The Power of BIG Data

The Power of Big Data as explained by Dr. Don Stacks at the International PR Summit – November 2018, Bali.

Looking at the advances that we’ve made in public relations and as we move toward the the notion of of a global public relations area, things are changing in terms of instead of being a media relations oriented this profession. We’ve now moved to trying to actually impact on behavior. And impact on that behavior in such a way that we create a shared social value for the constituents or the stakeholders that we have. In terms of Indonesia, I’m I have seen over the past 10 years and an increase in the sophistication of the practice of public relations. Since public relations is tied to a large degree to democracy and democratization, the movement within political affairs, the movement within corporate communication has become more than simply media relations and in government relations. The practice is extremely sophisticated it is highly competitive and from what I have seen the future students coming in are very well prepared

You don’t do research, you don’t know whether or not you’ve moved the needle, you don’t know whether or not you have made a change at all. Research has to be done in planning your campaign. If you haven’t done your research, you don’t know what your benchmarks are. If you don’t know what your benchmarks are or your baseline, you have no way of changing your strategy throughout the campaign if there’s a problem. Research in strategic communication, strategic public relations, without research it doesn’t exist. You’ve got to take the data you’ve got to create a narrative that will explain that if we spend more money to get better data, we’ll have better results and more precision. And if you truly want to get behavior change, you have to understand exactly what the topic area is, the problem area is. You have in your informational aspect communication intelligence that builds into business intelligence that builds into  production.

In the next 5 to 10 years, if you’re not working with big data, you’re probably not going to be doing a good job. We talk about the market of one, the individual market, even though we still when we look at our target audiences, we still look at them in terms of the social graphics, psychographic, variables that are there, what are what are the age levels, what groups that they belong to, what culture what religion. Now we can look within those same sort of things and we can then pick out people who are either above the average or below the average pull them out and look at them individually. Then if we’re tracking social media we can find out well who influences them. And now we’re beginning to get opinion leaders and then we can establish messages to them to say hey you should do this and it’s and and if they go ahead and retweet it or they go ahead and comment on it comes back in in the social media and it becomes what we call a third party endorsement. But it gives you the capability that deep dive into the data, and instead of having aggregated forms, percentage male percentage female larger numbers. Now we can go down to those individual sort of things and say “OK on these traits who are the top five and what are they doing” and then over time we can see how the behavior change or what the the outcome that we’re interested in changes and you would expect that maybe to do this but in the other hand it may oscillate and the big data gives you a chance to look at it and statistically test that against the assumption of no change.

What you’re looking at when you’re talking about big data, is the real time acquisition of information that you’re looking for it. Probably you can trace it back to the first use of credit cards, and then look at grocery shopping where you’re scanning items, and every time you scan and every time you scan an item they’re taking the data and working with it. They then can tie that to the credit card that’s used to pay for it, go to the credit card company, get the demographic data and can begin to look at supply chain orientation in terms of getting products. A good example of big data uses Coca-Cola Company. And what Coca-Cola Company does is they have push button machines for fountain drinks. So you walk up to it it’s got a big Coca-Cola you push the Coca-Cola, the information goes to Coca-Cola, to their marketing area. When you after you push that button to get their entire brand sequence coming up. You push that button they get that. Once the brand comes up now we have the flavors coming up you push that. And now they know through geolocation as to where the machine is, who is using which brands and by the way if you go back they know that too. So if you go in and you choose Coca-Cola Diet Coke caffeine free lemon flavored, and you do it one two three four, you’re extremely intense you know where you’re going. On the other hand if you’re going between root beer and Coca-Cola and Sprite or something like that. You’ve got a customer that’s not as directed as they would be otherwise. Now they can then tie that into other data that may be there such as video monitoring. But right now basically all they need to know is in this geolocation and this type of restaurant or this type of booth who typically uses it, and then they can go in and say pull this add this and they can do flavor testing. They can see what do Indonesians prefer you know what if we put up Diet Coke and Coke Zero, which are they going to do. It gives them a marketing aspect. We do the same thing with big data and public relations we take that data and we put it into a predictive formula. We can now begin to predict how people are going to respond. The difference between large data and big data is the big data continually is brought in it’s infinite. With big data, we stopped at a particular point in time, so we do time series type analysis. The big data looking to see how changes occur against predicted change over time.