An interesting article from The Economist highlights an emerging industry in the Great Big Social Media-verse that could become very relevant to marketers over the next few years (or more likely months!): the analysis of huge amounts of social media data in real time to track product trends and consumer chatter and thus (presumably) identify instant marketing opportunities.
On the surface this doesn’t seem terribly ingenious, Google has been tracking our search requests to better target advertising at us for years, but when you search something like a tweet you’re getting access to a much more intimate expression of a person’s sentiments, not to mention whatever detailed info they might have in their account bios and how many people are following them.
DataSift serves both big corporations and individuals. Customers can define sophisticated filters, for instance to find all tweets by men who are interested in a new product and live in London. Charges for DataSift depend on the filter’s complexity and the amount of data delivered.
Privacy addicts may cry foul but these companies aren’t searching for anything that isn’t already public, they’re just doing it on a much bigger scale than any individual user could ever do. What’s interesting is that along with data aggregation firms like DataSift and Gnip there are also offshoot, sub-industries forming like Lexalytics that specialize in analyzing the data to try and extract meaning from all those zany hashtags and RTs.
As I’ve always said the use of social media data is already starting to mirror how financial firms use commerce data:
Financial firms have become interested in feeding such data into the algorithms they use to make investment decisions, says Chris Moody, Gnip’s president. And corporations are increasingly keen on combining social-media data with customer information.
Along with services like Klout and the SBI we seem to be moving ever closer to an era where social data will be measured and valued just as much as financial data and may even become synonymous for some businesses.
