The best strategy is social innovation in retail

For some time we have observed the dominance of social data and its exploitation in defining an appropriate digital strategy. Knowing consumers, opinionated and can define behaviors most comprehensive and innovative strategies when facing our content to our communities of interest.

Noting the amount of data available on the digital medium and supplemented this information with the products purchased, with their properties and characteristics, will have a differential knowledge of our customers, contact our strategies and our products and services.

We want to mention to here the strategy followed by the giant Walmart to get this insight when superior character of its consumers and act accordingly. Having a lot of data, a repository of Big Data , it will be enough if we do not consider, from the outset, the ability and capacity to exploit that information ... The well-known and undeveloped conversion of data into information .

Data, tools, human capital, organizational visibility are all ingredients to validate a Big Data strategy that boasts. Develop, from Walmart, a company integrated services around the consumer based on the same information available, it became the best business strategy to compete with Walmart giant Amazon: robustness compete in e-commerce this with knowledge experience complete Walmart shopper. He was born WalmartLabs .

Walmart could not replicate the working models necessary for innovation and to capture new kinds of talent: creating a laboratory where companies incorporate in addition to incorporating the talent and teamwork culture of " two pizza " .

However, there was a Walmart culture data for some time that has collected millions of user data using loyalty programs, their purchase and billing data to draw a picture of the interests of its users and create products and promotions. Walmart retail revolutionized inter alia by the use of information technology but on ecommerce advance them to the left. In a world omni-channel must accompany the user but so far in the digital world has not worked since 4.9 ¢ at Walmart ecommerce invoice representing 1% of what Amazon bill .

The innovation developed by Walmart had several directions:

1. Innovating the ability and knowledge of the consumer through the exploitation of social data across multiple engines residents of Big Data.
2. Convert the company into a digital company, where information is the driver of any business strategy.
3. Surprise customers with a seamless experience, much wider and more varied, based on information gathered on various different moments of truth that make up the contact strategy.
4. Facing competition through a differential positioning tools and innovative, building a value proposition from the surrounding information to customers.
5. Finally, re-designing the whole strategy in a single solvent and social commerce strategy.

The paradigm of this revolution in Walmart lies in the consideration of a social concept that many of our readers will find familiar: WalmartLabs is the company that will manage the services of what is known as Social Genome .

Social Genome is a knowledge base for understanding conversations in digital media. It includes a taxonomy that identifies and classifies entities spoken (the subject and adverbs, adjectives ... we were taught in school), in "social elements": people, places, topics, products and events.

As you might have understood, and Social ste Genome is obtained in a Big Data platform across all social graphs that are arranged around a consumer: Diagram of Interest; Grafo of Friends; Grafo Devices; Grafo Whereabouts ... and getting a single, comprehensive picture of what our consumers want, seek and / or need.

This created and fed daily a knowledge base of institutions and social relations that processes real-time multiple terabytes of new data that collect the new conversations that include some of the hundred million keywords that monitor and crossing with petabytes historical data, covering several million users of products and internal sources of Walmart.

WalmartLabs has continued to supplement their sources of information with companies that provided talent to add the mobile component: ONE RIOT - Real time mobile and social retargeting , GRABLE - that develops technologies to integrate the POS with mobile phones and Small Society - mobile agency .

The key innovation is the knowledge of the interests and personalities of users, thanks to digital traces. As says Jure Leskovec, Stanford University .

Image Aleiex .