Social Media Analytics and Regulation #SMWKHK

This week was Social Media Week in Hong Kong. A global series of events held in numerous cities with the theme.. well you might have guessed it, Social Media it is.

A whole week of events around the social media theme. Topics on how social media can be deployed, what kinds of social media there is and of course lots of sharing from people in the field. Although I didn't think the line up was very strong, there were some interesting sessions.

One of the events I attended had the topic:

Social Media Analytics & Regulation

With so much data being collected, it would be interesting to hear the state of affairs from the industry and potentially governments on data protection, privacy etc. The talk was divided in 4 sections:

• Introduction and setting the scene by Kenneth Kwok Beehive Strategy (@BeehiveStrategy) who talked about why and how social media is deployed. He touched base on the how and why of social media, and shared some interesting movies like the one below, on the Return of Investment on use of social media. 

Basically use of metrics and analytics can help drive down the total cost of marketing as the marketing that is done is more effective and efficient. It obviously starts with defining what do you want to achieve from a marketing point of view. Define the goals and objectives of campaigns.

According to Kenneth the industry is working on some sort of self regulation at the moment, through for example the Hong Kong Digital Analytics Association (http://www.hkdaa.org/). Am curious to see how they will develop codes of practice for the industry.

The little bit of privacy discussion came up by showing the next video which is about Google+. The amount of data coming available to google is often raised as a point of concern for people. The old adagio: "if you don't pay for the product, YOU are the product" comes around the corner. Though, lets look at the next video..


An interesting point highlighted is the different Circles of people you hang out with, and what you would like to share with them. Google+ allows you to have more control over what ends up where. A better segregation on what you share with whom is possible. Though, a point not brought to the front is the fact that it allows Google to collect even more data around an individual. Uhh yes it is a big pitch on Google+ indeed.

• Second section was by Jeremy Smith from EmailVision, a company providing email systems and hyps of tools to support campaigns etc. He talked a little on some of the drivers companies can have (marketing, customer service, events and lead generation) to use social media. In short he did show some of the product the company runs, though no serious touching base on discussing analytics and legal impact. One point he made was measure what matters. My interpretation of that is.. the number of likes on Facebook, do they actually help achieving your goals?
• The last section was done by Dr. James She who just started a social media lab at he university of Science and Technology here in Hong Kong. Coming from an electrical and engineering background, he started of with talking about smart buildings and smart grids. How better data collection can help in forecasting utilization of buildings, and therefore can support decision making on energy conservation. People want to maintain a certain lifestyle, though this can sometimes mean a tradeoff on "savings". On that topic, I would say that there is still a significant amount of savings that can be achieved. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle can help, switching lights off on time, thinking about your temperature settings. The interesting bit comes in when there will be a link between currently used social media and other systems. To for example predict numbers of visitors for restaurants, building utilization etc etc. This will require vast amounts of data as well as hefty processing power. This data can really provide a personal profile for people. For once not only to provide targeted advertising but to improve the quality of life. A key question he put up was, who will be the owner of information. For example, if you tweet...if you write something on facebook, or when you log in using foursquare. Though it would be quite interesting to see your aircon at home switch on when you check in at a particular trainstation at a particular time.
• Section 4, was supposed to be QA though not many questions were asked.

In short, the last part of the last presentation was quite interesting though unfortunately the sessions didn't really adress the topic of the event.