The term “big data” seems to be the hot buzzword for 2013. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal had a report that discussed how big data is being used for business marketing, operations, human resources, and product development. Here are some mind-boggling numbers:
- InterContinental Hotels has collected 9.2 terabytes of data about its 50 million customers
- United Parcel Service stores 16.1 petabytes of data from all its operations
- Monster Worldwide has between 4 and 5 petabytes of data ranging from resumes to job listings
- Zynga stores almost 3 petabytes on how its players interact with its games
For me, and probably most entrepreneurs, megabytes and gigabytes are about as far as my brain can comprehend. But there was some important information in the Wall Street Journal report that could be relevant for small business marketing and performance metrics.
- 58% of businesses say analytics is playing a more integral part in their organization’s strategy and operations than it did 12 months ago
- 39% say their organization is not effective at analyzing information
- 36% rely more on analytics than intuition to identify target customers
- 31% rely on analytics to develop or refine products or services
- 19% say analytics has greatly helped innovation in marketing
- 51% of professionals surveyed cited “lack of expertise to connect the dots” as a reason data projects failed in their organization
For small business owners, web analytics and marketing performance metrics can be useful if goals have been properly determined and the analytics and metrics are relevant to revenue. A statement in the WSJ article can also apply to entrepreneurs, “corporate executives face a daunting obstacle when it comes to reaping the benefits of big data: Who’s going to tell them what it all means?”
