BIG: Families, Market Research, Data
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Wed, Oct 05, 2011 @ 10:29 AM
I love to laugh and try to laugh often...occasionally at the expense of a stranger. My family (my wife, kids, and I) enjoy traveling and do it with some regularity. I feel like it makes my children more well-rounded human beings. We especially like to visit New York, and other large cities in the east. As westerners, the culture, the transportation, the population, are all VERY different than what my children are used to. Travel, for my family, is not without its challenges. I have, what some would consider, a BIG family. There are six of us (four children, my wife, and myself). We have many conversations with the people that we meet that surround our family size.
On a visit to Florida, we were in a business hotel riding up the elevator, together, to our rooms. Two gentlemen hopped on the elevator with us. They turned to my wife, who I must say is kind of a hottie (ha), and said hello. I'm not sure how they missed the other FIVE of us standing there, but they struck up a conversation. They asked what she was doing, she mentioned that she was vacationing with her family (she brought me and the children to their attention). One of the gentlemen said, "These are all YOURS?" To which my wife answered proudly that “yes” they were. He replied with "Heaven help you!" and quickly exited the elevator without another word.
In Utah, four children really aren’t out of the norm. As soon as we hit the Mississippi river and further east, you'd think we'd walked into Twilight Zone. I like to goof on it as often as I can. We frequently travel with my brother and his family. They also have four children who line up pretty closely in age to my own children, look very similar, and could be mistaken for siblings. On a trip to New York, I jumped in a cab with my wife, my sister-in-law, my daughter and my brother's daughter. The driver, recognizing that we weren't dressed entirely in dark clothing (it was probably my sandals with socks that gave it away) asked where we were from. We told him we were from Utah, to which he said "I know what goes on there". I introduced him to my two wives and my daughters. He made a comment about barely being able to meet the needs of his one wife, to which I said "I hear ya' brother. Try adding a second to the mix."
On a visit to downtown Philly with my family, my sister-in-law and her children (my brother was at work), we visited many historic buildings and homes, the liberty bell, etc. Tracking around with eight children in tow, two soccer-moms, and myself, I'd engage onlookers with one question, "Have you ever seen 'Big Love'?" The looks were priceless. Incidentally, I DO NOT have multiple wives, but there are an awful lot of misconceptions about people from Utah that are REALLY EASY to take advantage of for a good laugh.
My organization has been conducting a significant amount of social media research over the past year. We have a solution that is much evolved and provides insight into mounds...may I say hordes...of online information (There's My One Sales Shtick). At a recent event, one of the speakers, when talking about social media, stated that "Listening is the new asking." I'd
rephrase that as "Listening is the new listening. The order of asking the question has just changed."
Online content and search, business intelligence data, market research data, customer profiling, social networks, etc. have produced a very difficult situation that needs to be addressed in our industry. What do you do with too much data? Or, is there such a thing as "too much?" More and more, you're hearing this term "Big Data" from organizations that have so much data that they aren't sure what to do with it all. Wikipedia defines big data as, "a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time." I can see this issue emerging and evolving as our particular organization processes and analyzes online/social media content whose search delivers unstructured qualitative comments in the range of hundreds of thousands of pieces of information. And, as we dashboard this information combined with business intelligence data, traditional market research data, etc. the issue is further spotlighted.
So what's to be done...?
Many software solutions are emerging that allow you to evaluate “Big Data” sources and dashboard their results. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, they seem to be very complicated (probably because many of them are still open-source or based on an open-source foundation). I’d prognosticate that you’ll likely see a growing software trend in this area…SOON. “Big Data” is not getting any smaller.
Data is only good if you have the ability to answer questions and provide insights from it. You can have the biggest data set in the world, a data set in the petabyte range, but if you can't process it, if it doesn’t represent…something, and you can't gather answers from it, it's of little use to you. Much like my statement above, "Listening is the new listening," "Insight is the new insight". The days of collecting or gathering data, simply for the sake of having access to the data, are coming to an end (whether the source is a survey, an internal customer database, from a social media research source or other type of market research or business intelligence practice). If you can't provide insights, and resulting business solutions that are based on these Big Data sets, then the question should be asked as to why you’re accumulating the data in the first place. As my wife’s elevator suitor said “Heaven help you.”