Rick Gardinier, Chief Digital Officer, Brunner Digital posted an interesting item in Silicon Angle on how can you be creative if you're drowing in data. Here's Rick's piece:
If I hear another agency person say “data is the new creative” I think I’ll scream! Data is NOT creative – people are.
Like most online marketers, I am fascinated with real-time data. Even 15 years into my interactive marketing career, I am still amazed that I can find out what is working – or more importantly what is NOT working – just hours into a particular campaign’s launch. For many years, the methods and tools that we used to measure success or failure didn’t really change all that much. Web usage stats, CTR’s, Email open rates and Opt-In’s ruled the data analytics field for years.
Not only that, but it didn’t seem like too many people even cared to see this data, which amazed me. Who wouldn’t want to tap into real-time performance data and graphs on a daily basis to find out the fate of their latest campaign? Why wouldn’t everyone want to know the home page bounce rate of your site and whether it was trending up or down?
Then along came MySpace and Facebook and a fascination with personal web stats. Startups like your.flowingdata are popping up every day and telling me that I can understand myself by digging into my personal web data. I might have issues, but this chart isn’t going to help me solve them!
Still, personal social networks have changed the analytics game forever. The average teenage Facebook user knows at every moment their “friend count.” Most Twitter users know which followers yield the most “reach” as well as their follower “growth rate.”
The pace of innovation in the data-visualization space has accelerated to dizzying levels. And now even the average marketer is demanding real-time data dashboards to track every one of the hundred or more standard metrics.
Social media monitoring companies are subsequently exploding in popularity – Spiral16’s data visualization model, for instance, is a tool that I can get lost in for days. The age old standbys, Omniture and WebTrends, for example, are scrambling to keep up.
But here’s my question – does all of this data REALLY mean anything unless we tie it back to business goals?
We are approaching data overload – quickly. In a matter of six months time, I’ve gone from the mantra “Take a look at your web daily visitor log and you’ll gain valuable insights” to “I’m not sure that you really need to be focused on how many Twitter influencers have re-tweeted your re-tweets, while figuring out if your latest sales promotion is working.”
Fascinating? Yes. But I can’t help wonder sometimes if we’re making it all too complicated. The fact is that people are still the creatives. People need time to think about the data that matters. The insights that we draw from data help to spur their creativity, but only if we’re looking at the right data.
As much as I love the field of data analytics, I fear that we’re in the middle of data overload and that might actually paralyze us instead of helping us be more creative.
Now excuse me while I use Trendrr to mashup my Twitter data against my Salesforce.com data… just for fun of course.