Posts tagged data

Josh Jones-Dilworth is the Founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc. a PR consultancy focused on bringing early-stage technologies to market. He blogs at joshdilworth.com

Outliers like Factual, WolframAlpha, Daytum, FlowingData, and InfoChimps have proven that painting our world in data (and metadata) is a rather valuable endeavor for any business.

In a previous post I wrote about key concepts in data marketing. There has been some great discussion along those lines, and some understandable apprehension. I wanted to follow-up and discuss how the proliferation of data will impact more than just marketing.

Data Democratization

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Conducting business at the data level is not a practice for the future. It is a core competency, today. I am reminded very much of what it felt like 5 years ago to transition what had until that point been a hobby (blogging) into a full-blown part of my work life.

Social media, at its inception, was all about the democratization of publishing and the conversations surrounding it. Today, frictionless interaction is arguably ubiquitous, and a higher-order discipline is emerging — that of data mining, and data analysis. The democratization of data is the natural next step.

Data cuts not just vertically or horizontally, but in every direction. Marketer Scott Brinker wrote about such a concept over a year ago:

“[We become] the champion of the underlying data — good, accurate, detailed content and the processes by which to keep it up to date. This isn’t just old-school “marketing” data, i.e., the stuff of brochures and the visual corporate web site, but rich, detailed information that has historically been trapped much deeper in the organization — information that can create value by its wide dissemination…”

Much of this work is, of course, in uncovering existing data and making it available and digestible — essentially, the curation task, which is no small thing, particularly in enterprise environments. This is an organizational competence that touches every role and every department, and further opportunities lie in framing, publishing and visualizing that data.

It’s Everywhere

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This trend didn’t exactly come out of nowhere.

We’ve had heart rate monitors for some time now. We have scales in the bathroom, speedometers (and more recently fuel efficiency measures) in the car, and all manner of time sheets in the workplace. Every day, we gather vast amounts of data about ourselves, and vast amounts of data are gathered for us (and about us). Kevin Kelly refers to this as the quantified self.

We are in many respects surrounded by gauges and dashboards, tachometers and GPS devices, calorie counters and performance metrics. Data mining and data journalism and data-driven application development, and now, data marketing and data-based business practices, are logical extensions.

More generally, the fields of biology, nanotechnology, and medicine have long chronicled the goings-on of our daily lives in the most literal sense, and recent advances have extended these capabilities by an order of magnitude.

Tim Ferris is becoming superhuman by calculatedly measuring and extending his body’s capabilities beyond what is considered normal, much less possible. Companies like 23andMe (despite their recent woes) have come a long way in helping reveal what our DNA may or may not have in store for us, and startups like Fitbit and Zeo are merging gadgeteering with health data and the web to create a new kind of personal data stream.

Only the Beginning

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As streams on the web (both personal and private, public and corporate) proliferate, gathering, analyzing, visualizing and publishing data become increasingly important to businesses of any kind. Data is the best way to understand an opportunity, design an approach to it, and differentiate. Data is how we know we’re doing well, or faring poorly. Data is how we make decisions, at every level.

Is our data obsession unnatural? Have we taken all the fun out of the game? Is there no room left for art, nuance, or gut instincts? Certainly there are — and some things will remain immeasurable. But there is less and less wiggle room, and less and less room for error.

This new reality is the natural extension of where we are and where we have been headed since the beginning. Our collective data is the byproduct and the artifact of digital life and web living. It is increasingly rich and it is precisely the inner logic according to which we make decisions to buy and sell, act and react. We have, consciously or unconsciously, made data the bonfire, the totem, and the town square.

Full Disclosure: WolframAlpha and Infochimps are clients of Josh Jones-Dilworth, and are either referenced above or referenced in pages linked to above. He is good friends with people at the Dachis Group.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Small Businesses
- 9 Great Document Collaboration Tools for Teams
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Retain Customers
- Top Mobile Productivity Tools for the Small Business
- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
- 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DamirK, enot-poloskun, Rellas

Tags: business, data, List, Lists, MARKETING