MWhile reviewing my conference session description for ILTA
2014, I started to think about Big Data. Do I really know and understand what
big data is and how it plays a part in marketing? So, I decided to do a deeper dive for more
information and came across this article by Lisa Arthur of Forbes magazine called “What
is Big Data”.
According to Lisa, Big Data can be seen as a scary thing to some marketers but
it’s really the same data we’ve always used. It is powerful but controllable. Basically,
big data is a combination of traditional and digital sources for discovery and
analysis. OK. I got that. She went on to discuss the important factors in
defining big data which include understanding the mix of unstructured and multi-structured
data. So, what’s unstructured and multi-structured data?
Unstructured data is unorganized information that is typically text heavy, such
as metadata, tweets etc. Multi-structured data is a variety of data
format/types derived from interactions between people and machines, such as
social networks, web applications etc.
Bottom line: Once you understand what big data is and how
it works, you’ll be able to use it for customer engagement strategy
improvements. This is a way to make big data work in your marketing and add
value to your customer interactions.
To
learn more about Big Data and how it can impact your marketing efforts, plan to
attend this session at ILTA 2014 “Using
Big Data To Measure Marketing and Business Development ROI”