I was reading a very interesting research by eMarketer that begins this way ¨Marketers know the value of social data but interpretation remains a challenge¨ and I thought, are we still having the same problems than 10 years ago. I mean, we are not talking about Social Analytics, a pretty new work in ¨the block¨ but at the end the day it´s the same thing.
1. The digital era fill the desks with information: Well, even when this is totally true we can complain about it. Come on, we are talking about it for more than 10 years and is not an epiphany that the better the processors the more information we have, the more information we have, the more difficult to ¨interpret¨ it.
2. From time to time something new, cool, exciting cames along in the internet and makes all of us fall in love. It can be Social Media, Mobile, Third screen among many, many others.
3. Tons of SaaS companies floods the market with analytics solutions that allows you to measure all the information from that channel.
4. The digital marketers fall in love with the Analytics platforms and they even believe that those platforms can do all the work for them, even to make decisions (true story).
So let´s get back to the eMarketers report, according to the following chart 47% of the marketers admit that they are not yet doing real time marketing
They have the most interesting and stunning excuses like:
1. I can´t afford: off course not!!! probably because you are not making real time decisiones!!!
2. I don´t know how to use it: Come on, is not normal that you don´t know how to do something the first time you do it? If you don´t know how you are ok!!! keep walking that way!.
3. Don´t plan on use it: Oh, you don´t? Really? Do you have any better ideal than knowing why your clients are leaving your company right know? Or to understand which are the drivers that makes a person your client, right now! It´s really amazing how marketers lose the opportunity of ¨working really close¨ of their market just to keep doing what ¨works¨.
4. Plan on using it for the first time: Ok…
5. Plan to start considering it: The what??? What does it mean? I imagine something like ¨I´m sitting in my office open my agenda and write, in 3 month I´ll have like a brainstorming with myself to define if I will consider or not using real time. If so, I’ll have another session to considering it”. That’s BS, big time.
You have like three levels of information:
1. Hard: The information that never change, like the day or birth and the gender.
2. Soft: The soft information is the one that can change from time to time like marital status, level of education, income, etc.
3. Momentum information: It’s the information generated by a human impulse. What a person thinks or is going to do “Right now”.
So if I’m a company that produces cases for iPad I can target a campaign based in hard information and displays the add to all the people 18 and 35 y/o (hard information). I can target my campaign with focus on Students (Soft). Or I can target my campaign on people that today was “asking” in the social media what’s the best case for an iPad (Momentum information). If that person is looking for an iPad Case, who I’m for not offering the “possibility” to buy my product just because the person is not an Student or is not between 18 and 35 y/o? How a fancy case cannot be used by 60 y/o people? So hard and soft information can help but in most cases requires to infers a lot (Actually it will drives you to infer).
The problem is that we are still waiting way too much from “technology”. The information platforms are great for tracking, processing integrating and manipulating information. That’s it! Then we, humans (or let’s say anthropomorphic beings 
), are responsable for taking the information and do our magic and get insights!
