Commentary

Mining Content For Insight And Profit

My colleague Aaron Baar, citing no less an authority than Google, is right to assert in Search Insider that the marketers who will best succeed are those who pay attention to delivering what their customers want, rather than trying to bait them with empty buzzwords.

That said, we all know there’s gold in key words, whether it’s in targeting new consumers or understanding existing ones. The trick is to identify the words social media users are themselves employing, and then to dig below for additional insight.

Within hours of SeaWorld’s announcing it would stop breeding orcas and training them to perform tricks, for example, Amobee Brand Intelligence told us the brand got a “big PR boost,” if Twitter responses are an accurate measure of public sentiment.

Specifically, of the roughly five-million tweets around either SeaWorld or #Seaworld from March 16, 2015 to March 16, 2016, sentiment ran 12% positive, 66% neutral, and 22% negative. On the day SeaWorld announced its new policies, there were 109,971 tweets posted by 4 p.m. Eastern, with 16% positive, 76% neutral and 8% negative. Since then, Amobee has determined, the percentage of negative sentiment rose slightly -- to 12% through March 28. This increase is “likely around frustration that SeaWorld will keep the existing orcas on display and won't be releasing them to sea sanctuaries,” Amobee suggests.

Amobee also had some advice for what SeaWorld might do proactively to attract visitors. Over the last year, 24% of all digital content engagement mentioning SeaWorld was aboutitsrides, with 8% specifically mentioning roller coasters.

In a similar vein, Treato has been monitoring social media and online forums to determine such factors as the side effects that patients talk about when they use certain medications. “The Internet is a completely new data set that never existed before,” that provides “the human perspective on health care," CEO Ido Hadari told me in an interview in November.

StoryBase, a tool developed in Copenhagen for writers of all stripes that just began a beta test in the U.S., mines the same vein by using big data toshow you what questions are being asked online and who is asking them. The premise is that by knowing what your audience is asking on a given topic, you’ll be able to write stories, posts or content marketing that’s relevant to their interests.

For example, when I typed in the phrase “social media,” I was informed there were 717 questions asked 162,800 times in the U.S. over the last 12 months incorporating the phrase from sources such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, Yahoo and Wikipedia.

The most popular query — “What is social media?” — was immediately followed by “What is social media marketing?” Other first-page results include “What is a social media specialist?” and “How to start a social media marketing business.” Many of the hundreds of questions were variations on those themes, in fact, reaffirming the human instinct for trying to figure out how to capitalize on a good thing.

The curious skew 64% female with the greatest concentration in the 36-49 demo, according to another feature on the site. CEO Torbjørn Flensteds ays StoryBase is developing ways to give paying users (nine queries a month are free) deeper insights into what their audience might look like. It’s also working on offering real-time data so that journalists might better cover breaking stories.

Both the Danish National Museum and its Parliament are among those who have used StoryBase to design campaigns, Flensted says, but it’s too early to cite any content-marketing case histories from the U.S. “I can say we are opening an ambassador program that we hope will allow us to work alongside select American members to help them improve their content and brand,” he writes.

“When it comes to marketing, I would argue that the new paradigm is, data is king,” Treato’s Hadari told me. “Content is okay, but it needs to be based on data.”

That may be true. But as Adobe itself so humorously reminds us, “everything in moderation” — which, by the way, popped up in “96 phrases searched 21.1K times in USA in the last 12 months,” StoryBase tells me. Any ideas what to make of that?

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