Nokia hires financial analysts to help understand social media for marketing

Nokia is recruiting financial analysts working in the City of London to improve how the company uses digital and social-media data for marketing campaigns.

Nokia's global director of digital and social media Craig Hepburn, told the Social Brands conference last week in London that traditional media measures were being inappropriately used by brands to assess digital and social-media engagement, according to Marketing Magazine.

"Social and digital are driving big data and it's more important than ever to hire data analysts to help marketers understand the opportunity," he said.

Hepburn maintains that consumers are becoming less reactive to traditional, above-the-line marketing, claiming that it's increasingly important to "combine creativity and speed of opportunity with the superb brains of analysts' to reach relevant consumers with relevant messages."

"What is the value of doing social media? I'm sort of getting tired of being asked. But I do also understand that businesses need to justify cost," Hepburn told the conference, according to Marketing Magazine. "It feels like we're always trying to justify it, and the biggest challenge for me is that we're trying to apply old thinking to a new, un-defined medium we don't understand yet."

Of note, the Nokia executive revealed that the company s in the process of developing an attribution model to help measure the effectiveness of its social marketing. "We're maybe three months away from having a solid attribution model that we'll then roll out across the whole company," he said.

For more:
- see this Marketing Magazine article

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