Jeff Dachis, CEO of Dachis Group is excited about data. To his mind, data can help brands unlock the potential of social. Furthermore, Dachis believes that authentic social engagement at scale is the pot at the end of the online brand advertising rainbow.
The Internet has proven to be the perfect direct response marketing medium, but a wasteland useless to any marketer that cannot sell their product directly online. If Pampers, Coca Cola, and Nissan could have spent more money in digital they would do so. They just never could. Until now.
…The opportunity to unlock the $500 billion brand engagement opportunity online has finally arrived and it has come in the form of social media.
Dachis goes on to explain how his company provides essential measurements to brand marketers via its Social Business Index. He claims “advanced analytic techniques like natural language processing, semantic analysis, machine learning, and cluster analysis can reveal the true consequences of marketing actions online.”
Dachis also notes early in his article that only 10% of marketing dollars are spent online today. He’s working hard to move that needle, and he’s in the perfect place to benefit from whatever shift eventually occurs.
What is left undiscussed in his sellsheet thought piece, is what role ad agencies might play in a world where data on social engagement around a brand is as important, or more important, than the fundamentals of presentation and persuasion.
I’m a copywriter, so I’ll ask what Dachis’ data-driven future might mean for me. Will I be asked to sift through data on how brand advocates are responding to initiatives, and then reply in real time on behalf of my clients? That could be a fun day at the office, or a serious pain in the ass, depending on one’s aptitude for such things.
At this point a decade into the social, I’m pretty adept at real time communications, but that doesn’t mean I want to live there on the edge of my keyboard. No, I want time to think and a quiet place to do it. That’s where I, and many like me, develop ideas. Sure, we also develop ideas at the keyboard — the point is both skill sets are needed.
And let’s not overlook the thing that most often activates “authentic engagement at scale.” Brand content. The brand has to give its customers something to talk about, or there’s no “there” there.
