Cerebra

Cerebra was fortunate enough to be involved in last year’s Internet Show as an exhibitor and with a speaking spot. This year, I returned on behalf of Cerebra to what has evolved into The Enterprise Technology Show. Made up of the Internet Show, Loyalty World, The Marketing Technology Show, Big Data World Africa and The Mobile Show Africa 2014, the two-day show, exhibition and conference comprised of a completely free conference and an all-new VIP event, which included keynote speakers and focused, breakaway roundtable discussions.

Fancy presentations, slide shows and videos were thrown out and replaced with face-to-face, peer-to-peer discussions focusing on industry issues – a big ask for some of the digital keyboard jockeys. The roundtables were chaired by CEOs, industry thought-leaders, leading industry bodies, agencies and representatives from major companies such as Virgin Active and Groupon.

The roundtable discussion was a great opportunity for me to discuss deriving customer insights from online monitoring, an area of online marketing that I feel still takes a backseat after advertising, email marketing, development and even community management.

Each roundtable came up with three big ideas or learning’s from the session. With Cerebra’s roundtable attended by project managers, social media managers and marketers the three big points for us were:

1. Brand Advocacy
There was a real need to define what this actually was, how we identify it, potentially reward it and nurture these habits within our organisations and within online communities.

2. Customers Want Credibility
With an increase in forum activity in South Africa’s online and social media space driven by a need for a credible, curated conversation – how do brands participate? How do we cut through the clutter and noise on Twitter and Facebook and really give customers what they want to know. The solution was research, more research and then, obviously, contextually relevant content.

3. How to report on your online reputation
A big struggle people had, was not knowing what was important, relevant and what was best practice. We outlined the important reporting areas as volume trends, sentiment, share of voice online, objective tracking, content efficacy, customer insights, competitor insights and platform specific conversation themes.

The big insight for me was that people are not actively tracking their online presence but instead focusing on Google alerts, Facebook and Twitter.

The internet is so much bigger than those platforms, and while they are essential in deriving consumer insight – brands and agencies need to expand their horizons, because outside of the walls and timelines, and even within organisations there is a wealth of information just waiting to be found.