The Power of Pictures: Salesforce announces image recognition capabilities for Marketing Cloud
Salesforce announced its new marketing product Einstein Vision for Social Studio. It provides image recognition capabilities to Marketing Cloud social media products, thus enabling the power of pictures to drive business insights.
Social Studio already provides business insights from words on Twitter, however social media is no longer primarily text-based, it has become a visual environment. According to Deloitte, in 2016, 2.5 trillion photos were predicted to be shared online. By introducing Einstein Vision for Social Studio, Salesforce now allows companies to find out and understand how product images are being used online.
The offering uses image recognition to report and identify customer behaviours around particular items. Users are posting images of special occasions, holidays, meals, working, dancing, and the list just goes on and on. These photos highlight customer behaviours, but if they are posted without accompanying text, companies and marketers will miss out on capturing it. There’s a massive risk of organisations missing out on understanding their customers even better, resolving customer service issues, improving customer engagement and identifying new fans/influencers.
Finally, marketers are now empowered to automate discovery of images and thus engage and reach consumers which have not mentioned their product or brand by name. Einstein Vision currently has access to four image libraries which include two million brand logos, 200 foods, 1000 objects and 60 scenes. It’s powered by using two API’s. Einstein Object Detection recognizes objects in images and can detect quantities and types of the objects. By leveraging these capabilities, companies can understand and identify trends within customers. Depending on certain trends, companies can develop new brands/flavours, etc. Take the example of food, if there’s a new interest in a flavour, they can leverage that trend and quickly change products promoting their products through intelligent product placement and social media. The second API is Einstein Image Classification. This allows companies to use existing knowledge of logos and objects. The capability can also be trained to recognize products relevant to the business.
Einstein Vision for Social Studio is currently available in Twitter, and according to Salesforce there are three main uses for the capability, but there could well be more:
Consumer Insights: identifies trending options from customers thanks to visual data in reach. This will help businesses make smarter decisions. So, a food-based business can understand and learn trends that are promoted by food influencers in pictures on Twitter and respond with new/adapted offerings.
Brand Tracking: now businesses and marketers can understand and analyse brand integrity. This gives them a better overview of their reach and the effect of their social advertising campaigns.
Social Customer Service: helps businesses identify how consumers use their products. It can aid if there’s a product fault before complaints actually come in. It can also help with combination selling based on different areas. Take food for example again, some areas will combine vinegar and salt over chips, while other areas will use peanut sauce. The insights are endless.
This is merely the start for Einstein Vision. Depending on what feedback is received, the capability may well develop inputs into areas relating to product development. In the future the offering should also include other social media platforms if deals are sorted with them. Who knows, it may even work with video.
For businesses and marketers looking to get their hands on this, there’s still a little time to wait yet. Salesforce has revealed that the functionality and pricing will become available widely towards the end of August. Exciting times ahead!
Are you looking forward to the image capabilites for Marketing Cloud? Let us know in the comments!
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