For digital marketers, one of the biggest challenges we face is cutting through the noise in the digital space in an efficient way. To do that, we need to understand how people make their decisions and eventually get to the point of making a purchase. 

To communicate, the bees dance. They twist, turn, and make a salsa move to share all the information they have gathered. The dance help to ensure they become a strong society. It is part of their decision-making, for example about where they should fly to fetch food via the most optimal route.

As an individual, each bee has limited intelligence and information. But as a collective group, they are able to pool their resources and complete goals that are beyond the reach of any one individual. As a superorganism, the dance builds the beehive’s collective knowledge, resulting in a stronger society.

There is also evidence to suggest that a similar construct would benefit human decision making: collective wisdom will often outperform individuals, even experts.

In product development, we see how individual users respond to a product or service individually, but make decisions for improvements based on the collective insight of all users. We do not make decisions based on gut feeling but on hard facts.

This also relates to marketing. At SMOC, we believe that the decisions of many are much more valuable than those of a few. That’s why we bring partners, advertisers and users together in an ecosystem to help everyone benefit from better decision making.

The result is a highly intelligent choice graph created through smart conversations between businesses and users. For every conversation, we collect several preferences per user. A preference is a decision made by a user and could be a demographic statistic, reward type, or love of coffee. Every node in the graph is a unique decision.

Like the dance of the bees make the beehive stronger, by connecting the dots in the choice graph, SMOC gets a collective intelligence around people's decisions. It can then predict future preferences and choices of the same and similar users.

Unlike traditional online marketing, where cookies and trackers follow people around like stalkers, users are given actual choices when engaging in conversations. They are in full control of which data to share and in which context. In addition, their attention is rewarded to motivate engagement.

In a way, the SMOC platform becomes much like a superorganism. The collective wisdom from all the pieces of information help people to navigate through the digital noise and reach the products and services they prefer via the most optimal route.

It turns out that bees have always had something to teach us. While it may not be intentional, conversational marketing is now following their lead.

So perhaps the solution to make (even) better decisions is to be data-driven and to dance more!