The Social Research and Analytics Opportunity

I was intrigued by the first class on digital marketing, in particular, the impressive stats on the expected growth in just about every channel of digital marketing – search, display, email, mobile marketing. While each of these channels presents significant baseline growth opportunities, on a more macro level, my mind was focused on the tremendous opportunity this presents for meaningful research and analytics in each of these areas.

With several hundred online methods for customers to voice their opinions on brands on the Web – how can companies get savvy about filtering out the crap and understanding the real data on their brands effectiveness? How can they mine and leverage the vast pools of data from social networks to gain competitive advantage? An example of a company that rode the early wave on analytics and has since been phenomenally successful is Techlightenment. Based in London the company started out creating facebook ad campaigns and has since expanded to using analytics for data insights and market research. Some of their tools include powerful front end surveys in facebook, rich media polls and social research dashboards.

As we progress through the course, it will be interesting to learn whether the sophistication of research and analytics can provide real competitive advantage across the various digital marketing channels. Watch this space.