Fools’ gold? Marketing Week interviews Daniel Nelson
Could social media ever offer up a rich seam of customer data, or is it just a mine of useless information? A rush of data companies are trying to turn the medium into a data goldmine. Lucy Fisher investigated and spoke to Daniel Nelson on the subject…
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the key benefit of a Facebook presence for mydeco.com is enhanced brand engagement
‘First you needed a website. Then you needed a social media strategy. But how many of us have actually started integrating data from social media into our overall customer database management processes? And how many of these are actually integrating ‘hard’ data – such as data that tracks customers as they undergo situational changes – say by moving house, getting married, or changing job?
Daniel Nelson, social media marketing manager at mydeco.com, says the key benefit of a Facebook presence for the online retailer is enhanced brand engagement.
The broad information – such as gender, age, country of residence – that can be gleaned from activities on the brand’s page, he says, enables his team to tailor content in line with what is generating the most ‘likes’ or comments. “On Facebook, we can see that 25- to 34-year-old females make up most of our fans, which means we can produce content with that in mind,” he says. “You can get an idea from the interactions on your page what your fanbase is responding to, but we’re not at the point where we’re doing data mining on social channels.”
In technology terms, there are tools out there to aid data collection and management, he says, but they tend to be quite expensive and constantly involved in a game of catch-up with the social media platforms – and among themselves. “It’s something of a goldrush. There’s always a new one coming out that’s apparently the definitive one. We get a lot of cold calls, but when we ask, ‘Can it do this?’ they tend to say, ‘Not yet,’” he adds.’