Last month’s Pivot Conference in NYC proved to be a real eye opener – with some of the most cutting edge practitioners of digital marketing tools, language, and techniques sharing their experience.   One speaker in particular, MTV’s Britta Schell, shared her experience about how we as marketers can learn from translating social engagement history and language into insights.   This “digital anthropology” as applied to the social customer experience is different than traditional demographics.  What marketers can glean from social customer interactions is how marketers will differentiate themselves and translate action into meaningful insights and understandings in order to curate better experiences for social customers.

Curate the experience

Beyond the demographics available traditionally to marketers in the past,  there is now a new set of “social dimensions” available to marketers.  ‘Liking’, one’s social connections’ content, posting notifications to friends, and information about what offers your friends are interested in are all indicators that marketers can now consider and leverage for targeting.  With those indicators and other information that people have declared about themselves, marketers may extract knowledge, enabling marketers the ability to slice and dice to segment further – and to offer specifics offers across these new dimensions.  It’s a new marketing philosophy – measurement across myriad dimensions is now possible enabling real time offers and better accuracy.  

A little bit of social data goes a long way

But how do we take stock of social network history, trending topics, and conversations in meaningful ways – ways that enable marketers to segment the social customer target segments effectively and put relevant offers forward?  Let’s take a closer look into one vertical market segment. 

If we take the telecom industry as an example; the way that telecom customer service agents “bond with” or “handle” the end consumer, may determine if they’ll retain or lose that customer or if they should attempt to keep that customer at all.  What happens when a customer who  didn’t pay his last bill comes to your website or opens your facebook app to look at some cool stuff you market? Well, you’re not going to offer more products to defaulters, but you may want to help the customer to become a better payer with a different product and/or by restructuring his debt. There may be several relevant offers to be made to the customer at that point, considering the customer’s preferences.  By taking a closer look at actions of similar customers with similar preferences in similar situations, we are able to postulate whether a certain offer or action will have the desired impact.  

Predictive Segmentation

Having insight through social information and “social importance” can be of great help to marketers in deciding how much to invest in order to get the desired result.  Predictive segmentation uses commonalities and links among customers (including social) to target – but, even more importantly, to predict – the impact of actions on one according to the observed impact on his peers.  Real time predictive segmentation can enable marketers to identify the best actions that impact the behavior of the customer’s friends and similar people or his “social soul mates”. Today’s dynamic nature of social communication, where people tweet, like, dislike or “defriend”, requires those organizations that want to grasp the moment to enable real time marketing capabilities and technologies. I expect to see more real time offers and “inference-based” segmentation in social networks leveraged in organizations whose  systems enable real time customer interactions.

Not only can the ability to predict the impact of the right offers with the right language in real time be a better experience, but it may also lead to better and more optimal promotions by focusing and optimizing marketing actions to the level of “a segment of one” in real time.  In so doing, a higher level of personalization is achieved – resulting in a better experience for the customer.   In turn, loyalty to your company and products will follow.  And those loyal customers will hopefully become advocates of your products and company in their real and virtual life. 

More advocates in the age of social; now which marketers wouldn’t be interested in that?

Author: Shuki Idan     RSS Feed

Dr. Shuki Idan is the Head of Technology and Solutions Management in SAP Labs Israel, overlooking SAP Real Time Recommendation technologies and Machine Learning.

Prior to SAP Dr. Idan held positions in Amdocs, I-WAY Technologies, Radvision, ESPCI and the Israeli Defense Forces.

Dr. Idan has received numerous industry and scientific awards and… View full profile