Data: My Precious…
From a simple Google search to that funny video you share on Facebook to the pretty little black dress you bought online for your cousin’s birthday shindig down to that Collector’s Item of a hardbound book that you got from Amazon. Oh, and let’s get a bit more personal — like the number of steps you made today to the music you picked on Spotify to how many times you watched Morgan Freeman rap in a Super Bowl ad, or your HVAC usage!
That, my dear, and everything else that can be quantified is data. The world’s new black gold, the new oil. The newest kid on the commodity block. Or Gollum’s new ring.
In a world where information is just a click away, it’s easy to understand why data has become a commodity — and boy, isn’t there an abundant supply of it! You probably take it for granted but you create and receive data on a daily basis. It’s a fusion of the out-of-this-world to the most mundane of things but essentially, it’s everything about you or me — your online activity, your preferences, information about your health, job, social network — your life in general.
Creepy, huh? And to some degree, mighty scary.
Its magnitude has spurred on a mass influx and outflow, thus creating a robust economy; the data economy. More data means more information about us and the world we live in. It helps concoct the most potent elixir for what used to be hopeless medical cases, understand the complexities of human behavior, build cutting-edge technologies, and break new grounds and frontiers. These days, with the abundance of data, it’s very easy to spot trends and recognize patterns. It’s also very easy to have personalized and ultra-customized digital experiences.
Don’t know about you but it sure sounds like a true-blue economic engine to me! It is leverage used and exploited by businesses. Because of that, you can even say that data is more valuable than oil. And unlike oil, data isn’t finite. It’s reusable. You cannot reuse oil, but you can share and manipulate data. You can give out information to one company or two, and that still wouldn’t diminish its value. On the contrary, it increases it.
On its own, data is not as precious. Its value comes from analytics, data science, machine learning, and by blending it with other data sets. That is why, if you’re an internet giant with huge data lakes and a ginormous processing capability (think Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Apple) it would be extremely easy to innovate and stay on top of your game — or sell priceless data to those who want to establish a stronghold in their own industries.
Is it fair to deduce then that monopoly could be in the picture? Absolutely. But at the same time, with the amount of data from all sorts of things, there should always be something unique for everyone.
There, certainly, are drawbacks — privacy being the biggest. But to keep it secure, we need to extrapolate data and find out how to set safety nets in place. And so, we fall in a Catch-22 in the whole data universe.
But as there are fumbles, there are touchdowns. I mean, let’s face it, it’s easier to shop with product recommendations and targeted ads, look for a job with sophisticated career matching, or even find a date!
So, Frod — errrr, buddy, don’t stay on the sidelines. You owe it to your business to hop on the data bus and get the pulse of your market — what your customers really want, where and when they want to engage you — and how — and calibrate your marketing efforts so everything is in great sync! Don’t know where to start? Don’t fret. We’ve got you. Click here to get started.
