 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
You’re going to have to get used to it: data is everywhere, we contribute to it constantly, and it has a huge impact on the retail industry. In fact, 80-90 percent of all the data in the world was created in just the last two years. Big data is generally portrayed as having all the solutions to many of the biggest issues in retail (as long as it is mined and utilized correctly), but it still has a lot of quirks to work out.
A big chunk of the problem with big data comes down to how it’s defined. There are dozens of different takes on it, but let’s discuss it as the rapid increase of the creation of diverse and quickly transforming data through multiple channels that must be processed in innovative and strategic ways.
Global retail sales should reach $3 trillion this year, and big data has the potential to unlock a larger slice of the market share pie for retailers. How? Well, that’s the interesting part....
Organizations quantify, classify, categorize and track people well before they've even made a purchase and throughout their customer lifetime. These analytics provide a constant stream of data that should improve the decision making process.
To get a better understanding of problems and opportunities for your customers, you'll want to collect data from each of the following four customer analytics groups....
We need answers, not data.In today’s socially-fueled communications ecosystem, our core challenge as marketers stems from the same place that opportunity does: Big Data. We are at the center of a chaotic, endless ecosystem of conversation. Finding our bearings requires both a high-level view of the overall messaging horizon, and the ability to zero in on the people and places that matter. By understanding where we’re going, why, and who’s going to be there, we stand a far better chance of engaging the right people in a quality conversation that amplifies our message.
With that in mind, the most critical tool in our PR and marketing arsenal is a sophisticated communications search engine....
This a selection of great websites (blogs) created by statisticians, data scientists, machine learning and other analytic professionals, thought emphasis is more on statistics than data science.
I would add the following ones: - DataScienceCentral - this blog!
- KDNuggets
- AnalyticBridge - a channel of DataScienceCentral
- R - bloggers
- Stats blogs - you can submit your own blog (RSS feeds)
- AndrewGelman.
And, for a far more comprehensive list, read our article on 2,500 categorized websites for data scientists....
I always make the point that data is everywhere – and that a lot of it is free. Companies don’t necessarily have to build their own massive data repositories before starting with big data analytics. The moves by companies and governments to put large amounts of information into the public domain have made large volumes of data accessible to everyone.
Any company, from big blue chip corporations to the tiniest start-up can now leverage more data than ever before. Many of my clients ask me for the top data sources they could use in their big data endeavor and here’s my rundown of some of the best free big data sources available today....
Earlier this year, several producers at CNN received an alert from a new digital news-gathering tool that they were testing: A teenager in Los Angeles had posted a tweet saying that the pop music heartthrob Justin Bieber had been arrested.
CNN’s Los Angeles bureau followed up on the tip by calling the appropriate local precinct. The police said that they were pursuing an attempted robbery complaint against Mr. Bieber, but wanted to know how the cable news network could possibly have known that.
The answer is Dataminr, a software tool aimed specifically at analyzing billions of Twitter postings for patterns that could indicate breaking news. On Tuesday, Dataminr becomes commercially available to news organizations, some of which — like CNN and Gannett — have already been testing the software.
“On the whole this is one of the best technical tools we have,” said Richard T. Griffiths, senior editorial director at CNN. “Besides our local affiliates, it is probably our best source of story leads, and you live or die by your leads.”...
...Sony Corporation of America is an early tester of the platform, and its VP of marketing, Steven Fuld, said the program is helping the electronics giant drive better conversion rates.
"Pursway has a unique social graph that allows us to reach prospects with strong, real-life relationships with our customers," Fuld explained.
Indeed, Pursway and Sony assert that the program can segment influencers' actual, real-life friends—not just social media ones....
Will your customers and clients be looking for what you're actually trying to sell them? There are points you want—and need—to get across. However, have you pondered all the points from their perspective in ways they expect you to dissect data trends, anomalies, and correlations while tracking targets? Did you provide convincing proof? Let's delve into each of these five data differentiators....
When Raja Rajamannar became CMO of MasterCard Worldwide in 2013, he moved quickly to transform how the credit card giant measures marketing. His artillery: Advanced Big Data analytics. MasterCard had always been a data-driven organization. But the real power and full potential of data was not being fully realized by marketing.Rajamannar involved finance early.
To spearhead analytic efforts, he assigned a finance person – who was already embedded in marketing – to create an ROI evaluation framework and integrated her deeper into the marketing function. With a better understanding of the marketing context, she has brought a new level of financial discipline and rigor to the marketing team. This has reframed the conversation to balance the interests of both sides....
The days of clumping customers together based on zip code, age and income are falling by the wayside, thanks to the power of big data integration. Instead, chief marketing officers are getting personal. Business leaders are using personal data to better understand -- and serve -- customers. IT leaders, too, need to be aware of the shift taking place with big data in marketing if they want to keep up with trends.
At Big Data TechCon 2014 in Cambridge, Mass.,MainStream Analytics Executive Vice President Robert Dayton discussed how big data integration, the cloud, and consumer engagement are prompting business leaders to focus more on technology investments if they want to succeed...
...Few fully understand what big data is, much less what the term’s offshoots entail. But big data is evolving and smart data, identity data and people data are here to stay. Think of them as the human discovery of fire, the wheel and wheat. Just as those inventions couldn’t have occurred without humans, these subset terms couldn’t exist without big data.
Of course, the human race wouldn’t be where it is today without those three key finds, and these data segments will prove to do the same for big data — making it comprehensible for the masses.
Are these definitions all-inclusive? No, but they will help you to wrap your head around the terms that will influence digital media careers and online experiences for years to come...
"If you're wearing six different kinds of health metrics and personal analytics tracking thingies, and they're measuring all kind of different things ... the question is, what do you do with it?"
The Wolfram Language will become publicly available in the next few weeks,Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram promised in a recent keynote at SXSW.
In that keynote, he demonstrated a few of the Wolfram Language’s amazing powers: In response to nearly natural-language queries, it’s able to parse phrases and generate remarkably sophisticated responses. A few of the demonstration’s more outrageous examples, all accomplished with just one line of code (often via iterative, interactive modifications of that single line)....
First off, what is it?... Datasets are multiplying as we measure lots more than we used to. This means our thinking has to broaden – no longer is ‘what can we do with our database of email addresses?’ the question, rather ‘what data can we look at to give us the best idea possible of a customer’s stage in the buying cycle and what they’ll be receptive to next?’The definition of big data isn’t really important and one can get hung up on it. Much better to look at ‘new’ uses of data.So, here’s some examples of new and possibly ‘big’ data use both online and off....
|
Linkedin‘s vision is to create economic opportunities for the 3 billion people in the global workforce. Today, Linkedin is starting a competition to discover the best ways to use its data to make that vision a reality.
The Economic Graph
Linkedin has been vocal about its love of graphs. Its CEO Jeff Weiner explained that his company’s vision is to build a digital mapping of the global, the Economic Graph. Linkedin is not just a collection of resumes. Its users have built a rich dataset of skills, people, schools, companies, jobs or knowledge. All these entities are linked together and form the rapidly growing Economic Graph....
Dear Mona, Is the express lane in the grocery store always the fastest lane? Barry, 44, New York.
...That’s what Wes Stevenson, a professional data analyst, did out of sheer curiosity. To test the difference between single and multiple lines, Stevenson quantified a few assumptions (10 cashiers, an average wait time of 3 minutes) and put them into his model to see what it would spit out.
He found that the wait time in single lines is more predictable (you can see that in the chart below, where there’s a narrower spread of outcomes). More importantly, though, Stevenson found that a single line is more likely to mean a shorter wait (also visible below, where the single-line chart clusters farther left than the multiple-line one, meaning that more of those 10,000 simulations produced a shorter wait time)....
in a marketing landscape fueled by technology and consumer-driven behavior, brands need to combine big data plus big emotion to engage with audiences.
The tech-led empowerment of customers will only grow as the "Internet of Things" connects everything to everyone, driving down the marginal cost of production and distribution, just as technology has done with the supply of information.
Emotional fulfillment, not technology, will be the standout offering of a winning brand. People like technology -- but people mostly really like other people. The more digital life gets, the more people will value being understood, touched and involved by other people. The brands that win will be real and personable -- whether it's a live person on screen, a physical store interaction or the mass intimacy of a stadium event, from football to rock....
Below is the list from CRN Big Data. They also publish the 100 Big Data Management Companies and 100: Big Data Infrastructure, Tools And Services lists.…
Take a moment to step back and contemplate all of the things we, as marketers, are responsible for. Content creation, SEO, email marketing, PPC, social media, lead generation, analytics ... the list is never-ending. Where do we find the time, budget, and resources to do it all?
The answer is: We don't necessarily have to.
Doing stuff just to say you're doing it isn't a good enough reason. Instead, you should figure out which parts of your marketing plan are working, and then focus on and improve those parts -- and then you can start to tackle those other marketing channels.
Sometimes it's a matter of digging into your data, pinpointing what's working and what isn't, and then cutting out the things that aren't working as well. Let's walk through a few different ways data can help you do that....
...Today, cross-channel attribution can give us more insight into the customer journey than we've ever had before. Where they were once imaginary things meant to illustrate the way marketing efforts work together, today we can literally see our marketing funnels in action, visualized on-screen. Since the conceptual is becoming less important than the actual, the lines between stages of the funnel are blurring, and the flow of the funnel is becoming all that matters.
Because of this meshing of channels, we are witnessing a need for approaches to marketing that embrace the convergence of media. Who cares what PR did? What does it matter if it was your content marketing team or your sales enablement team who used to get the credit for a new tranche of prospects? Today, a marketing win is a win for marketing, and a win for digital.
Some companies are investing in extracting insights from digital channels that can be applied to digital channels, regardless of departmental titles. They do this for clients, but more and more, their marketing analytics teams also help them understand their business better....
This list of top 30 thought leaders in Data Visualization is based on recommendations and opinions by visualization experts in various social media channels. The names are listed alphabetically....
Exploring how Big Data is being used to build community, employee and customer retention and ultimately revenue for companies large and small.
...Outside of the large enterprise, the application of big data has been somewhat stifled; at least in the most obvious sense of using Big Data as mentioned above. This is because the cost both human capital and in dollars is too great for most businesses to fully mine the entire data landscape when trying to make business decisions.
However, to some extent the biggest opportunity for many businesses large and small is to use big data to solidify the three areas of the marketing mix that comprise marketing and social media ROI; the development of community, the continued investment in keeping employees and customers satisfied, and of course the most sought after ROI metric, which is the revenue generated from your efforts....
Lisa Arthur’s book Big Data Marketing provides a strategic road map for business leaders who want to drive competitive advantage and top line growth.
In a world of exploding social and mobile media, change is needed for corporate marketing to move from ‘the Dark Ages’ to the ‘Age of Enlightened Data.’ Decision-making has to become much more moment-to-moment and accurate in a world of Big Data, and while startups are moving nimbly in this new world, larger incumbents need to re-boot and re-launch....
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....
Wouldn’t it be great to catch the next Bernie Madoff well before his pyramid scheme collapsed around us?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Advances in the field of data science have brought us to the point where it’s reasonable to expect that an ongoing program of fraud could be identified in its early stages by people with access to the right data to cross-reference and query. And more than ever before, organizations and even ordinary citizens have access to massive data sets; they can draw on publicly available information in dispersed domains such as social media, open source projects, government statistics, and even weather patterns.
But data by itself is meaningless. It’s the skill of the data scientist that makes the difference. The best of them allow us to see the data in a set, to visualize relationships between data points, to ferret out insights, to turn expectations topsy-turvy — and ultimately, to solve previously unsolvable questions for businesses....
Using the power of the Watson supercomputer your bank could soon be stalking you on Twitter. And that might not be a bad thing.
Using some of the same technologies that allowed the Watson natural language supercomputer to conquer Jeopardy, IBM's next step: Psychic artificial intelligences that read your Twitter feed and can tell when you're about to have a baby, get married, buy a house, or move across the country, and even tell you how these major life events make you feel, then approach you about them accordingly.
Last week, IBM announced a new consulting practice called IBM Interactive Experience dedicated to better fusing business strategy, data, and design. As part of the announcement, IBM revealed that the company had been working on perfecting a couple of tools that are offshoots of the same computer research into natural language that led to Watson....
|
Here's a quick look at how big data influences online retail.