MarketingWeek recently mentioned our work with O2 in developing the O2 Brand Graph. This project is building a clearer image of O2 Twitter followers and others who mention the company online, in order to deliver consumer insights. It’s a good article, so we wanted to share it here, too.

The #WaitroseReasons Twitter fiasco shows that social media stories are still dominated by the frivolous rather than the serious. But brands are starting to use social data to gain insight into their consumers and their marketplaces and this will become of greater use if they change the way they think.

Ask 100 marketers what to do with social media and you’ll get 100 different answers. Ask them about how effective it is as a marketing tool and you’ll get a spectrum of responses ranging from boundless enthusiasm to outright derision.

The one thing that most will probably have in common, however, is that they think of social media primarily as an outbound marketing tool – that is, a medium for sending out information, whether to one person or to many. Those who use it for inbound communications are likely to say they use it for customer service – responding to questions or problems.

Relatively few are likely to say they use it in a way that’s quantitative or analytical. Yet, with so much information being wilfully placed in the public domain by millions of consumers, brands that aren’t doing this are surely missing out on vital knowledge.

One example is provided by telecoms company O2, which has set out to build a ‘brand graph’ based on its Twitter users. The project, run in partnership with agency Face and social data company DataSift, has sought to assess O2’s social media audience according to demographics, behaviours, interests and the ways different users influence each other.

Continue reading the article by clicking here.