Data Management at SushiVid

As I’m browsing my Facebook in the morning, I see an article shared by a friend that seems interesting. I click to check it out, only to get a pop-up asking me to allow cookies and without much thought, I would just accept all. I love the convenience. If there is an option to login via social media or fill up an entire form on any website, I would link to my social media. To me, convenience is a priority. I also love to share about my day-to-day life. I tag all the places I go to on social media, and I post photos, videos, and moments freely. Personally, I don’t quite care about what Meta or Alphabet knows because I don’t have anything to hide. In fact, in our line of work as digital marketers, I absolutely embrace it. Clients want a more targeted, more curated audience, and without our activities and Meta’s ability to track, how can we get more targeted?  

My boyfriend on the other hand doesn’t even connect his Apple account to his MacBook, browses everything in incognito mode, and doesn’t sign up to anything that requires linking to his Facebook or Google in order to sign in. He hasn’t shared anything on his social media for the last 5 years and certainly will not subscribe to anything for a 15% discount. To him, he doesn’t want social media to start behavior-tracking him and start curating content they think he would want to see. He doesn’t want the content he consumes to be subjected to Meta’s algorithm. This is consistent across everything he does; he doesn’t listen to any mainstream music, avoids the best-selling authors, does not subscribe to Netflix and wouldn’t be swayed to watch any movies in the cinema. When it’s movie night, he chooses to watch documentaries (🙄 ROLL EYES).  

As you can see, we are at two completely different ends of this spectrum. I’m the uber transparent person that readily accepts my fate as a user where as my boyfriend is anti-mainstream and doesn’t want anything to do with Facebook. Everyone has a different level of tolerance to data sharing and data security. Where do you stand in this matter? 

The reason this topic is being discussed today is that SushiVid does require influencers to link their social media, and we do from time-to-time profile our influencers so that our clients can search for influencers more effectively. And… from time-to-time influencers do make our lives really difficult by refusing to link their social media, and when we do ask for insights, take forever to respond and I guess it’s time we fully disclose what we do with their data. I hope through this article, our influencers would feel more at ease with us requiring data the next time.  

As an influencer, you are promoting a campaign for a client, and since they are paying for your service and platform as an influencer, it is their right to know what is the result you have generated for them. The good news is that no influencers in our seven years have refused to provide us with their insights. However, some of you prefer to screenshot it for us instead of linking your social media to our platform. And me no like it! 

Reduce errors made by manual labour 

When it’s screenshots, it means we need to do manual labour. When there is manual labour involved, there are bound to be errors. Imagine our team gets the screenshots from 100 of you for a campaign, and they need to key in one-by-one for everyone, that’s a lot of time wasted and by the 20th influencer, they are so confused going back and forth all the different WhatsApp messages to find the insights. This increases time taken to do this manual labour, and in turn increases cost that clients have to pay not to mention the errors we will make when keying in one-by-one.  

Nobody enjoys doing such menial work. You might think this is not a problem for you, but actually, it is. It is in everyone’s nature to do things the fast way. While we’d love to work with you, we will not hesitate to replace you with someone who makes our lives less difficult. So, yes it doesn’t affect you outside of SushiVid, but within our team, we generally will select a less difficult influencer for future campaigns.  

Static view count vs Incremental view count over time 

When you provide us screenshots, the number stagnates, we won’t have time to change your views and reach and likes and shares daily, but when your social media is linked, client gets updates in real-time. So maybe today your content looks like there’s 1000 views (not great), client comes back tomorrow and hey! It’s 1500 views! YAY! You might wonder, how does the views go up? Sometimes, when you do a new post, people get curious and will check out your profile to see what other contents you’ve done. Sometimes when someone likes your post, Instagram will show them more post from you, because they think your followers want more. This is great right? Except your client doesn’t see the increase if you screenshot because that number is fixed but if you link your social media to SushiVid, the next time you post, your sponsored content views goes up again! YAY for the 2nd time! This makes clients really happy to see the numbers going up and as a result, they may engage you again.  

Let’s say now, you have agreed to linking your social media account to SushiVid, you might wonder what data exactly do we take from you? 

Data collected by SushiVid 

Generally, we do not scour through all your content to get every detail, but we do collect general info such as your follower count, your profile name, profile description, your audience demographics and that’s it! We also cannot afford to do this every day as it is costly to store so much data, usually we will only refresh your profile info once a month or when client wants to engage you. 
 

When we do a campaign together, you will provide us with a link and then, we will pull specific data for that link only (which is related to the client’s campaign). We do not have the bandwidth to go through every single data of every single content you put out and it certainly would be too expensive to do so.  

That’s it? NO… There’s also SushiVid’s own data about you.  

From time-to-time, when we work together we will have information about you, like your address (for when we ship products to you) or what brand sponsorships you’ve worked on with SushiVid (you get access to that too - in the invoice section - great for when you need to file taxes - check out the article HERE ).  

When you join SushiVid the first time, we also ask that you profile yourself. This is because sometimes our clients wants to work with only a specific group of influencers such as  mother influencers, vegan influencers, or gaming influencers, this would be really handy if you filled that up. 

When a campaign ends, we need to submit a report to the client, where we not only assess your content performance, we also do a quick review on your timeliness, responsiveness and professionalism. If you worked directly with brands on our self-serve platform, the client would review you directly. These reviews generally provide trust to our future clients, that you are a credible, reliable influencer to work with.  

Please note that we do not have information about you regarding campaigns that are not done via SushiVid.

How we keep your data safe 

When answering this question, I think I would need to first and foremost answer the “who”. Who is the data safe from?  

There are so many manpower that has come and gone from SushiVid and I’m sure it will freak you out to think they all have your data. The truth is, they don’t have any data that is not already available on your account.  

The SushiVid team does not all have equal access to our database. So for example, sales team would have data about you up to what they need to know only to propose you for a campaign. The account servicing team would have data about you specific to your campaign only. Specific data is only accessible via platforms for different functionalities to different teams, and not a single person has access to all data. At any point in time, if they need more data about you, it has to be requested and they need to justify why they would need the data. It works the same way in Google, no one employee gets to just do an in-depth search about someone or some specific company or entity. Any search that any employee from Google does, will need to get approval.  

Most importantly, is your password and access to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Twitch or YouTube or any other social media you connected to us. Maybe not SushiVid team, what if we got hacked? 

What about Hackers?  

Layers of data encryption by industry standard AES-256 encryption algorithm have been implemented to prevent your data from unauthorized access. For the more geeky bunch, here’s more information.  

~~~ Skip this part if it’s too technical for you 

Our data is being stored in multiple different servers, such as AWS & DigitalOcean. 

AWS has been accredited under: 

SOC 1 and SOC 2/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 (Previously SAS 70 Type II) 

PCI Level 1 

FISMA Moderate 

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) 

 ISO 27001 

 
While DigitalOcean has been accredited under: 

SOC 1 and SOC 2/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 (Previously SAS 70 Type II) 

ISO/IEC 27001:2013 

PCI-DSS 

Additionally, DigitalOcean has achieved Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Level 1 which addresses fundamental security principles across 16 domains to help assess the overall security risk of a cloud service. 
 

Firewalls are utilized to restrict access to systems from external networks and between systems internally. By default, all access is denied and only explicitly allowed ports and protocols are allowed. Each system is assigned to a firewall security group based on the system’s function. Security groups restrict access to only the ports and protocols required for a system’s specific function to mitigate risk. 

~~~ Continue here…  

How is this data a game changer? 

When looking at influencer data, we look at it in a wholesome manner, not as individuals but collectively, as a whole. This is a sample report from SapotMode (SushiVid’s in-house software). Just looking at this campaign report, you will see that we present the information together to form a decision whether a campaign was underperforming or overperforming. Look at the formulas, we calculate based on the total reach, comments and likes receives for the whole campaign, and a particular influencers number is just 1 of the X number of influencers engaged. 
 

What is the use of data if it is outdated?  

For the longest time, brands have not been able to form opinions about their campaigns because it takes too long to collect the data (when we use to do this manually), nobody knows what data exactly to analyze, and by the time we are done collecting the data, client has moved on to the following campaign.  

As an influencer, you are selling your social media account as a media platform and though it may seem a little gray, like “Hey! That’s my personal life!” but the day you accept a sponsorship, you are providing yourself as a form of media outlet to brands. It is the brand’s right to know how their campaigns went (since they paid for it) and it is certainly most helpful for SushiVid (your partner) to obtain the info automatically so that we are not “outdated”.  
 

We want to be respectful of your privacy, that is why you decide what level of info you wish to give when you wish to give it. Because of that, you can unlink at any time from the SushiVid platform but when you do have an ongoing campaign - we strongly advice you to keep it linked. I hope this clarifies a lot!  

This article is written as we launch our software SapotMode. We hope you are as excited about it as we are. I hope I answered any questions that you may have about your data and if there is anything else you’d like me to add on, do let me know at [email protected].