thoughts about social media data, and how it is forcing marketing innovation.
Social media is so quantitatively and qualitatively different from other sources of consumer data that marketers have only two choices: ignore it or innovate like crazy.
Many industries have begun to recognize the importance of an effective social strategy to stay competitive, and the pharmaceutical industry is no exception. Beginning on Monday, May 2 the Advanced Research Institute will present its annual Social Media for Pharma conference in Princeton, NJ. Over 20 companies will be speaking at the event about planning for effective development, execution, and evaluation of Web 2.0 strategies.
The conference provides a forum for pharmaceutical professionals to share experiences and successes in the social media realm. In addition to the wide range of speakers, the event provides a number of opportunities such as networking lunches and unique workshop sessions covering topics such as:
This week celebrates Social Media Week, a global event platform for conversation, collaboration and learning to advance the understanding of social media’s role in society. I was checking out the event Website and its history – pretty impressive as it began in New York in 2009 and in two years has become a nine-city, biannual, global event. I couldn’t help but think back to its founding year and reflect on social’s growth since 2009, a year that was a true turning point in the evolution of social media and ways businesses engaged.
When I think back to 2004/2005, social media began with a few million blogs and the start of social staples like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Along the way it picked up Twitter and continued to grow at an alarming pace, further fueled by increases in Internet use and smart phone adoption. Brands could no longer ignore its impact on their business and many began to monitor and listen to online conversations. They began see the value in directly connecting with their customers through social media. By 2009, what was a few million blogs grew to 126 million, Twitter hit 27.3 million tweets per day, Facebook commanded a user base the size of a large country and social had become serious business – changing forever how businesses market, sell and service their customers.
When I first started as an Account Manager at Visible two years ago most of the social listening projects I worked on were with small groups from Interactive teams, Market Research or Corporate Communications from within large and often exceptionally diverse global corporations. As the “social media” folks within their organization they often found themselves on the cutting edge but also somewhat isolated from everyone else because social was something different and not necessarily something for everyone within the company. What we found though is that as you listen to conversations across social media channels and pay attention to how people feel about your company and how your products or services are resonating with your target market you can find yourself saying “oh this is totally something that other people in our company should know.”
These are opportunities for utilizing Social Intelligence across business groups. Enterprise-adoption of social intelligence has grown exponentially as we learn to move from listening by specialized groups within an organization to normalizing social across the company moving it from cutting edge to “something we just do”.
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Is Social Media more or less anonymous today? A look at the numbers—Part 2
Posted by Jackie Kmetz on July 26, 2011In the previous post we looked at the degree of anonymity across the four largest volume media types in our data repository and saw that blogs are leading the pack in authors choosing to remain veiled in mystery when making their online contributions. This discovery prompted me to look a little deeper, particularly in relation to the question of whether or not the growth in popularity of Facebook and other social networks like Google+ where people more openly identify themselves has influenced how people handle their activity across Blogs and Forums over the last three years.
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