Social media conferences are typically scattershot affairs. Attendees run the gamut from individual content marketers to big brands to agencies to software vendors, and they all have different goals, challenges and problems - especially since social media itself spans so many different industries and use-cases. These conferences are interesting and educational, but with so many voices, it's often challenging to tease out the key themes.
The beauty of Big Boulder is that it's solely focused on social data. There are no sponsors, no celebrity keynotes, just individuals and organizations who are interested in all of the issues surrounding social data. With that tight focus, the conversations all narrow down to a handful of topics, facilitating deep discussions into those subjects.
This year, there were two key themes that kept coming up over and over again.
Balancing privacy with data utility
It's no secret that most of the apps, social networks and websites we interact with on a day-to-day basis track and store data about our behaviors on those properties. That data represents a huge opportunity to better understand consumers, build demographic profiles and drive business decisions in all sorts of industries. Yelp, as an example, talked about how real estate developers use Yelp's review data to identify locations and businesses that are generating a lot of positive reviews from the demographics the developers want to attract.
There are limits though. Clearly no one would want to get an email from those same real estate developers saying, "hey, we just opened a new coffee shop in our shopping complex, we know you love coffee so come check it out." That would feel creepy and invasive.
This example highlights the delicate balance required. If user data is applied too aggressively, users will be turned off and will stop allowing their data to be collected. However, if the data isn't used at all, why bother collecting it in the first place? While there wasn't a clear consensus, there was a lot of talk about "opt-in" and anonymization as critical strategies for preventing users from feeling intruded upon, whilst still allowing businesses to drive value from their data.
Data-driven ROI for social
Another common theme of the conference was the question about how to calculate the value or utility of social data. Andrew Patterson from Major League Baseball talked about how they try to calculate the value of their social data efforts, not based on the number of followers, but on engagement with users talking about baseball, as well as the geographic locations of those users. When there's a spike in one city talking about a particular play or run scored in a baseball game, odds are good that video clips of that play will perform well on social media.
Similarly, Brad Feld and Mike Brown, two prominent venture capitalists, talked about what's being funded in the social data and analytics space. A big takeaway from their discussion was that there's a ton of interest in platforms that go beyond simply aggregating data, or presenting information, and rather focus on identifying clear business value based on that data.
We've been big believers of that idea at Synthesio for a long time, being able to calculate business metrics based on social data is a key component of our value, and I'm happy to see the industry recognizing this and looking to invest more in that.
My biggest disappointment about Big Boulder this year is that we didn't get to do more. We wanted to meet more people, attend more sessions and sit down with more customers and partners, there were only so many hours in the day to do all of those things. It was an extremely valuable conference, and we're looking forward to next year's event.