Yes, you have heard me right. Data is not boring. Data analysis would most probably be voted as the most boring/confusing part of any marketing campaigns. However, as disliked/confusing as it may be to traditional marketers, data is essential in understanding the marketing campaigns and also in trend making. Most interestingly, these seemingly useless, incomprehensible data actually forms a beautiful story when it is being woven correctly.

With 1 trillion internet users around the world, 31 billion online videos watched in a month in the US, 10 million searches conducted in a month, 1.9 Million of tweets per day, have you ever wonder what are these data being used for?

1) Art/ Design

Some innovative curators decided to put these useless raw data into a pure aesthetic form of the data visual using search patterns. They might not have any business use, neither do most of them make any sense, but don’t they just look good?

2) Cool stuff to know

With the constant chatter online, some websites decide to look into these chatter and put them into FYI sites for your leisure viewing. Cool to look at, good to know, but these data do not make any business sense. Purely just for your entertainment.

3) Making sense of the raw data online

If we start framing some of the cool data into categories, we would actually have interesting information generated. One of the most popular data visualization is the Nike Plus website. After the runners transfer their running data to the website, this website collates the information and show runners how they are progressing.

4) Putting the sensible data into marketing use

Practically, business people do not normally appreciate the value of any marketing tools unless they help increase sales or boost the value of the company.

A small data visualization project that we worked on in F5 last year was to segregate the online consumers in Asia according to their Internet penetration rate, Number of internet users and their GDP/Capital. Interestingly, we found that the Asian countries were grouped into 3 distinctive categories (very developed, developed and developing) and China and India stood alone. In the marketing sense, marketers should develop their marketing strategies accordingly to these categories rather than mass online marketing to the whole of Asia as these 5 different groups are different in their rate of development and their marketing needs would differ.

With this entry, i hope i have changed your perception on data and you will learn how to embrace it instead of shunning away from it. To end of my entry, this is my favorite data visual by far. Enjoy!