Retailers Struggle with Mining and Managing Unstructured Social Customer Data #nfr11

By Blake Landau (@blakelandau) Jan 10, 2011

When you think of some of the more forward thinking industries when it comes to technology do you think of retail?

I don’t — one reason I was particularly interested in attending the National Retail Foundation expo in its 100th installment. The New York City event with over 18,500 attendees is the biggest retail event of the year started on Sunday the 9th and ends Wednesday the 12th, currently unfolding at the Javitz Center.

The conference covers mobile strategies, store operations, global outlook, sustainability, technology, digital retailing, supply chain management and the list goes on.

(NRF T.V.-Expo Intro Video)

Mining and Managing Unstructured Data

Many retailers are operating without collaboration tools. At NRF today we heard a panel session sponsored by DemandTec that focused on brands partnering with vendors and sharing data. They discussed leveraging communities for marketing. The panel featured Shelley Hyytinen of Target who said Target has looked at their social customer for the last “15 years.”

Hyytinen discussed some of what is known as social CRM, but admitted to struggling with mining for unstructured data. Most companies have not even achieved the social business maturity of Target. But they are setting out on their social business journey. The panel also featured Doug Knudsen of ConAgra Foods and Rob Culin of DemandTec, Inc.

It’s no secret that many retailers struggle with exactly what Hyytinen of Target mentioned: mining and managing large amounts of unstructured customer data.

Change Management

Today we heard a keynote from Dan Heath, author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Heath had an introduction from Terry Lundgren, CEO of Macy’s. Heath’s session was a highlight of the event. His content on change management conjured social business challenges; without specifically mentioning “social business” in his talk.

Heath told a room of roughly 1000 people yesterday afternoon, "The consumer is motivated by emotion." Heath is someone who studies change and behavioral patterns. His first book was Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. During his keynote today he reminded the audience of retailers, "If you want change then failure is part of the deal." The #NRF11 tweet-stream was bustling. One re-tweet from Heath’s talk from attendee @CA_Rose, “If we want to change, change the question. Don't ask what's broken & how do we fix it. Ask: “what's working and how do we clone it?” While we know social business campaigns can’t necessarily be cloned, the idea is to think about the strengths of the business and how to create more of them.

The State of Retail Today

Retail employment numbers are down. In a report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14.4 million people were employed in the U.S. Retail Industry as of April 2010.