Digital marketing matured in 2014. Brands recognized the need to become more sophisticated with customer insights, while advertising platforms explored ways to accommodate demands of marketers searching for ways to engage customers on and offline. The result has been the emergence of more complex targeting tools and points of purchase.
The marketing and advertising worlds are evolving to incorporate data into campaign research and measurement. In this week’s Weekly Wrap-Up, we share our top picks charting the changes across the digital marketing landscape.
The Myth of Social Media
Early last year, Gallup published a controversial study, claiming that corporate social media efforts are largely ineffective and generally do not influence consumer buying decisions. The research firm cited polls conducted last year in which roughly 18,000 people were asked to share their opinions on the topic. Gallup was correct to stress the need for brands to look beyond “likes” and impressions, to demand more quantitative forms of measurement.
Venturing one step further, tools to harness third party data have become available to provide audience analyses at such a scale as to make social media a viable place for brands to invest and expect returns.
Facebook Emotional Contagion
This summer, Facebook published the results of a computational social science study by Kramer, Guillory and Hancock (2014). The paper implied that emotional states as expressed in posts on social media are contagious in that “they affect whether readers of those posts reflect similar states in their own later posts”. Folks across social media were enraged with the knowledge that Facebook intentionally manipulated data in order to illicit user response.
Folks from the People Pattern’s data science team explored the controversy in a three-part series. Co-founder Professor Jason Baldridge penned an overview of the controversy, followed by a second post by Director of Engineering, Joey Frazee, which explored similar activities that fall within the same grey zone, but that did not generate the same outcry.
Finally, we published a third post that allowed folks to test the experiment for themselves by opting-in to the study.
The Emergence of Market Research in Social Media Campaigns
In August, The New York Times published a story highlighting Facebook’s early move away from organic media to a paid form that relied heavily on market research technologies and an emphasis on showing ROI.
The move marked a shift in the interpretation of social media marketing, and breathed new value into paid media. The days of ROI as “Return On Influence” are over. In this short piece, social media pioneer and People Pattern co-founder, Ken Cho, explains the paradigm shift and explores the exciting implications for marketers.
IBM Partners with Twitter
Earlier this year, IBM and Twitter announced a partnership that will incorporate Twitter data into IBM data. The move will further enhance IBM’s solutions with deeper information. The alliance is strategic. By incorporating social data into their solutions, IBM is propelled into the marketing playing field, and Twitter is further positioned as an enterprise solution.
As methods for analysis improve, companies become better able to make informed decisions for bolder marketing efforts.
Facebook Curtails Unpaid Marketing Efforts
Beginning January 2015, Facebook will limit organic distribution of promotional brand content. The move, announced November 14th, involves the implementation of a new algorithm that will filter out posts that push people to buy, enter a sweepstakes, or simply recycle the same content used in paid promotions. Facebook published a blog post explaining the move as an effort to provide a better user experience by limit irrelevant advertisements.
The announcement is the most aggressive in Facebook’s move to paid media.
The digital marketing landscape is quickly evolving to meet the demands of a more conscious consumer based. While 2014 was characterized by a shift in how marketers approach customer engagement, we look forward to more refined methods for customer insights in 2015.
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