MONITORING AND ANALYSING ONLINE CONVERSATION

This is Gatorade Mission Control, where they analyse online buzz around the brand. It's pretty impressive. And a big investment, and commitment.

According to Mashable, "The room features six big monitors with five seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards –- also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom built with partners including Radian6 and IBM" Read more about it on mashable.

This area is now gaining rapid traction as a discipline. Just last week McKinsey, and Nielsen joined forces to create a new company called NM Incite. The new firm will take on from where Nielsen BuzzMetrics left off, and use buzz monitoring to help transform business operations including product development, marketing, communications and customer service. With the creation of this new venture, BuzzMetrics becomes wholly part of NM Incite.

It's getting very interesting.

THE FIGHT IS OVER: NEW EGG CAMPAIGN

Publicis Modem and Egg launch The Fight Is Over

See more Egg videos on YouTube

Egg on Twitter

MINING THE SOCIAL GRAPH

Social CRM has become the next buzzword you'll have to master.

You'll need to know:

1. A bit about Facebook and Twitter; and
2. A little about CRM strategy
3. A lot about data analytics
   

The problem with the current hype around social CRM is that there are lots of people evangelising their skills who know about point 1 (Facebook and Twitter) but know little about CRM, and data, and the 40 year old science that sits around it.

We - in digital - are fond of re-learning the lessons of advertising over and over again. Our contempt for traditional advertising obfuscates our opportunity to learn. Social CRM is still in its infancy, and is better described as social direct marketing. Lester Wunderman - generally considered the father of direct marketing- introduced a "direct marketing" approach to service his clients, using the medium of clients’ mailboxes as a way to develop a more personal connection with potential customers than general advertising had previously found possible. Exchange the word mailbox for Facebook account, and add the fact that your friends can see and act on these messages in your mailbox, and we are talking social CRM.

Twitter is generous with data, but Facebook is a closed shop. Once the data that is trapped inside the Facebook API is released, social media strategists will need to take a crash course in data strategy. Segmentation and targeting will become more important. Remember recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM Analysis)? Lifetime value modelling. Use of regression and Chi-square. Add to these techniques the maths that surround graph theory and you can see why I've been calling for a new class of professional to tackle this complexity. The Digital Economist will be key to deciphering the changing landscape of advertising. The list of data and CRM techniques is endless, but if social CRM is to pay for itself, social strategists will need to master these techniques and invent a few of their own.