Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Is Social Media Changing How We Do Math Too?


 2+2=4, or does it? Maybe two potential customers plus two potential customers equals four potential customers, but those numbers have taken on a whole array of new factors.  Social media offers tremendous new opportunities to analyze metrics for digital marketers. Insights into user behavior, if identified well, provide creative platforms in which to gauge ROI. 

Fab.com, a growing design e-tailor owes much of its success to this new social media math. Not only do investors want to see real time and projected purchases, more notably, customers are interested. People are curious to know what others like and are much more likely to recommend those items to their friends. Simple math would recognize that one ad would yield a certain number of members. Yet through the power of social media, one member invites a group of friends of which some become members as well. As founder, Jason Goldberg comments on ads “It was basically buy one, get one free. We were looking at the viral coefficient of the ad, so suddenly your costs went way down.”

I think customer analytics companies have a very bright future in this digital age. Information is everywhere and becoming more readily available. How we creatively analyze the data to glean true insights will likely separate those that succeed from those that don’t.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/business/fabcom-and-the-value-of-online-word-of-mouth.html

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