The Importance of Real-Time Data to Marketing and Journalism

Part 3: Never has the Internet seemed so relevant to so many

But only social media hipsters in East London share this much information, right? Wrong. It’s surprising how quickly people get engaged when it’s about their real lives. We are programmed to engage in these ways, and the technological barrier is falling. Only two years ago, my dad thought I was crazy. Now he is connecting with long-lost colleagues on LinkedIn and tweeting about the media, Covent Garden and QPR, and telling other people to do the same. Never has the Internet seemed so relevant to so many.

Social media marketing can be traced back to the origins of Web 2.0 in 2004. Marketers were quick to see the potential of social media: self-organising brand advocates; viral video hits etc. There were also high-profile brand casualties, most notably Kryptonite’s bike lock that was unlocked with a biro pen and became an internet sensation. Despite these opportunities and risks, most brands carried on largely as before, while dipping their toes in the social media water. It was additive, still often used as a broadcast channel, but by no means a new model for marketing.

There is a simple reason that most brands got away with the status quo and why now really is an inflection point: the connection between our offline and online lives was not yet strong enough. Most of our lives occurred offline and few people cast a big enough “digital shadow.” The more people share, however, the more marketing is going to have to change, and the more journalism will also have to adapt to this new order. People will clearly argue this point, and also the demographic and regional variation in data sharing, but given that by 2020 the mobile phone will be the primary global internet connection device, smart marketers are investing in tools and new techniques now.

We are witnessing a rise in massive, passive datasets

The future of marketing is in monitoring and analysing “massive, passive” real-time data – i.e., listening to what the masses are saying and sharing. This form of market research has never before been possible. It has already impacted on journalism more than marketing – citizen journalism – but has significant potential for all of the media. Increased data is enabling us to construct detailed network maps – topologies – of people in relation to brands and industries, and hence understand how ideas, perceptions and behaviours spread.

If marketing in the past was about broadcasting to individuals and looking for signs that brand ideas were taking hold, it is fast becoming about understanding the multitude of networks a brand is part of, and prioritising and targeting key individuals within these networks. Using network science to map networks of influence is helping us answer pertinent marketing questions. As marketing is concerned with the spread of brand perception and behaviour, this has relevance for the spread of ideas in general, and thus journalism.

Network science may be about to revolutionise marketing, but what has this got to do with journalism? Many would see journalism as the antithesis of marketing: the reporting on real events vs the creation of ideas to change real world events. If this ever was the case (doubtful), the rise of a more personally relevant, social internet will force marketing to change. It will simply be too difficult, and costly, to spread ideas that are not true or not relevant. Marketers will focus more on the reality of their products and services, and getting these experiences to be more contagious. As such, they will be investigating a multitude of brand experiences and aggregating and promoting them. In short, they will become brand journalists.

So what can we learn about the future of journalism and the new tools that will be required? Journalism has already been severely disrupted by the Internet. The business model has been undermined, with a whole host of knock-on effects on media businesses and journalists alike. Citizen journalism has also forced journalists to justify their very existence. At the same time, micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter have been both a useful tool and a competitor in breaking news coverage. However, the same growth in “massive, passive” data can plot a path ahead for journalism. Information is all good and well, but journalism is and always has been about perspective. “Massive, passive” real-time data is helping to answer a number of key questions for both marketing and journalism. 

– Oliver Snoddy, Director of Digital Services, Doremus NY

The Importance of Real-Time Data to Marketing and Journalism

Part 2: The Key To Facebook's Success

Facebook didn’t invent real-world online profiles but it has been instrumental in driving a shift from an internet of imagined personas to one that directly reflects our real lives. This simple insight has been key to Facebook’s success and central to the development of the Internet over the past five years. Contrast the Facebook’s, Twitter’s and Foursquare’s of today with the MySpace’s and Second Life’s of recent history. The Internet is less and less a place to escape to – social networking only recently overtook porn as the key internet activity – and increasingly a very real part of our lives. 

I remember being in a job interview, aged 23 or 24, and being asked what my favourite website was. As an aspiring digital marketer, this should have been a simple enough question. I used more websites than most back then, but most performed a particular function. Few held the integral place Twitter or Facebook currently do. I made a hash of the question, much to my embarrassment, but that moment stuck with me and left me wondering what the Internet really was.

The Internet is no longer simply a place we go, or something we use, but a massive real-time connection of people and things, a “digital shadow” on reality if you will. And privacy concerns aside, this development path shows no sign of abating. We are sharing more and more information about ourselves and our experiences. At last count, Facebook delivers 60 million status updates each day, roughly one for every eight of its 500 million members. Add to that the more in-depth blog posts, and the quasi-active data sharing from applications such as Nike+, WiFi-enabled scales and Google’s PowerMeter data explosion. 

CES 2011 was awash with connected devices from GE, LG and Samsung. 2011 will likely see the first persistent-location mobile apps, tracking our location continuously rather than prompting us to “check in” to specific locations. All of these actions are generating an exponential rise in the amount of data sharing and the existence of “massive, passive” data sets: data created from everyday, low involvement actions. Although some way off, we are converging on a situation where our every waking hour is captured and analysed, and we all become sensors in a hugely developed internet. 

– Oliver Snoddy, Director of Digital Services, Doremus NY

 

A snapshot of the "massive passive" from the GlobelWebIndex, which shows media consumption habits by geographic location. 

The Importance of Real-Time Data to Marketing and Journalism

Part 1: The Rise of "Massive, Passive" 

People often think that Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, is joking when he says that being a statistician will be the sexy job to have in the next ten years. He goes on to predict that “the ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualise it, to communicate it – that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decade.”

Nowhere is this more relevant than in journalism, and mainstream news organisations have already taken note. From the Guardian's Data Store, to excellent infographics and data visualisations from The New York Times and the BBC, “data journalism” is a hot topic. The Wikileaks saga may be the best current example of data journalism in action, but journalists are increasingly gaining access to a wide variety of large data sets, from governments, NGOs and whistleblowers alike. They are using this “new” data to create compelling visualisations about military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan (such as in the BBC’s reports on UK military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq), local incidents of swine flu (the Guardian’s swine flu data in the UK) and the unemployment rate according to demographics (The New York Times’s Jobless Rate For People Like You), to name but a few.

Image from the Guardian's Data Blog

New publishers such as Flowing Data and Visual Complexity are also developing this space. Journalists are both responding to, and helping to shape, an era of unprecedented data availability. We are, however, still at the very early stages of data journalism. Most data journalists would admit that they need to get better at telling compelling stories with data, rather than simply producing innovative and arresting visualisations that may or may not help their audiences understand a subject better. More fundamentally, the rise of “massive, passive” real-time data from almost 2 billion connected individuals around the world points to a new type of data journalism.

Journalists will increasingly gather and process data, in addition to making sense of data made available to them – investigative data journalism if you will. They will also need to be able to predict and represent the mood of the world at a variety of scales. In addition, they will need to leverage tactics for getting their stories distributed across the internet. Journalists will, thus, need to develop many skills. They will need to be entrepreneurial, multi-media storytellers, community builders, bloggers and curators. Some programming skills will also come in handy. Above all else, however, they will need two core capabilities: great editorial and storytelling skills – as they always have – and a new fluency in how real-time data can capture what is really happening in the world. Data journalism is going to be core to the future of journalism as a whole, and real-time data an increasingly important driving force. 

-- Oliver Snoddy, Director of Digital Services, Doremus NY