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Birthdays, relationship statuses and nationalities are three simple pieces of information that anyone can easily find, especially now with the amount of public information people are willing to put online.
As marketers, it is our job to know our customers. An important part of getting to know our customers is to collect information about where they live, what they do, what they like… and the more information we have on our customers, the more effective marketing campaigns will be. Let’s take an example of what can be done when we analyze a single piece of information.
STAMEN is a design and technology studio based in San Francisco specialized in maps and data visualizations. For their last project they focused on “Mapping the world’s friendships”, a project that allows you to see the degree of interconnection between the now billion people connected to Facebook.
“A Closer Look” gives you an insight of historical, economic, linguistic and cultural facts between two countries.
For example, when you select the Marshall Islands located in the Pacific Ocean you find out that the people living there have a strong relationship with people living in the United States. But why having such relationships with people who are located 4,600 away from you? Well if you take a look at their History, you learn that the US occupied the Marshall Islands from 1944 to 1986 and that many Marshallese moved from the Islands to California, Oregon and Arkansas.
Image may be NSFW.
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Or did you know that more than 120,000 Serbs lived in Switzerland in 2010? If you click on Switzerland you learn that the Serbs are the 4th largest immigrant group in the country thanks to the generous Swiss asylum policy that took in refugees from the Balkan conflict in the 1990s.
This initiative of using one piece of information that comes from a social network (on the public profiles) shows how powerful they reveal to be when well treated and analyzed. Here, STAMEN only used the nationalities between friends on Facebook. "Mapping the world’s friendships" is a tool that could be really useful for businesses in terms of marketing campaigns. A Swiss airline could promote flights from Geneva to Belgrade during holiday season. Or a Californian online store could offer free shipping to the Marshall Islands. Think about what your business could do if you were using efficiently the data you’ve already collected on your customers. Data is powerful and can be used to understand customers better.
Check out one of our new videos on how to use your customer data.