information that they know about their own customers and website visitors to develop relevant messaging even further.”
Ownership of data
The exact nuances of who owns data and how they can use it does vary between social platforms, and it takes a close reading of each one’ s privacy and data use policy in order to understand it. As such, brands should be very conscious of privacy and legal considerations when accessing or using social data.
Firstly, in the majority of cases, the right to use social data sits primarily with the platform provider, and the brand may be seen as a third party user, which carries various constraints on use.
Secondly, when actually using social channels to post, share and repost, brands should be just as conscious as individuals that once posted on a social platform, their data can be taken, repurposed and shared in a manner not under their control.
Once information is out there, it’ s able to be pushed into the public domain even if posted privately in the first instance, so companies need to be be very cognisant of potential fall out from content posted under their brand’ s username.
Facebook owns its own data and is strict with how that data can be applied.
“ We take privacy very seriously, and we don’ t pass any personal information of people in the Facebook and Instagram community to any third-parties. The data behind our targeting capabilities can only be used when communicating to people on our platforms,” says Lockwood.
“ We think ads should be as relevant and interesting as the other content you consume on Facebook, and with the launch of recent products, we’ re providing advertisers the ability to reach customers and prospects in ways that are more relevant and customised to them.
“ And we have built these experience in a way that protects our users’ privacy – neither advertisers nor third-parties get any personally identifiable user data from any of these products.”
Capabilities
So what kind of software / tools and skills do companies need to make the most of their social data?
On the capabilities front to make the most of social data you need staff with experience across computing science, data management, data science and analytics. And they don’ t come cheaply.
Research into labour costs by IAPA revealed that typical data science salaries in Australia can average $ 120,000 a year, but that figure rises as high as $ 200,000 when it comes to skills with social data.
It is not a problem unique to Australia. The McKinsey Global institute for instance predicts that by 2018, the US alone could lack 140,000 to 190,000 people with the qualifications to analyse data to effectively contribute to large business decisions.
The simpler way to imagine that is that for all intents and purposes those people don’ t actually exist in the kinds of numbers that make them easy to find.
Worse, while you may be able to find data science practitioners, getting one who has both the capabilities of the discipline and knowledge of a specific market – say retail for instance – is very difficult in a market like Australia. That is why there is a growing trend towards analytics outsourcing.
Earlier this year Sri Annaswamy, founder and director of Sydney-based Swamy and Associates, told US-based CMO. com:“ Analytics outsourcing is the fastest-growing part of the outsourcing industry. Annaswamy said the early impetus came from the US and the UK, and that cost alone was not the only driver. It’ s about finding people with sufficient skills to deliver this on a large scale.”
In that same article Anna Frazzetto, senior vice president and managing director for international technology solutions at global executive recruiter Harvey Nash was reported as saying:“[ The ] offshoring of data science and analytics is a rapidly rising trend in the outsourcing and offshoring industry, and it’ s a direct result of the push in recent years by businesses worldwide to collect, analyse, and make the very most of their big data.”
Fighting back
There are also local initiatives to address data skills shortage, of which social is just one aspect. Earlier this year, Melbourne Business School( MBS) and SAS Australia announced a three year collaboration to provide Masters of Business Analytics students with the advanced business skills and business analytics software. Companies such Woolworth’ s, AT Kearney, SEEK, Brightstar, Suncorp and Telstra lined up behind the program offering financial assistance with scholarships and access to data sets for study.
At the time of the announcement Emma Gray, the chief data and loyalty officer at Woolworth’ s said,“ Woolworth’ s is passionate to further the science of developing better insights for better business decisions through advanced data analytics.”
Toolkits
To really get into the juicy data for most social channels, companies need to access data through API feeds rather than just the front end‘ reports’ offered on their main sites. There are a lot of ETL( extract, transform, load)
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