By Joe Skorupa

Facebook passed a trillion page views per month in June, according to Google/Doubleclick, making it a singularity in the digital world. To retailers, this represents an immense source of CRM data with unlimited potential, but it has been impossible to tap. The problem is the data is a mix of text, graphics, geospatial and other formats. How can retailers structure this black hole of unstructured data? Turns out MicroStrategy has a solution.

Rumors about mining Facebook data have been circulating for the past 18 months. Aside from big software vendors like Oracle and SAP, some off-the-record hints have come up about using applications developed by CIA-friendly organizations that currently monitor the digital world for terrorist activities or using artificial intelligence supercomputers like IBM’s Watson.
 

But a solution has finally emerged that is more realistic and has more relevance to retailers. It comes from MicroStrategy, the first to go on record with a trio of Facebook solutions it is rapidly developing that will unlock the future of retail CRM.

Already one of the leaders in retail business analytics and BI, and a top performer in the RIS Software LeaderBoard, MicroStrategy is now in the forefront of Facebook CRM, the next logical step in the evolution of Facebook into a treasure trove of marketing opportunities.

Gateway for Facebook

This past summer MicroStrategy began a measured release of the first of three Facebook CRM solutions. The first solution, which is available now, is called Gateway for Facebook.

“Gateway converts Facebook data into a relational database,” says Mark LaRow, SVP of products for MicroStrategy. “Once it is in this format the data can be accessed using standard enterprise-friendly SQL protocol that supports deep queries, which can’t be done through standard Facebook access protocol called the Graph API, which is only optimized for applications that need only short and simple queries. Plus with Gateway you can integrate existing enterprise data with Facebook data with things like purchase history and loyalty program history, making your Facebook application more useful to consumers.”

What Gateway for Facebook offers retailers is a way to extract and host Facebook data that they have permission to access, and organize it for easier usage in enterprise-caliber applications. Once it is in this form, retailers can do things like create segments of shoppers with specific demographic profiles and with specific interests and likes by using the second of MicroStrategy’s Facebook CRM solutions called Wisdom.

This kind of segmentation is ideal for making a special offer, for example, to a highly targeted group of shoppers and achieving a high conversion rate, which is a rare feat for current Facebook marketing efforts. But, according to LaRow, without the MicroStrategy application “it would take hundreds or thousands of queries to answer.”

One of the first users of Gateway for Facebook is Mike Relich, CIO of Guess, and one of the most innovative IT leaders in retailing. Relich has been working quietly with MicroStrategy for several months to find a way to effectively tap into the one million Guess Facebook fans and nudge his Facebook marketing conversion rate above the tenth of a percent mark, which is typical for mass Facebook offers.

I have spoken with Relich several times about his Facebook CRM project, and he has spoken about his plans to use Facebook data as the core of his company's CRM database to create a centralized CRM platform augmented by data from purchase histories and loyalty programs.
 

Relich believes one of the major benefits of incorporating Facebook data into customer profiles is that it helps relieve Guess from the task of probing too deeply into customer preferences when they sign up for the loyalty program, something many shoppers dislike, and making sure profiles are updated.

By pulling shopper data from Facebook through the Gateway application Guess is able to enrich its customer profiles and keep them automatically up to date.  

MicroStrategy’s third Facebook CRM application is called Alert, and it lets retailers broadcast in a personalized way by tying into Wisdom and sending messages and offers to micro segments. Alert is now developing capabilities to extend into a mobile app and become a consumer tool that allows shoppers to aggregate their favorite Facebook Pages into one app and one location. It will also enable shoppers to receive exclusive content and offers.

Retail is on the cusp of the Facebook CRM era, one of the biggest developments in retail technology and marketing since the invention of the Web, and MicroStrategy has staked its first-mover position.