A few weeks ago, I pulled 10 nuggets from The Economist’s special report on social media. Fittingly, The Economist followed that this week with a special report on managing information.
Managing and making best use of all the data trails that consumers create via digital and social media is critical for marketers (see this prior post on managing information richness). This capability is one of a few that will separate winning marketing functions (and even enterprises) from losing ones in the next 3-5 years.
So, without further delay, here are 10 of my favorite takeaways from the report.
10 Nuggets from The Economist’s Special Report on Managing Information
1. Decoding the human genome, which involves analyzing 3 billion base pairs, took 10 years the first time around in 2003. Now, it can be completed in one week.
2. The amount of information in the world is growing at 60% compounded annually
3. The human brain can retain seven pieces of information in its short term memory, and can hold only four concepts at once. More information, or greater complexity, generally leads to confusion.
4. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”–Herbert Simon, economist
5. A new kind of professional is emerging— the Data Scientist—who combines software programming, statistics and storytelling/artist skills to extract insight from mounds of data
6. “What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data—and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level” –Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft
Example: Microsoft’s Farecast examines 225 billion airline pricing data points to tell customers whether they should act now or wait to buy the lowest price airfare for a particular itinerary
7. According to Wal-Mart (and its gigantic purchase database): Leading up to hurricane strikes, people buy flashlights and batteries (no surprise)—and PopTarts (!!) PopTarts are an easily ported and consumed survival food. Nimble, data savvy businesses can spot and seize opportunities to stock shelves just-in-time with the right goods.
8. By crunching numbers, Cablecom (a Swiss telecommunications firm) has reduced churn from 20% to 5% of subscribers annually. How? In sifting through data, it found that customer defections peak in the 13th month, but customers decide to leave four months earlier (on average). Cablecom identified likely leavers, and made them special offers in month seven to pre-empt the month nine moment-of-truth.
9. “Understanding turns out to be overrated, and statistical analysis goes a lot of the way” –Edward Felton of Princeton University. In other words, if there are mountains of user data available, it can be used to augment the algorithms programmers normally rely on to execute a complex task.
Example: Google’s spellcheck program was effectively crowdsourced: using the millions of search queries with spelling errors, and offering a correct spelling (which searchers accept or don’t), allows Google to zero in on a statistical technique for spotting and fixing spelling errors.
10. Remember when “terabyte” was the term used to convey gobs of information beyond what most of us can comprehend? Well, beyond terabyte, you have petabyte, exabyte, and zettabyte (the total information in existence this year is believed to be around 1.2 ZB). Beyond zettabytes lies the realm of yottabytes—too big for us to imagine at this point.
MLC Members: See our work on Digital Marketing. As well, stay tuned for an upcoming webinar, slated for May 4th, on Creative Uses of Social Media Data.
