Taming PR’s latest trend: Big Data

Big Data is the practice of collecting the information scattered across the Web to better target consumers, and it has a promising future for the public relations industry—from predictive analytics to mining data from social media interactions.

But for the PR professional on the ground, harnessing the deluge of data is not so much about the future as it is about the current challenges that demand an answer to the question:

How do you deal every day with two huge data explosions: the expanding universe of digital influencers and the massive volume of social media conversations and real-time digital mentions that concern your brand, industry and competition?

The number of digital influencers has grown 30-fold in the past couple of years. The monthly traffic on Facebook alone runs in the billions of page views, and social channels account for more than 20 percent of brand impressions.

The sheer volume of your brand mentions may demand that you start by prioritizing: Find out who matters, determine what they’re saying, and how it sways others, and decide the best (and perhaps most immediate) way to engage with them.

Finding out who matters