I just returned from speaking at the Chief Marketing Technologist Exchange conference where I had the opportunity to listen to and meet with several martech industry leaders while there -- people like the @chiefmartec himself, Scott Brinker, who is not only an influencer but a super smart creative who is a masterful blend of Picasso’s perspective and Edison’s utility, and leaders from McDonald’s, Netflix, HP and more. Throughout the conference, one message was clear: To be effective today, you must be holistic in perspective and utility.
Today’s martech landscape needs its own navigational chart like this one. In fact, at last count, there were approximately 224 social media listening/monitoring/analysis platforms on the market. Do you need to use several of them to be effective? No. There are two perspectives, or lenses, to consider; the first being satellite-level imagery.
Satellite imagery has been used for decades in a myriad of ways, from observing environmental changes, property tax measurements, and military intelligence to monitoring war crimes. The power of its perspective and utility cannot be underestimated. It’s effective, increasingly precise and can illuminate new trends when used as a strategic tool. The same thing exists online through the help of marketing technology. Strategic level trends and insights can be tracked quite effectively with products like Brandwatch and Spredfast. In fact, we advocate for the adoption of these satellite imagery tools as part of a company’s marketing analytics arsenal.
In most cases, once an area is identified as a hotspot, more precision is needed. In the case of hunting down criminals, a closer look would be required by a forward observer, sniper, or CIA assets like those depicted in this movie. In the marketing world of the last decade, we would rely on flat analytics like views, pixels, and likes. While informative, these are certainly short of actionable intelligence.
The brilliant imagery analysts can usually pinpoint accurate details from space, but cannot discern the type of lock on a door, economic condition of a neighborhood or public sentiment. For this we need binoculars.
Binoculars provide us with a narrow but up close perspective -- a higher level of fidelity to uncover more actionable data, or in some cases, validation of a hunch. Ideally, marketers have a simple solution that provides both the satellite level imagery married with binocular level assessment so they can discover and engage the most credible voices sharing their content and validate their marketing spend. For example, when music industry leader, Vevo, began using the VizSense platform for strategic level insights to evaluate the success of Adele’s online video for “Hello”, they were also able to see, within the same image, the specific impact that influencers like @ziperativo had upon a video’s network influence while uncovering details about this Sao Paulo, Brazil organization that commands mega influence in the music industry.
It’s likely that many large brands have numerous sets of binoculars and satellite imagery in their martech arsenal, but nothing that is holistically integrated, and many of our current clients have found us through their desire for integration of a variety of perspectives and utility. In the next few months we will be surveying potential satellite partners to combine our talents and provide an even more detailed, informative and valuable service to our clients. Feel free to hit us up here if you’re interested.
To learn more about how VizSense helps marketers harness the power of Big Data and influencer marketing to identify and activate their advocates to improve revenue and profit, visit us here.
