eMetrics Summit Interview Series: Brian Melinat

In anticipation of his upcoming conference presentation at the eMetrics Summit Boston, “Analytics of the Future,” we asked Brian Melinat, Social Media Listening Consultant at Dell, a few questions about his work in digital analytics.

Q. Where does digital analytics sit in your organization and how do you interface with your business units?

A. Our group is in the Marketing Sciences team within Global Marketing at Dell. My team is focused on Social Media Analytics specifically. There is a “traditional” digital/web analytics team parallel to us within Global Marketing, and – at Dell – there are also digital analytics teams within the “BU’s” (Business Units such as Consumer, Public, Large Enterprise, etc). Within Global Marketing, our teams support central planning decisions around investment, best practices and platform/capability decisions. The BU teams are focused more on day-to-day, “run the business” metrics and analyses.

Q. What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned so far in 2013?

A. Social Media listening is a viable complement (and sometimes alternative) to fielding primary research studies which can by quicker, less expensive and more candid.

Q. What’s the latest analytics method/process/tool set that you have implemented and what advice would you give others?

A. We have found that Social Media “listening” provides many valuable business insights, and Dell has actually built a Social Media listening platform in house: Social Net Advocacy Pulse (SNAP). It leverages third party components, but in the end provides a user-friendly, Dell-centric interface that helps various stakeholders throughout Dell focus on listening to the Social Media conversations that impact their area of focus. Even if your company doesn’t have the resources to build your own customized solution, Text Analytics and NLP (Natural Language Processing) tools are critical if you want to get the most out of Social Media “conversation mining”.

Q. What sort of attribution model are you using to allocate marketing funds?

A. Dell’s Marketing Sciences team uses a tops-down MMM (Media Mix Modeling) approach (and my past role was managing the MMM). We’re also working with OFA (Online Fractional Attribution) solutions to get more granular detail of the online customer touch points.

Q. Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the eMetrics Summit.

A. I will share an evolution of Social Media metrics (and attribution) approaches that we’ve applied at Dell as well as provide a peak at our Social Net Advocacy Pulse tool.

Don’t miss Brian Melinat’s session, “Analytics of the Future,” at eMetrics Boston on Tuesday, October 1st, from 1:30pm-2:15pm. Register Now!

By: Jim Sterne, Founder, eMetrics Summit