Social data – why you need to use it, or lose it!
Toby Beresford, founder of Leaderboarded.com, says if you are business looking to leverage social data in your campaigns, first work out what you’re sifting for in the stream, gain consumer opt-in and then create responses that are triggered as soon as they occur…
An assumption exists in the world of data – that more is better. You don’t know what is going to be valuable in the future, so it’s worth capturing everything now, or so the argument goes.
While I’m sure this sort of thinking has merit in traditional data industries – perhaps where any data is better than no data – in the world of social data, the myriad updates from our social network sites, it stops being true, and quite quickly.
Social data is not a gold seam, ready to be mined. No, it is a stream, and a very fast running one. The Twitter firehose is called so for a reason. Millions of tweets every hour without an off-switch. The social stream is full of hundreds and thousands of micro-stories; from the banal “I really feel like an ice cream right now” to the ultra-banal “Toby has just bought a tractor in Farmville”. Think what literary value you might place on your own ‘stream of consciousness’, multiply that by millions of users and you start to get an idea of the value of the unfiltered stream.
The raw social data stream has had no value added to it. No editor has curated it or processed it. No, the stream is an unfiltered, fast flowing waterfall of everything.
Yet, in the stream, there are the odd stories of genuine interest, a new romantic partner, a beautiful photo or a useful utility shared among friends. These are the signals amid the noise.
It is in finding these interesting stories for us, that the stream filters, the social media machines, come in. Think of Facebook’s News Feed or Gmail’s importance filter or even Google’s page rank.
These social media machines are mini-leaderboard engines, responsible for producing the top ten most interesting stories for you on a single page. They are the new editors, the TV producers or Radio DJ’s of the electronic age. Immense computing power has been applied on a global scale to produce personalised, digestible pages, in real time.
But why is this important? Because these social media machines are exactly what we must seek to mimic, before we can profit from opportunities presented by the social data stream.
It is not sufficient to create machines that simply store the stream. A concept known as the ‘data ocean’. No, we must create machines that can filter the fast flowing data and trigger a personalised response.
Each story on the stream has a finite lifespan during which it has value to a specific business use case.
Take the value of a new pregnancy, for example, to those selling raspberry leaf tea, a herbal accelerant of labour. This life changing moment is shared for all on Facebook, typically with the publication of the image from the three month scan. For those selling raspberry leaf tea, that information has a very definite lifespan, about six months to be precise.
Let us take another example, Jane updates her Facebook status at the end of a movie to say what a great film it is. She has previously signed up with Domino’s Pizza to let them read her status updates. If Domino’s want to offer her pizza vouchers for their nearest restaurant, they have to work fast. They need to know where she posted the update, where the nearest Domino’s is, and of course they’ll need her email address or preferably mobile phone number. Ten minutes too late and she will have gone for a Chinese instead.
In this case, the piece of social data, a cinema related update, has a lifespan of just ten minutes.
So my advice is, if you are business looking to leverage social data in your campaigns, first work out what you’re sifting for in the stream, gain consumer opt-in and then create responses that are triggered as soon as they occur. You need to create machines (or apps) that trigger in response to social data.
And for anything on the stream that doesn’t trigger a predetermined response? Let it pass you by, after all it is yesterday’s news.
Leaderboarded.com is a tool to make leaderboards from the social data stream. Toby is also chief breakfaster at the Social Data breakfast meet-up, held monthly at Google campus.