SIIA Digital Discourse

On the surface, data and social media don’t have that much in common. One is rather definite, the other a bit nebulous; one you can make money from, the other sort of leads you in that direction. What they do have in common is that you kind of have to be educated to succeed in both.

I was fortunate enough to attend an excellent DataContent Conference last year in Philadelphia and get an education on making money through your data—and discover connections between data and social media. I was reminded of that this week reading in The Washington Post about a company called Clarabridge, that used to be a “wonky analytics company” and now is a pragmatic customer service firm. It “culls Web sites, customer service phone calls and social-media sites to help companies make sense of customer feedback.” The idea is that social media—like Yelp, Twitter and Facebook—is transforming customer service. And that unless you monitor social media carefully, you may miss out on what your customers are saying.

“We started thinking to ourselves, what else can we do with this data to make it useful to our customers?” said Sid Banerjee, the company’s owner. “Instead of just providing reporting and analytics, we added a real-time alerting capability that notifies customers when something happens.”

SIPA 2013 attendees—of which there are almost 250 already!—should be very pleased to have the opportunity to hear Megan St. John, the managing director of InfoCommerce, deliver a Pre-Conference Data Bootcamp workshop. InfoCommerce is the company that along with SIIA puts on DataContent. So you will be hearing from the best. The description of the bootcamp says that “the data business is the hottest segment of the information industry.” Attend and you’ll quickly understand why.

Of course, good data companies mine more than just social media. Gordon Anderson, VP of content for InsideView, a company that delivers data on customers and prospects, said at DataContent that a social profile updated yesterday is probably more accurate than something two years ago.” But he went on to say that “information directly out of an audited filing where the penalty is prison is probably better than a social profile…We’re pulling relevance out of data that people publish about themselves”—both in social media and beyond.”

The Post article quoted a client of Clarabridge that credits the company with helping increase their real-time interactions with customers. “Social media continues to be a critically important customer-feedback channel,” Céline Dumais, vice president of consumer affairs at L’Oreal USA, said. “We’ve enhanced how we listen to, understand and act on those conversations across our 27 brands.”

And this is clearly an expanding market. “We’re dealing in a reality where every year, the data volume gets bigger,” Banerjee said. “Every year the types of things that people want to do with the data get more diverse. This is a market where you really can’t stand still.”

As social media expands, our data points do as well. At SIPA 2013, you’ll also be able to learn more about succeeding through social media. Rachel Yeomans, VP of marketing of Astek and Terry Gordon, social media director of AARP, will lead a session titled, Information Now: Social Media – The Big Picture for Marketers. Rachel reaches a lot of younger people—through Astek and her Working Wardrobe website—and Terry reaches a lot of not-as-younger people through AARP, so it should be a perfect mix.

The social media as customer service dynamic has been documented, so it makes sense that data companies would spring up to take advantage. Consumers are happy to go on Twitter and Facebook to air their complaints. And smart restaurants monitor those places. It’s a lot to take in. SIPA 2013 will be the perfect place to get a better handle on this growing dimension—and show you how to make money from it.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline

Here are nine technology tips I’ve heard recommended around the digital water cooler.

1. Google Reader is going away on July 1. The staff of Astek likes Feedly for a replacement. “It’s really easy to use and cleanly designed. It will automatically move your feeds if you use Google Reader now. It takes five minutes to set up and you need a Google account.”

2. A SIPA member told me last week that she really likes brainshark as an alternative to PowerPoint. They’ve increased the maximum size for file uploads from 200 MB to allow brainshark On-Demand, SlideShark PRO and SlideShark Team Edition users to upload up to 500 MB per file.

3. For note-taking—a good skill to have with SIPA 2013 set for June 5-7 (have you registered yet?)—I’ve heard lots of good comments about Evernote. It’s a service that works on your desktop or laptop, on your iPad, iPhone, Android phone, etc., and synchronizes your information across each platform. So if you take a note on your iPad, you can view it later on your smartphone, and vice versa. In addition, Evernote Hello now lets you remember people easier—another good Conference tool—and helps to bring in information about those people you meet.

4. Workflowy is another good note-taking program. Farhad Manjoo of Slate is a big proponent. He says it’s flexible, not complicated, has multiple uses and is easy to learn. Jesse Patel, one of the creators, said that it grew from “a job that was really overwhelming, where I had to manage a bunch of moving parts for 30 different projects…The biggest problem with all of them is that they don’t support flexible data structures—they don’t let you define things how you want. So I was like, ‘I’m just going to start creating a hierarchical interface for myself to manage this stuff.’”

5. Another SIPA member just started using Bento—a smaller version of Filemaker and she “absolutely loves it.” Made for Macs, it’s great for organizing ideas for writing, projects, databases, students in classes, etc.

6. Jay Berkowitz of Ten Golden Rules spoke at last year’s Marketing Conference. Their blog recently mentioned Twitter’s newest ad platform feature—keyword targeting in timelines. “Advertisers can now target promoted tweets to users based on keywords in their latest tweets and the tweets they recently engaged with. The good news is that this enhancement does not result in more frequently displayed promoted tweets, so it’s not intrusive to users. Targeting users based on real-time context signals affords the ability to show more relevant ads. Further targeting is offered based on options such as geographic location, device and gender, with options to use keywords as either phrase match or unordered keyword match.”

7. Today, Google released new tools that try to predict the person’s follow-up questions and answer them, too. According to The New York Times, “Google also uses location information to answer questions. So people can ask, ‘How far from here to Santa Cruz?’ and Google will know where ‘here’ is, or they can ask, ‘How tall do you have to be to ride the Giant Dipper?’ and Google will know that is a ride nearby.”

8. Assignmint is helping freelance writers get paid. According to the Times, “the overall idea of Assignmint is to fix the relationship between writers and publishers, including print outlets and blogs, which until now has been a bit disorderly. The site offers a number of features, including arranging assignments and contracts, setting up editorial calendars and dealing with the not-so-fun aspects of writing, like expenses and payments.”

9. And lastly, from Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Resource Media has a fantastic and free guide to visual storytelling. The guide has great tips like: 1. Always test visuals; 2. Pair visuals with words to increase retention of your message; and 3. Shun bad stock photos. Should work well with next week’s video webinar.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline