Last week I got asked if I know about big data and how you use it in
digital marketing. Yes, of course, I do. I’ve been using big data for
years when analysing numbers from websites and social media.
I’ve also been fortunate to speak at many conferences where some of
the speakers are fully trained ‘big data ninjas’, and I’m lucky to know
some of them personally.
Big data is complex information, and it feels as overwhelming as a
huge waterfall. It’s only if you present big data in a meaningful way it
helps you to make better decisions.
Big data is inconveniently big. It’s hard to handle. Impossible to overview in its raw form.
On Wikipedia,
you read: “Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or
complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate.
Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing,
storage, transfer, visualization, querying and information privacy.”
An acquaintance who is responsible for all digital marketing for a
large hotel chain in the US told me about her struggle to start to look
at numbers when making decisions. For years, they had been making most
decisions based on prejudices, personal experiences, and their ‘gut
feeling’.
Every hour their hotels have thousands of guests who are in touch
with them, either online, over the phone or staying in one of their
large hotels. The information they collect about their customers is big
data.
The information they have about their guests comes in many forms.
Some are internal data, and some are external. You have access to the
data that you asked your guests for before their visit and during their
stay, and then new random data that you collect from your guests.
Their challenge was to use all information they have about their
customers in a meaningful way so they could make better marketing
decisions. To kick this off, they spent several days in a large
conference room trying to figure out every possible touch-point that
their customers have with them. What they got was a big complex map that
told stories about their customers. The map was not easy to overview,
or understand. The next step was to set up data collection points that
they could follow and then also improve everyone’s web analytics skills.
Analytics
is a vital phase of the big data cycle. The most common tools marketers
use is Google Analytics, and it tells you about your website visitors.
With the help of this information, you can understand what was
successful in a campaign and how many online leads it gave. You can
analyse your conversion rate, and see how many visits lead to a sale or
an inquiry.
It’s when the data shows you meaningful pattern that you can do
something with it. To see those patterns in an excel spreadsheet can be
hard. That’s why you use visualisation software to do this, there are
amazing and beautiful tools that magically help you visualise data.
To start using web analytics in a meaningful way took a while for
the hotel chain. It’s not a one-month projects, but more like an
on-going continual improvement project where everyone has to be open for
new learning and share their knowledge.
Five examples of big data in daily life:
1) The Panama leak was a big and complex project with 11 million
documents. And to understand them better, see the pattern the
journalists used big data visualisations tool. They used Neo4j and Linkurious to follow a pattern and see where the money went.
2) Eye on the Reef program – people, are helping scientists to find out what’s going on with the reef by sending them updates.
There is so much to be discovered. Last time when I visited my local
GP, or ‘house doctor’ as you say in Swedish, the nurse told me that they
keep track on patient’s blood pressure, ‘they give us a call and share
their blood pressure weekly, and we add it into the patients journal.’
Right now they collect the information manually. In the future, it will
be done over a digital application on your smartphone, and you may send
it to your doctor if you wish to.
We will use new personal digital technology in the future. We
already have the fitness bracelet and different health apps. We will
track all kind of body functions, sleep, movement, pulse, blood
pressure, periods, hormones, blood, saliva, and weight. Then we will
connect this with our smartphone, and start to see graphics and other
visualisation tools, and share this with our doctor. There is a lot of
medical issues that you can keep track of and prevent this way.
With so many new digital devices we are collecting and storing more
data than ever. One question we need to ponder is how we will use it,
and how it can be helpful. More tracking tools will be developed, it
will give us more data, and they may help us to make better decisions.
How many people who are working in digital marketing are big data
ninjas? Not that many, unfortunately. Big data is complex, and by
collaborating and sharing skills you can explore what it means to your
organisation.
Read more about big data here.
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