Make Good Use of Your Telescope

In my mind, big data is a useful tool, like telescope, that help you to look farther and deeper. As usual, everyone knows to use telescope to see distant landscape, but not everyone can see it because of wrong methods. So most people will just take telescope by hand rather than really use it. For big data, it faces the same situation. Most marketers know they need big data, but few of them understand how to use it. In fact, using big data well is not a difficult thing; we just need to begin with a correct understanding of it.

As a tool, big data has its important functions. As telescope can help you to see distant landscape, big data can help you to understand your business better and to catch the market trends. We can get much useful information if we can make good use of the tool. However, there are always too many landscapes to see so that we need to choose the most beautiful sights to see. For big data, we need to consider Atkinson’s general principles. The first one is marketers need to adopt a culture that sees information as a key driver of success. And the second one is that make sure you are using big data to measure the things that are driving your success. According to the principles, we need to take good advantage of big data that about core business.

On the contrast, any tool is not almighty, big data also has its own limitations. The first limitation is inability to remove barriers. When you use the telescope in a foggy day or dark night, you cannot clearly see the views that you really want to see clear because telescope is just a tool to help you look farther. Big data also cannot remove the barriers. It may not tell you clear information if there are some obstacles between you and the truth. The data may collect from wrong group of people, for instance, so that you cannot get the right result from these data. The second limitation is cannot create anything. Big data is the objective response of real situation so it will never create something new. You need to use the result from big data to analysis and then to create new things.

Although big data is the objective reaction of real situation, it also can give you a wrong hint because its inability to remove barriers. What you see is not necessarily true; moreover you have to see the truth through a telescope. So you cannot trust every data. You’d better to make sure if there are some barriers existing.

If you want to describe the current scenery, you have to use telescope to see it immediately, because everything is changing very fast. Marketing is changing even faster. So it is not a smart way to make future decisions based on past behavior from data. Any correct decision should be based on real-time data that means any successful decision maker should be monitoring data all the time.

No matter how good the telescope is, it will be just a decoration if you cannot use it correctly. Likewise, no matter how valuable the big data is, it will be just garbage if you cannot make good use of it. 

I believe big data is an opportunity to achieve success. So we need to catch the opportunity.

Link: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/34461.asp