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BLOGBig Data and NO Competitive Advantage: The Tenant Problem

by Randall CraigFiled in: Make It Happen Tipsheet, Blog, Business Development, CRM, Data, Social MediaTagged as: ,

Do you have the classic “long-term/short-term” problem with social media? Whether it is LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, are you drawn to using them because of their massive, targeted audiences?

Big Data and NO Competitive Advantage: The Tenant Problem

Is the ability to quickly build a community or identify prospects through content or ads just too tempting to resist? For most people, all of this is true. And it is, actually, too good to be true.

Over the longer term, these prospects — and in fact your entire marketing strategy — are captive to the whims of the tech platform. You are a tenant, and they are the landlord.

Of course, the alternative is to build your own platform, but this is costly, and doesn’t drive shorter-term revenue. With your own platform, you are starting from scratch: it’s a ghost town, with absolutely no prospects.

The problem with being a tenant is that the data connected to each and every prospect on the social platforms is completely unavailable to you. Facebook (for example) has a complete “ghost” profile for each user based on their data, their behaviors, and their connections: you do not.

This means that a fundamental part of the prospect and client journey — and the user data along the way — is invisible to you, and cannot be integrated in any way with data from your other systems. Furthermore, the more central a Social Media-based marketing and business development strategy becomes, the bigger the black [data] hole. At a certain point, it is practically impossible to fix. Over the long term, you must own your data.

Some organizations in the B2C space have deployed loyalty apps that creepily track their customers’ locations, minute-by-minute, and glean data that way. Even this, however, is becoming a data dead-end, due to the public backlash to being tracked, Apple’s movement to data transparency, and growing regulatory oversight.

This Week’s Action Plan:

Clearly, the solution to the tenant vs landlord data problem is to drive social media users to your own platforms, where the user data and behavior are more easily accessible. This week, put together a list of incentives (lead magnets, access to experts, access to online learning, community, early access, recognition, gamification, etc.) to help draw these users in.

Related post: Secret Sauce? Improving Social Media ROI

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