How we will make social media marketing data-driven

We recently told the world about our new €2M data-driven social media marketing project. We have teamed up with Komplett.no, one of the biggest e-commerce sites in Norway with a €203M yearly revenue, and want to do a real effort to go from thinking to knowing how social media marketing works.

Many have asked us about project details. We can of course not share them all. The project is a part of what will become a critical part of the 24SevenSocial platform and our trade secrets. We hope you understand this. But we will nevertheless share some info.

Background

Social media generates an enormous amount of data. We believe this data is an untapped source of knowledge for advertisers. But there is a need for both structuring, understanding and presenting the data in an understandable way.

(Data is in this sense the buzz word “Big Data”. We see data as data, no matter if it’s big or not.)

Most marketers agree in this need. There are lots of people talking about how we can solve it, but few have really invested.

We want to invest. And that’s what we’re doing. €2M to be exact. Partly funded by Komplett.no, Innovation Norway and Norwegian Research Council after rounds of project discussion and evaluation processes.  Needless to say, we are investing a lot of time, money and effort into this with a team of business developers, programmers, designers, mathematicians and statisticians. Both internally and externally.

What we will do

We understand we are taking on a huge task. We also understand the project is highly uncertain, risky and with an unknown end-result. That is also what excites us.

Two of the challenges we will look into is how value can be defined, structured and measured and analyse which attributes affect the given value for the respective brand.

The project is not about defining the value of single simple metrics such as a “like”. We believe the world is too complex for that. There are always several multiple variables that should be taken into consideration.

The project is neither about finding one single exact value. We doubt that this is possible. But we believe we will be able to find probabilities and relevant correlations that will increase the effect of social media marketing.

What can be shared

The end results will be implemented in the 24SevenSocial platform. During the project we will evaluate which academic papers, results, models and APIs that can be shared. In general, we believe in an open approach, but do not promise sharing anything specific at this point.

Let’s make marketing more analytic, scientific and data-driven!