Meltwater's Nitin Bhatia puts the spotlight on data being the new oil!

Nitin Bhatia, Managing Director - India at Meltwater in a stats powered session speaks about the significance of data in today's world and is data the underrated piece of Digital Marketing Puzzle. 

We live in an information society. The new mediums of gathering that information have become much more relevant - Nitin Bhatia, Managing Director - India at Meltwater.

Bhatia shares that since the inception of mankind, 90% of the world’s data has been created since last two years, which kind of gives us an idea that there a lot of data that gets generated on a regular basis on the internet. Over 2 billion people use internet on a day-to-day basis. This is happening majorly because of the huge mobile penetration. Penetration of internet is around 4.02 billion people, social media users around 3.2 billion people, and 5 billion mobile users. Twitter is seeing over 450 thousand mentions regularly.

"What we are doing right now is trying to figure out ways in which we can create maximum amount of information available on the internet and then trying to make sense out of it," he added. 

Social Media and Big Data

Social media is nothing but any particular website which allows people to talk about or share perception. That according to me is a social media channel. That means from a monitoring standpoint, we are tracking all these popular social media channels and also making commercial efforts in terms of gathering information from those kind of sources which are not that popular for eg, customer complaints- one of the biggest areas we are focusing on, news tools such as iTunes and google play store also allows a lot of information.

Internet and the Data

We are seeing a big paradigm shift in how internet will provide data in future. For instance, there are so many people posting something or the other, if I have to ask the audience in general, if I go through an Instagram or a Twitter account of a person, I would come to know a lot about that person. This expands into an ecosystem where we are talking about billions and billions of data points, then we can easily understand that in future the modern day marketer will rely on more focused data points.

In future we will be looking into how we can materialize or co-relate analysis, for instance, between number if job posts of the company vis-a-vis the expansion plan of the company or it can be the kind of patent hiring that the company would be doing.

GDPR Guidelines and the Misuse of data

GDPR guidelines have come into the picture and with this misuse of data will not take place and if a user feels that his/her data has been shared by a company then that person can easily sue the brand. The brand in return has to pay extremely hefty amount. Ourselves as an organisation have also make sure that we are completely GDPR compliant and make sure that we don't sharing any information which is not permitted by us. Its very hard to say that if brands are really misusing data in that pretext right now because there might be some bit of who could be doing it and some don't. But by putting these kind of guidelines in place I think the data providers like us are definitely making sure that it is not going in the wrong hands.

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Brands utilising data provided online 

Traditionally most of the companies have been focusing a lot on internal data and this data is which can be linked with essential information.

At one juncture we are data providers and at the other we are data collectors. There are different kind of guidelines that we have to follow in terms of ensuring what kind of data we are collecting and secondly what kind of data we are circulating. In terms of utility of data on the internet specifically, it's completely up to you how much do you allow the ecosystem that you are participating in, in terms of gathering your information and delivering the same.

Data Consumption trends 

Majority of the companies in the past have been using internal data which have collected internally by the organisations and this data was in the form of sales and footfall information, supply chain, hiring and firing data, distribution information. But now in the future a lot of reliance will take place on outside as the internet has started knowing more than the company or the person himself and that is actually a very interesting area to explore. Most of the information is also publicly available.

For instance, if Pepsico has any kind of plans to launch operations in Kenya, firstly they would invest their time and energy into finding the right talent in that country. If there are proper mechanism in terms of collective anomalies from the internet they could have an interesting bet - PepsiCo is hiring in Kenya. That information is going to be extremely vital because neither has Kenya mentioned about their brands in the PR or social media, but what they would do is they would hire a senior director or a consultant in that particular country and that information will be available to its competitors way before it is public and that will help take much more steady decisions in the future.

Nitin Bhatia, Managing Director - India at Meltwater was speaking at the live session of India's first live conference #SMLive 2018.