Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Everyone s talking about Big Data these days, and it has marketers buzzing with anticipation. In fact, data proliferation is expected to grow from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes by 2020.

So my advice to brands is not to get seduced by the lure of Big Data and ignore the power of Relationship Data. Want to find out how people really feel about your product or a particular service? Just ask them. We’re so much more connected today that we have many more opportunities for developing relationships. And if we concentrate our efforts on building and expanding those relationships, they’ll help us glean priceless information about how our prospects and customers feel about our products and services....

Do the Promoted Tweets and Sponsored Facebook Posts we see online really influence what we purchase when we sign off and head to the store? Datalogix, the data giant that tracks more than $1 trillion in consumer spending, is finding the answers for Twitter and Facebook.

Through a new advertising metric Twitter is calling "offline sales impact," it has been working with Datalogix to find out how brands' tweets--essentially miniature online ads--impact their offline sales.In preliminary studies with 35 brands, Datalogix found Twitter users who were exposed to a brand's tweets purchased more than users who didn't interact with a brand's tweets at all, regardless of whether they were Promoted Tweets or organic. Datalogix also found users who both followed a brand's Twitter account and were exposed to that brand's Promoted Tweets made nearly 30% more offline purchases.