Numbers = Knowing (and Knowing Matters)

By: Brad Mays, Senior Vice President, Digital, Edelman Austin

Numbers are everywhere. The swipe of your credit card at the airport coffee shop. That phone call you just made. The diagnostics from your engine when your car is in the shop. The Tweet you posted about your weekend on the coast. For every action, there are more ways to capture that activity. And, increasingly, we're finding ways to turn that activity into data and that data into insight.

The River of Data

The numbers we're focused on through our analytics practice in the Southwest are the bits and bytes found in online conversations. These conversations happen not only in the seemingly endless posts in social media but also in the blog post comments, forum discussions, news coverage, photo uploads and anything else that people and machines push to the places where people and machines can find them online.

Currently, in the Southwest region, across the Edelman network and throughout our industry, much of what we're measuring is historical data – what happened (two seconds, hours, days, months ago) as a result of the programs we implemented for our clients. Or, how that new business prospect we're pitching has elevated their message, improved their search rank or inspired conversation around their brand – in the past tense. We make a considerable and growing profit in mining and conveying this information to clients. But, in the end, what we have is a rear-view of success. While we'll continue to conduct this type of analysis, we're measuring the success of a program, campaign or strategy that has been executed.

What we need is a windshield view of what will be successful. Which road ahead will lead to the most efficient form of success? How can we predict who to engage, where to engage them and which words will be most successful in conveying our brand's message? Beyond our media list, who else should be on our list? Where does the brand sit on that list of influencers for the category, and what, specifically, can we do to impact that? It's this level of knowledge that we're focused on in our efforts to build an Edelman insights algorithm.

This effort is under way right now, and it’s really exciting. Working with a cross-functional team that includes mathematicians in New York, analysts in San Francisco and Chicago and developers in the UK, the Southwest digital team is leading a new era of knowing for Edelman that promises to be a sustainable and defensible position in the category of analytics that will secure our position in the industry as those who not only measure but know.

Because knowing matters. More to come.