Changing data - the facts

By Rick Brar,Vertical Sales Manager, Experian QAS

Whatever happened to data? Up until a few years ago, capturing data on an individual was a relatively straightforward, and structured, process. Firstly, there was a relatively limited amount of personal data that organisations could, and indeed would want to capture. If you had someone's name, address (including postcode of course) and landline telephone number, you were off to a good start. And if you supplemented that with Experian demographic data, and possibly transactional data to highlight the products and services an individual had shown themselves to be interested in, and even bought, you were in an even better position. The first sign that things were changing was when organisations began to recognise the importance of collecting email addresses around 10 years ago. That was one more data field to incorporate, but it was still a piece of data that you would describe as more structured than unstructured; something volunteered by the customer in the course of their interactions with you, or given to a third party data aggregator, along with permission to pass it on to other organisations.

Multiple identities

If we look at what's happened over the past five years, it becomes clear that things have changed irreversibly. The first change is in the sheer number of personal identifiers that an individual can have. In addition to postal and email address and a landline telephone number, this now also embraces a mobile number, Twitter name, Instant Messaging profile, plus a number of profiles on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more. There are very few, if any, customer and prospect databases, that have caught up with this phenomenon.

The second part of the data explosion comes from the way that the web, and in particular, social media, have encouraged us all as consumers to stop sitting back and accepting what brands tell us, and instead, turning to each other for advice and recommendations.

Five years ago, blogs were the name of the game. Anyone with the inclination could launch their own blog and share their views with the world on anything and everything. This was good, to an extent, but it still relied on millions of people bothering to set up their own blog, and other people stumbling across them. Then along came social networks like Facebook and Twitter, that pulled these disparate voices together onto a single platform, in one place, making it incredibly easy for anyone to share their thoughts on everything from last night's issue of The Apprentice, to the conduct of the presidential elections in Iran. And everything in-between.

Unstructured data

All this has resulted in a sea of unstructured data that, in truth, no one was really prepared for. According to IBM, we are creating fifteen petabytes (15,000 terabytes, or 15m gigabytes) of data every day. This is eight times as much data as there is in all of the libraries in the United States combined. The challenge for Chief Information Officers in this new era is to make sense of all this data, and turn it into meaningful information that can be analysed and used to make tactical business decisions.

Organisations are starting to embrace this. Some, for example, are turning to online brand monitoring tools that can analyse negative comments being made about them on Twitter and other sites, in order to enable them to respond to the criticism and try to help the person having the problem. But it's a sign of how new and misunderstood this whole area is that at the beginning of this month, British Telecom came in for a torrent of criticism, after an article in the Mail on Sunday likened the company's practice of monitoring social networks in this way to spying on its customers.

Most people in the customer service business would probably argue that BT's and other companies' efforts to monitor online noise about their organisation in order to respond to it should be applauded, rather than criticised, but it's a sign of how the issue of using social media for any sort of marketing purposes is.

The one conclusion to draw from all this is that no-one can claim to have worked it all out and to have all the answers. What we are doing at Experian QAS, however, is devoting a significant amount of time to scoping out the new data landscape, in order to better understand the challenges, and help our customers to make sense of it all. The work we are currently doing will feed in to our webinar, seminar and white papers programmes for the remainder of 2010 and beyond.

Speak to an Experian QAS Account Manager to find out more information on how Experian QAS can help with your contact data management (CDM) requirements.