Data mining is when businesses look to gain and store the personal information of potential customers. This is done for a few reasons it can be done to help find the target audience of a product but more often that not it is done so that businesses can build a database of customers information so they can keep sending advertisements for new products to them. Data capture or mining is a massive business and you only have to look at 'Microsoft paying $26.2 Billion to acquire LinkedIn in 2016' to back that up. That works out at' $260 per LinkedIn member' (Getapp,2020) just to have their personal information. Data can be captured in a number of ways for example when you buy a product from a site and put your information in that company then stores your information. Another way is when you accept cookies on websites that often gives that site permission to store some of your personal data. It can also be done via social media and I think this is a way it could be effective to me for growing my business. To start data mining you have to have an idea of the likes and dislikes of your target audience so for my business being a freelance cinematographer I know that companies like good quality professional shots and interesting shots this would not only attract potential customers but also other people in the industry who may be able to give me helpful advise. I know that smaller more local companies wouldn't want to pay loads of money for things like adverts so using words like cheap or inexpensive in titles and descriptions of pages would help. I also found it hard to find any local media professionals on Facebook as none of them use the place name next to the title of their company which makes them more difficult to find. After gathering this research I can then look at creating a Facebook page or group and rather than calling it my companies name which no one would be searching for I could call it something like Taunton Media professionals narrowing the location of the page down and making it harder to find. I could then fill it with shots of my own work and allow anyone to join and hopefully over time this would build a database of local people who work in the industry and potential customers all of which have now been exposed to my work and I have their contact details via Facebook for free. It is hard to find examples of data mining like this on a smaller scale as a lot of people consider to be morally wrong so companies do not like to admit that they do it. That being said I do not see anything wrong with my idea as people would be joining of their own accord. That being said promoting anything on social media is difficult but over time and with constant updating of the site and its contents I could start to build a good sized client base.
I have had success with a form of data mining myself. I joined a local media group called Taunton music and posted some of my work in there and said that I was a freelance cinematographer and I wasn’t really expecting many responses. In a matter of minutes though I was flooded with people asking me for quotes on how much it would cost to make a music video for their band and within the hour I had my own mini data base of around 25 potential clients from one post. I was surprised at how effective advertising like this was and will definitely be looking at advertising in this way again.
Bibliography:
ickell, D. (2020) Social Media Data Mining – How it Works and Who's Using it, Learn.g2.com. Available at: https://learn.g2.com/social-media-data-mining (Accessed: 5 May 2020).
Maria, G (2020) What is data mining?, Available at: https://www.getapp.com/resources/what-is-data-mining-small-business/ (Accessed: 7th May 2020)
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