#12 MOST-READ in 2017: New Year, New Metrics: How New Technology is Shaping Audience Intelligence in 2017
Ted Merz, Global Business Manager for News Product, BloombergThe annual CES tradeshow, a global consumer electronics and technology event that convenes professionals from finance, media, telecoms, sports and a host of other industries for four days of innovation in the Nevada desert starts this week.The event’s agenda shows just how focused corporate communications professionals, marketers, investors and business development executives are on technology that lets them parse through mountains of news and data to better understand their audience and the value of their brands.If I were a marketer or corporate communications professional, for example, I’d want to be alerted immediately when there were spikes in the volume of content written about my company or a swing in the tone indicating news was suddenly more positive or negative.And increasingly there is a need to monitor not just news articles from traditional sources but also social media. We've seen this demonstrated in recent weeks when Tweets by President-elect Donald Trump on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ford, General Motors and other companies, caused sudden fluctuations in their stock prices and forced corporate communications executives to scramble.The analytical challenge is easy to understand when you take into account that there are 500 million Tweets a day and we estimate that less than 1 percent, or only 500,000 that are financially relevant. At Bloomberg, we believe that only about 100, or 0.02 percent, are actionable on any given day.Given the volume and speed of media, it will be increasingly critical for corporate communications professionals to adopt new tools and technology to identify broad trends and then be able to drill down quickly into the specific catalysts.Bloomberg has spent years working on tools which have allowed financial professionals and institutional investors to do this type of work - classify, index, display, summarize and identify trends within vast amounts of market information.The tools used on Wall Street were made possible because of substantial investments in machine learning, computer programs that can improve as new data is introduced. This is quickly finding its way to the consumer market.There are simply too many data points from which to manually derive insight in a timely fashion – even for a large team of researchers. Machines will likely take over the core data aggregation and analysis tasks in a more structured and resourceful way, allowing humans to focus on the higher level elements of interpretation. As such, companies will be able to adapt their strategies much faster as they integrate audience intelligence data analytics into their operations.As the CES agenda shows, you will be hearing a lot more about the analytics that help generate insights. [author]About the Author: As Global Business Manager for News Product at Bloomberg, Ted oversees news applications, third party content and analytical and social media applications for Bloomberg Professional service. He was responsible for developing a number of significant products for Bloomberg including First Word, Bloomberg Brief newsletters. He previously worked in in Bloomberg News as the Managing Editor for the Americas, New York Bureau chief and Emerging Markets Editor. He has a BA from St. John's College. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst. [/author]
