Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As Big Data matures beyond the hype, organizations are re-evaluating how they approach it. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO at Mozilla, describes an interesting strategic shift from “Big Data” to “Lean Data”:

“For growth-minded companies, collecting customer data for the sake of collecting data is more risk than the rewards can usually justify. Instead, we should be looking for ways to collect less data and go lean. Why? Because our collection tools create expensive overhead and risks that are impacting the trust of our customers in a negative way…

“For the most part, compiling bigger and more complex sets of customer data will not lead to the big profit and marketshare breakthroughs that Big Data promises. Instead, we marketers must learn to live and think lean. The twin false gods of Big Data and MarTech will continue to encourage thousands of marketers to gather all the data they can wielding an ever-expanding arsenal of tools to sift through it all, with little discussion about whether the mad scramble to vacuum up customer info is worth the trouble, expense, and risk…...

Five years ago, a team of researchers from Google announced a remarkable achievement in one of the world’s top scientific journals, Nature.

...It produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote “The End of Theory”, a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, these four articles of faith are at best optimistic oversimplifications. At worst, according to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge university, they can be “complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.”

Found data underpin the new internet economy as companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon seek new ways to understand our lives through our data exhaust. Since Edward Snowden’s leaks about the scale and scope of US electronic surveillance it has become apparent that security services are just as fascinated with what they might learn from our data exhaust, too....

Does your least favorite shirt fit you too tightly in the shoulders but too baggy on the belly? That’s data. Do your breasts pop out of your bra and the straps dig in too tight? That’s data. Are sleeves strangely loose on you? That’s data.

The data trend that has overtaken everything from job recruiting to sales leads has finally made its way into an unexpected place: the world of Anna Wintour. That’s right. Big data has arrived in Fashionland.

There’s multiple already funded Kickstarters underway right now, all that use data to produce perfectly fitting men’s t-shirts, in 24-50 unique sizes for all fellas of all shapes and sizes....