INDIAN WELLS, CALIF. —Talking about social media’s impact on TV is all the rage. Figuring out how usefully to leverage that is a bit more amorphous. The topic was tackled in a panel discussion Wednesday at the HPA Technology Retreat.
“The interaction with the customer is changing,” said Kurt Kyle of SAP. “Content is going directly to the consumer.”
This means anarchy for traditional metrics. Content providers and those who support them are trying to bring order to the chaos, or at least convince media companies that there’s value in mining social media data: 59 percent of media organizations have no analytics tied to content management; 94 percent use social media solely for marketing; 64 percent still rely on “very manual content distribution cycles;” 97 percent have no automated, real-time analytics, according to Social Media Today, HP, SE-AIA and Forbes.
Paul Mears of Nielsen noted that the metrics firm “sees about 200 million transactions per day. That data means nothing without processing it.”
Christy King of the UFC said, “Every element of a transaction is important. If someone doesn’t tell anyone else they’re watching a movie, it doesn’t do you any good. You have to find those talkers who make your content sound important… As long as people are talking about the UFC, it’s all good.”
Jeff Caldwell of HP warned against forecasting based on social media trends.
“It’s a dangerous slope to believe we can predict things through social media data,” he said.
Mears responded that Nielsen vendor Catalina Marketing, monitors purchases, in grocery stores for example, and measures how effective advertising is by the number of purchases. There is a saying that half of advertising is effective, he said.
“We have the ability to know which half is being affected,” he said. “We can be a little bit more targeted with that ad.”
King said UFC’s world was not as all-inclusive as Nielsen’s.
“There’s a world of sports fans,” she said. “Does it behoove the UFC need to know anything about a football fan?”
What they need to know is how to figure out a way to get that football fan to become a follower of the UFC, she said.
“If we can figure out how to do all of this going backward, then we can figure out how to market going forward,” she said. “How do you get something in front of people who control everything they see with something new? The point is not to react to data that’s old. Its about how to get in front of people in the moment, and joining conversations in the moment.”
