Communicate your data

Data can completely change a communication and marketing department. How? Is there a trick, a magic formula? Far from what many may think, data is the secret ingredient and, together with digitization, it gives us the possibility to be more agile and make the right decisions.

However, how can Communication and Marketing departments cope with such a maelstrom of data? It is difficult to have an exhaustive control of the information generated by the multiple data sources they work with: from the control of the investment made in each online campaign, number of followers, the monitoring of intangibles, brand tracking or what customers say about our brand and the competition, to mention a few examples. Having real control over this information is a challenge for several reasons:

1. Thousands of data in a matter of minutes

The human being does not have enough capacity to assimilate all that information. Data ranging from social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok), offline and online media to email marketing tools. And to this we add the proliferation in the market of software to measure, for example, Social Listening, Social Mention, Scoring or Benchmark.

2. A lot of time invested

We have to spend a large part of our working day detecting the source, extracting the information and selecting the information that really interests us. In addition, this search is done by departments, independently, so that the global vision of the strategy is lost.

3. Information arrives late and badly

We must make decisions based on data. But what usually happens? Information often arrives late and wrong. This means that we make the wrong decisions out of time, being unable to react in time to any unforeseen event or crisis that may arise. To survive in the new digital paradigm, immediacy is key. Therefore, we need to anticipate and have tools that allow us to work and analyze data in real time.

Therefore, it is good that a marketing and communications department has the tools; however, it must be able to unify the information and decide which KPIs we want to analyze and visualize in greater detail.

It is important to have a complete view of the business: the analysis, to be truly effective, must be carried out in a cross-cutting manner.

In this way, not only do we make the data much more accessible to the teams, but with the right Business Intelligence solution, we have a global vision of the department and it allows us to cross-reference information that is really relevant and necessary for the achievement of our objectives.

Benefits of the Social Media Command Center

As we have been seeing over the years, digital transformation brings with it many advantages, but it is also a great challenge for companies, so how can we coexist and make the most of technology in communication and marketing departments without dying in the attempt? Through the Social Media Command Center. A business dashboard that monitors and manages in real time all relevant information in a simple and intuitive way, facilitating its consumption by the work teams.

The KPIs shown are defined based on the needs and objectives of each client with a previous exercise of consulting and conceptualization of the data. Because data, by itself, is worthless if we do not give it a meaning, if we do not give it a context.

The Social Media Command Center advocates precisely for that, to put the data as the protagonist, monitoring and displaying the information in a very intuitive and visually attractive way. In this way, anyone who consults the dashboard, regardless of their professional profile, can truly understand the information and can make decisions based on objective facts, avoiding any assumptions.

In addition, this data management and visualization model brings with it a change of mentality in companies and a change in the definition of the company’s strategy, putting people at the center of decision making. The data is accessible and employees can consult it at any time; therefore, they can self-manage and make decisions autonomously, without depending on the superior command.

In the online environment, the Social Media Command Center is an ideal solution for analyzing and managing all the conversations generated around the company or brand. Many departments make the mistake of focusing only on social networks, forgetting, once again, the big picture. It is essential to cross-reference this information with other data from, for example, social listening, media clipping or internal marketing and communication data.

We detail some of the benefits of the Social Media Command Center:

1. Visually attractive information. The data are presented in such a way that those who access them are able to interpret them easily and draw conclusions in an agile way.
2. Team self-management. Sharing data means that employees have full access to verified and accurate information and can make decisions autonomously, without always having to go through the management team.
3. Agility in decision making. The data collected allows us to perform predictive and prescriptive analysis and thus detect opportunities and identify management insights for the Communication Department as a whole.
4. Reduction of analysis times by automating several of the processes. No more need to send emails, consult data with different departments, analyze metrics for each activity performed, prepare reports, etc. All digital activity information, both commercial and reputational, is presented in a unified way, on a single screen and from the aggregate to the detail: that is, from the general to the specific.

On many occasions, we overlook valuable information precisely because it is not unified and we do not perceive the correlation between data. For example, relating a news item to a movement generated in social networks or the performance of campaigns in the different countries and platforms where it has been launched.

Many analyses focus only on social media and forget to cross-reference the data with all available digital sources to obtain a global and complete view.

And let’s not talk about when we find companies that operate in several countries or have an infinite number of different digital profiles, as happens, for example, to Banco Santander. Eduardo Bendala, former Director of Corporate Communication on the Internet at the Santander Group, stresses in this video: “It is enough to look at the screen to know what we should be concerned about right now and where we should focus our attention”. The company has more than 200 profiles that were examined in order to design a videowall to analyze everything that is said about the company, both internal and external content, in each of these profiles (commercial accounts, sponsorships or accounts belonging to other business units, among others) and what is happening in each of the countries where it is established.

Telefónica is another of the cases that has opted for real-time visualization of the data of the Communication department, so that the teams can work live with the information. This is highlighted by Laura Sanz, Telefónica’s Audience Director in this video: “The dashboard is a way to democratize information, so that everyone has access to it and that the work of each area is easier, without having to be constantly resorting to the source of the data”.

Now, more than ever, we have the opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge of our business thanks to real-time visualization of information. BI solutions of this type are the ones that allow us to go further in terms of data analysis and decision making. Yesterday it was an advantage, today it is a necessity: innovation is the only way to stay competitive.