Situation: A company seeks to leverage the difference between information from traditional media and the richer information available through social media. Their objective, using publicly available information, is to identify individuals’ specific plans or preferences to better target their clients’ marketing dollars. Can social marketing leverage your competitive position?

Advice from the CEOs:

• The principal value proposition is the ability to mine publicly available information from consumers through social media and make it useful to advertisers who want to reach those customers.
• If the company’s technology allows access to shared data which can be used by many companies this is less expensive than clients’ trying to go it alone.
• The most important differentiation will be the timeliness of data. Many firms collect data after the fact – for example after a key purchase is made. What advertisers desire is the ability to anticipate purchases. An example is a consumer’s plan to buy a house. This information is valuable to many companies. If data is mineable, it is valuable.
• The essential question is how the client will make more money from data being near-real time. If the client can use the company’s data to enhance their marketing database, this adds value.
• Consider partnering with the agencies that B2B and B2C companies hire to advertise their products. Even the largest consumer B2B and B2C companies work with outside ad agencies because these companies have better access to targeted customer lists than the companies.
• Consider a subscription model, offering access to unique, current data to many customers. The differentiating value is the currency and timeliness of the data. A subscription model generates an ongoing revenue stream.

[like]