How To Master The Social Web Data is what would make it more intelligent, just as knowledge makes humans so.
By Amarpreet Kalkat •
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Amarpreet Kalkat, currently the co-founder at Frrole -a social data intelligence startup, pens his thoughts on currating web data.
Most people don't think so, but software is still pretty dumb. Data is what would make it more intelligent, just as knowledge makes humans so.
There are 4 large data sets in this world - Traditional Web Data, a data set that Google has mastered. Captive Data, a data set that BI tools help organizations explore. Social Web Data, a data set that is perhaps the best data set to understand consumers at scale. And a relatively new data set is emerging from sensors and mobile devices, which is relatively new. We have always hoped to become the Google of the social web - the master of the 3rd data set.
However, it is practically impossible to execute to a "meta' thought like that, so a while ago, we zeroed down on a vertical that we thought was the most optimal when seen as a multiple of Probability of selling * Attractiveness of opportunity. Especially given that we had meagre resources, we decided that selling to marketers would be the best bet as marketers had bought social analytics for a while and had developed enough confidence in its value. It was a crowded space, but with significant over-promising and under-delivery, and we believed that we could differentiate enough to create an attractive opportunity for ourselves.
Truth be told, if we did have enough resources, we would have perhaps liked to go directly for an opportunity that was much harder (and much more lucrative) - maybe in Finance, Stock Markets, Public Sector or Web Personalization. It would have been a much riskier bet as it would have required creating a new segment from scratch, but would have been very lucrative were we to succeed. We decided to keep all of those for later, post the initial base-building, when we would have enough resources to go after some or many of those, one by one.
And that is where we are today - selling #peopleintelligence to marketers, that allows them to move beyond simpler social analytics and truly deploy social data for better consumer insight. We are not the only one offering this, but we are definitely one of the handful who truly, honestly have substance to back otherwise noisy claims around technology, innovation and abilities. And we believe that the users would see through.
This is not where we have set out to be, and this sure as hell is not where we shall stop. This, however, is a hugely important part of our journey, and we would leave no stone unturned to become the best here. And give our customers in marketing the very best solution in their quest to understand their consumer in and out.
However, make no mistake, our ultimate calling lies much, much beyond. At a place, where software becomes truly intelligent, and where we would have played our part in making that happen. That is our raison d'être, that is why we exist.
