MDMC17 Executive Roundtable Recap

By: Andrew Strotheide

This year’s Midwest Digital Marketing Conference (MDMC17) offered its attendees plenty of opportunities for networking. Those who are on the executive level had a chance to attend the Executive Roundtable moderated by Forrester. Among the panelists were Rich Spiekermann from Nestle Purina, Steve Bauer from FleishmanHillard, James Whittaker from Microsoft, Maya Mikati from IBM, Jessica Liu from Forester, Yahoo, Dennis Dayman from Return Path, Matt Cotter from Oracle, Michael Becker from mCordis, Inc., and Alberto Brea from OgilvyOne Worldwide.
At the start of the session the panelists gave an insight into the challenges big businesses face today on a daily basis as they continue to persuade consumers to purchase more of their products. The discussion was focused on “big data”, which is made up of tons of information about consumer online behavior. Everyone who uses the Internet today has a profile, so what these companies are focusing on is just setting up the infrastructure to be able to access the data available and use it to influence consumers’ purchase decisions and make them buy more. In the past few months, a lot has been discussed in terms of access to the personal browsing data by big businesses and whether companies should be allowed to sell it or use it for their own purposes.
There are certain benefits offered to those marketers who have access to Big Data. Since it allows to track consumer online behavior, targeting becomes more precise, which helps to reduce advertising costs and increase ROI. Nevertheless, there are certain downsides present, with one of them being the complex character of the data on hand, which requires complex algorithms that would need to be put into place to take the full advantage of the data available. Companies like IBM have dedicated whole teams to collecting, organizing, processing, and utilizing big data for years, and they still are not even close enough to completing the programming. Speaking of programming, bots will slowly but surely help us make up our minds, and aid in the decision-making process, which once again ties into the “big data schema”.
Right now, with the way technology is being developed, society is on the fringe of expanding digital marketing to a completely different level which will allow us to deliver the right message to the right customer, and result in a sale even more frequently.

Twitter Analytics Are Now Free For Everyone

Twitter Analytics

Twitter AnalyticsEver wonder what your followers on Twitter are most interested in, their demographics or wish you could view your post reach? This was something that was once only available to paid advertisers, but now it is free for all users! Finding ways to measure and boost your impact on Twitter was once a complicated thing to do. Businesses especially had a hard time figuring out who their audience was and how impactful they were. With the Twitter analytics tool anyone has the ability to measure engagement of their tweets, check out the interest of their followers, pinpoint locations of their followers, see how their Twitter cards drive clicks and much more.

What does this mean for average users?Twitter Users Analytics

This feature is a great asset to those that are looking to improve their personal brand. Users that have been on Twitter for at least 14 days and tweet in English, Spanish, French and Japanese can access a dashboard to analyze their tweets.The main dashboard allows users to see how many impressions their tweets received in the last 28 days and it can be broken down even further to see impressions by hour.  This tool makes it possible to see what tweets people are interested in so that users can tailor their tweets to keep followers interested while drawing in new followers. This tool will ultimately help users to better connect and engage with their audience while building their online presence.

What does this mean for marketers?

marketers using twitterSince Twitter users can now see the interests of their followers, they will start to explore deeper into those areas and industries. For example, if Twitter users are finding that a large percentage of their followers have an interest in culinary activities, they may become more interested in the culinary industry. In addition this sparked interest from users will help create more of an interest toward the culinary marketer’s profiles. The key for marketers is to be ready for this change and make sure their information is as relatable as ever to followers so that it will be retweeted and shared.
This change is to ultimately increase engagement on Twitter. An important thing marketers may start seeing is more consumer interaction. It is almost like a domino effect. Since companies with a large following have a great reach, and regular Twitter users like seeing how much engagement they get, Twitter users will start reaching out to brands more and more in order to see their numbers increase. They almost become mini marketers, which allows actual marketers to capitalize on the increased Twitter interactions.

What resources/ guides are there to help with understanding Twitter Analytics?

twitter analytics dashboard
Having a little help understanding Twitter analytics can be usefully. Below are a few resources that can help with understanding and using Twitter analytics to its fullest potential:

Authors

This article was written by University of Missouri – St. Louis Social Media Marketing Undergraduate students Desireé Blue. Taylor Bartley, Madevi Biekram, Naheda Dabain, Nicole Nelson, and Montorrius Tobias.
 

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