The Future of Social Media in Customer Insight

If someone opened the curtains behind the window to their soul, would you look in?  What if you were a marketer and this was your consumer unveiling his inner thoughts?  Or perhaps this thought process is too deep.  What if they were merely unveiling their intentions for you to see, as unadulterated and unfiltered as possible?  For a marketer, that would be a dream come true.  Enter the realm of social media.

In 2011, the Arab Spring caught the world by storm…but not really.  In actuality, a small think tank using google analytics and tracking the words used on social media and in general queries managed to predict the chaos.  By using popular movies, celebrities, and common searches as a benchmark they were able to uncover rising interest, and unrest, regarding certain policies, political figureheads, and potential means of expression the discontent.  You may ask, “What’s the point?” the digital universe that we live in on a day to day basis holds a wealth of indicators about what we’re thinking, feeling, desiring, and, as the Arab Spring showed, planning.  What’s even better is that these indicators point to the future even when we don’t realize our plans.

Noreena Hertz, a leading economist in the UK, successfully developed an algorithm that employed this idea.  By developing an algorithm and program that listens to and analyzes the tweets of social media users she was not only able to determine the topic but determine the sentiment of a group at large regarding a situation.  Her experiment correctly picked winners of “The X Factor” prior to results being released.

This idea goes even further.  With Google running a tethered service of sites that all share data as microcosms of Google’s overall idea, what are the potential applications social media based data in marketing?  What is the current state of lifestyle media for extracting customer insights?  What are the restrictions?  Best of all, where is this idea going and where does most of its potential lie?

When people think of social media, often times their minds immediately run to the idea of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and maybe even Orkut if they’re perusing around Brazil.  In reality, lifestyle media is becoming social media.  On my phone, I have MyFitnessPal, in which I store what I eat daily to analyze later in pursuit of my health goals.  I also share this journal selectively with other fitness freak friends. Hypothetically speaking, developing a Machine to Machine (M2M) protocol that allows this and other related apps to share my data would provide an interested party access to my eating habits and schedule, my tastes, what a typical shopping

basket looks like for me, the brands that I care about, my demographics, and so much more. Access to data in Yelp, a popular social media tool for reviewing and identifying restaurants to suit a variety of tastes, would tell an interested party which areas of town I’m willing to travel to for food, which places I’m not willing to travel to, how far I’d be willing to travel for various types of food, and how frequently I may visit particular restaurants.  Accessing the locational data from any social media app could do the same.  Past patterns are a solid indicator of future patterns.  But what are the restrictions in all of these ideas?

Privacy is a huge issue for most users, though they leave locational data open to their favorite phone apps.  Would people share locational data with an interested party? If the value provided exceeds the cost, or perceived risk, the answer will be a clear yes.  The ability of machines to speak in the same language, or protocol, also stands between the present situation and ultimate success.  Varying applications storing data in varying formats makes the

data difficult to aggregate into a usable format.  What could the answer be?  Companies are actively dedicating resources to developing standard M2M protocols.  Google has been a huge proponent of open platforms such as with Android, just as the Linux crew has been.  The more important issue is if all of this was possible and would the end state be worth the journey? Absolutely.

The intuitive nature of Apple’s products came from Steve Job’s insistence on basing the functionality of his products on empirical evidence of how people interacted with machines, technology, and the world.  Social media provides data on these interactions, habits, and desires for 72% of the population.  By nature, social media is a platform that people use to express themselves and share personal information.  Sir Jobs of the Apple clan was without a doubt impressive in understanding the needs that people didn’t know they had yet.  In leveraging this mountain of data, finding a way to aggregate it, understanding its potential, and innovating a process for understanding it, we may find the next Apple fueled by the insight of the next Steve Jobs.

What does all of this point to?  Social media and lifestyle media have invaded our lives in force.  Oddly enough, it can’t be considered an invasion because we’ve welcomed it with open arms.  We depend on social media, living our lives and communicating through it daily while we share…everything.  The marketer with customer insight foremost in mind takes deep interest in what makes the customer who they are, and what endears the customer to his brand.  By leveraging this virtual journey map and trail through cyberspace, the marketer has one more tool in his tool box to provide exactly what the customer wants and needs, even when that customer doesn’t realize it.  What role will social media and lifestyle media play in the future of customer insights? How are marketers leveraging these tools now and how can we best position ourselves for the future use of this tool?  In my research to come, delving into current and rising trends and theories of social media’s use for customer insight in the future, I hope to find out.  The ultimate goal?  Insight into social media as a tool for customer insight.