This document discusses how blending social media data with other data sources can provide business insights. It provides 6 examples of companies that blended social data with weather data, customer relationship management (CRM) data, event check-in data, liquor licensing data, and other third party data. This blending allowed the companies to learn more about customer preferences, improve advertising targeting, increase sales, and adapt brand perception. The document advocates that social media is just one part of understanding the business, customers, and market, and greater insights come from blending social data with other relevant data sources.

1. Connecting Social to Dollars/
The Magic of Blended Data
Will | @willmcinnes

2. 2

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5. @willmcinnes | @brandwatch

6. Let’s get this
straight.

7. Simple Idea #1
As social moves from a silo to being better through its
connection to everything else in an organisation, so does
social data.

8. Centralized Distributed Coordinated Multiple
Hub & Spoke
Holistic
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

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10. Simple idea #2
That getting an edge matters.
And the best way to get an edge
with social data is to blend it.

11. Caution!

12. For every beer and nappies…
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

13. ...there are 17 spurious correlations.
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

14. 3 main risks with social data
1. Sample/selection bias
Assuming people on social are representative of the people you're
interested
Assuming the people you're interested in are posting on social
2. Inference problems
Things like sentiment, gender, location, etc. are inferred with less
than 100% accuracy
3. Being creepy
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

16. Raw ingredients
1. Great quality social data you can manipulate
2. Great quality other data
3. Analyst or data science resource

18. 6 stories to
Enlightenment

19. Be real.
These are all real examples.
All but one are Brandwatch customers.
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

22. Goal:
Blend social data with weather data to find insights
How:
Got social data for customers talking about consuming their ice cream
product using
Got weather data for the same period
Outcome:
Found there were meaningful increases in people talking about eating
ice cream when the weather was bad.
Used that to inform their future advertising strategy
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

24. Goal:
Jump in to conversations about test drives to signpost potential buyers
to local dealers
How:
Queries set up to locate social mentions that mention car model names with ‘test
drive’, dealers names
Using Rules, Categories and Tags to automatically filter these conversations by
Colour, Model, Brand, Dealer etc.
Then matching CRM details of known customers with social handles to explore
the potential of social CRM at scale (they already have a database of >1m
customers on Social)
Outcome:
Increase in car sales from test drives

26. Goal:
More effective ad spend and return visits to their parks
How:
Identified people who met demographic criteria in each of their theme
park DMA region.
Identified topical areas of interest in those demographic segments, by
region
Fed those topics into tailored regional advertising campaigns
Outcome:
Uplift in ticket sales + increase in per ticket revenues
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

28. Goal:
Change and Adapt Brand Perception
How:
Matching offline physical event check-in data with the social
conversations around each of the physical events
Matching social handles to offline identities and then observing and
learning
Outcome:
New evidence and insight into which events drive the most brand
favourability change
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

30. Goal:
Sell beer in the coolest bars to remain current by giving sales team
precise lists of targets
How:
Identified bars in each of their target cities across USA with cool, up and
coming reputations, using social data
Cross-referenced that list with Liqor Licensing Bureau data and own
CRM to give sales teams
Outcome:
Directly measurable sales uplift
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

32. Goal:
Understand which brands and items their existing customers
were talking about publicly
How:
Acquired mentions for the key brands that they sell
Worked with a third party vendor to match social identities to their own
CRM database
Outcome:
Used information to promote those brands and items via the website
and email. ROI ‘made the leaderships’ jaws drop’
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

33. The point is that it’s not just about social
anymore
• It’s about the business
• The customers
• The market
• Social is just part of it
@willmcinnes | @brandwatch

36. What about
the plateau of
productivity?

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39. @willmcinnes | @brandwatch

40. China rates its own citizens – including
online behaviour

42. @willmcinnes | @brandwatch

43. So what?

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45. now you know