This week’s question for our Broker Roundtable: Is social media a viable source of new names and data? Why or why not?
Our current panel features Christopher Pickering of MeritDirect, Stephani Wright of Focus USA, Becky Hagadorn of the Catamount Group, John Ahern of MDx Medical, Lisa Horder of Institute Lists and Kathy Duggan-Josephs of RMI Direct Marketing Inc. (Would you like to be considered to be a member of our roundtable? Contact Larry Riggs at larry.riggs@penton.com.)
Christopher Pickering, senior vice president, list brokerage, MeritDirect:
Social media is one area where business-to-business marketers haven’t ventured into as quickly. There are some unique to B-to-B social media sources like Jigsaw that have deep amounts of data, especially in job titles. These are very viable and can often help provide coverage into areas that have a paucity of universe.
Stephani Wright, national sales manager, Focus USA:
Social media is a medium that can help with branding efforts. Many marketers are using their pages to offer coupons or alert current consumers to sales or new products. In this way, social media helps the consumer stay closer to the brands and creates a following.
I think the big question on everyone’s mind then is how to monetize the channel. Because of the existence of large compiled databases, social media data may not be a source of “new names,” but [it could provide] new data that adds value to existing databases. With two-thirds of the world’s population on some sort of social media or blogging site, there is new behavioral data about consumers that we didn’t have access to before now. Traditional analytics like profiling still help take a snapshot of your customer. But if you can use social data, you can better understand how to engage your customers, talk to them and hear what they are saying about you.
Becky Hagadorn, senior account executive, Catamount Group:
Absolutely yes! Contests and sweepstakes on the big social media platforms are proof positive ways to grow one’s database
