As data storage costs fall to zero the temptation to suck in more and more information becomes stronger. Of course, data on a giant scale has always been valuable. Just look at the grip it has given big grocers on the UK marketplace, notably Tesco with its Clubcard. But it can also be overwhelming. The guy who managed the Tesco's sales data once told me (with pride) that it was like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. Today, with the rise of networked media, the temptation...
...is there for marketeers to hoover up all the new social factoids on the web using near-free terrabytes and turn it into mangeable data. Good idea, right? Well maybe, but it's important to realise the scale of the challenge.
Unlike those Tesco sales numbers, social information on the web isn't being rung up into neat packages at the till and held in tidy proprietary databases. It's an oceanic soup of public, unstructured data in the shape of stories, complaints, recommendations, conversations, videos, pictures and audio. And it's growing - fast. In 2004, the notion of consumer-generated media was a novelty. Now it's a given and people jump from one social network to another without a blink, leaving data trails along the way and writing their lives large over a web which never forgets.
In theory this should all be a marketeers dream. But ironically, people are spilling information about themselves faster than marketeers can catch it. Like trying to drink from Niagra Falls. Of course, Google has set itself the mission of bringing order to this sea of bits and bytes and is building a technical platform like no other to make it possible.
However, it may even be wrong to see this data - as data. It may be more sensible to view it as human communication. And you wouldn't consider trying to listen into every conversation in the world on the off chance that someone mentioned your name, would you? Rather than focusing on gathering and analysising every piece of online chitter-chatter, it may actually be better to find a few relevant ones and focus your efforts on becoming brilliant at contributing to them. Let Google do the heavy lifting - it's what they do.
Well said. The Niagra Falls analogy is dead on.
The question is: “What do you do with an infinite amount of data?”. We are fast approaching that. At the level of analyzing a massive amount of data, you can look for trends. Trend analysis can define the movement of a market which, if you’re able to move quickly enough, can enable you to make a lot of money as either a provider of new products and services, or (more likely) as a financial arbitrageur.
Another thing you can do is “plug in” and track the conversations that are most relevant, as you said. We don’t really care about all the things falling over Niagra Falls. Maybe we only care about the tree branches, or the fish, or the rocks, or the people in barrels. If we focus on those things most important to us and track them, we can deal effectively with data overload.
Then, in an eddy after the item of interest goes over the falls, we can jump in and get involved in that space. We can engage in conversations to learn more about what it was like and what should be different. The key is to focus on the specific information (not data) that you seek and learn from that, without getting overwhelmed with everything else.
Posted by: Glenn Gow | June 14, 2007 at 04:19 AM