As usual this time of the year, there are prediction posts on pretty much every blog I read – digital predictions, marketing predictions, social media predictions… But what influence will all these changes have on the consumer data companies have to store, analyse and use?  

The data will have to follow the shifts in consumers’ lives and the main changes in consumer data that we can expect in 2011 will be driven by all things social and digital:

1. Social networks data

The exponential growth of Facebook and Twitter last year also caused a boom of related applications, share and like buttons etc. More than ever brands want to connect with their consumers in social media; and they want to know what the social media value of the consumers is. To answer these questions, companies will have to start storing that information and connecting it to all other available data about the consumers (consumer centricity, remember? It is a new channel, but it has to be integrated in  the overall picture).



For this reason companies will have to store the information about the consumers who are on Facebook, Twitter and other networks; how many friends or followers they have and how often they share information about the brand. There is a huge difference between that monitoring social media and actually using that information: smart companies have been monitoring social media for a while;  but now they have to figure out how to integrate that information into their consumer database, match it with individual clients and how to use it.

2. Location data

Location based apps and platforms like Gowalla, Facebook Places, Foursquare and many others continue to grow and open a whole new set of opportunities for marketeers. Location based marketing is on top of all marketing trends in 2011, but it requires significant amounts of data to implement it well; and it will produce additional data to analyse. Here the capabilities of combining the GPS coordinates with store data and consumer information will be crucial for successful campaigns. Those who will get the right data expertise for location based marketing will succeed, the rest can expect big costs with limited results.

 

3. Mobile data

All marketing predictions lists expect 2011 to be the year of defining and implementing more mature mobile marketing strategies. According to Forrester however, “Despite increasing activity and more strategic spending, inconsistent data and analytics will plague mobile marketers hoping to make a business case for testing emerging opportunities.” Mobile, as well as social network and location data is very complex – it comes from many different sources, in many different formats, there are huge volumes of it and it has to be kept as real time as possible. For all those reasons it will indeed give big headache to marketeers.  

4. Visualization

In the world of increasing amount and types of data, visualization will become more important than ever, and various dashboard and visualization vendors will experience a year of euphoric interest in their offering. The successful ones will have to offer not only great data view capabilities but also very powerful engines to cope with the amount of data and sources. Unfortunately augmented reality technology is not in the visualization budget of the average marketeer:



5. Data diet  

Despite – or exactly because of – the exponential increase of available and necessary data over the last years, marketers and managers will willingly go on data diet. Brands will focus on measuring only the most relevant information. They will demand the agencies and analysts to cut the amount of data they have to look at and deliver predigested insights and conclusions. This can only be achieved by automation of analytics and segmentation using various algorithms, that will continue to develop and become more complex.

It seems like we have a very exciting year ahead, with a lot of innovative tools and methodologies to discover and implement!


This article was originally posted by Kalina Lipinska on the Bisnode Interact Blog