What 10 years ago was called “information overload”, is now known as the “data deluge”. Whatever your preferred moniker, at the end of the day the issue is the same – in an highly evolved and evolving consumerist society, we are literally now drowning in bits and bites of media-borne information.
Clicks, tweets, likes and shares offer marketers vast amounts of customer detail, alongside footfall sales and receipts. Then there’s copious reports and papers on financials, market sentiment and even trendspotting, to be considered. And all this on top of the anecdotal, on-the-ground feedback proffered by sales teams and mystery shoppers.
From a marketing and communications perspective, this deluge throws up a two particularly serious issues:-
Firstly, how do you distinguish between the peripheral and the really useful data? Writing in his blog for the Economist Schumpeter (www.economist.com/node/21542154) says that the “value of things is largely determined by their rarity”. Applying this truism to the data deluge point and it would seem that the data of most value to a company is therefore not necessarily the everyday output from the organisation’s daily marketing activity. So where is the really useful data and how can it be gleaned?
In a world gone cyber-crazy, brands today have so many touch points with customers, the resulting data noise is tumultuous. And the current obsession with social commentary is in danger of rendering other data inferior.
Ironically, the stakeholder conundrum of the Noughties has evolved and even a few loud activists, now on-line, can be a serious drain on a brand’s communication effort. Meanwhile other – often much greater in number – customers’ passivity goes unchecked. Social media has irrevocably transformed the volume of the consumer voice, and in the main undeniably for the better. But it has arguably followed that he who shouts loudest and most often will not only get heard but also receive a disproportionate level of attention with respect to their actual value to the brand. Distinguishing your data is a priority issue, and a critical communication issue that must not go unchecked.
The devil really is in the detail, or the detailed implication of the data in this case. So the second issue is how to extract genuine intel from the select data, and convert this into useful and valuable knowledge that can be embedded and utilised in the company’s marketing strategy. This then in turn can determine an organisation’s communications strategy, and in particular identify which audiences to deal with and in what manner and should be a key business endeavour. .
Paradoxically, the communication by-lines of marketing days gone by still resonate in 2012: The customer, data and content are all still king, it’s just the dais that’s changed.
SH