Smash Summit

It used to be that consumer data was opaque at best and invisible at worst. Filling out forms and paperwork sent everything from your name to your net worth into distant databases and filing cabinets, rarely to be seen or combined with other data unless by hand. At banks, retail stores, airlines and innumerable other establishments, consumer data remained sequestered within the vault. To be sure, there were some benefits to this era, such as security (although there has been no shortage of consumer data leaks in recent years.)

But by and large, the technology to make consumer data social and intelligible simply was not yet available. The last five years has witnessed an explosion in data socialization, led by companies like Mint, Facebook, Twitter and, of late, the World Bank. The result is a burgeoning goldmine of new, interesting data – and useful marketing intelligence.

Open data

(World Bank)

One of the major trends driving data socialization is the publishing of entire databases. Organizations are no longer, as the Harvard Business Review lamented in 2009, “burying their data in tombs.” Perhaps the best example of an organization that has proactively opened its data to the public is the World Bank. The World Sentinel reported on April 25, 2010 that the World Bank was “now providing free, open, and easy access to its comprehensive set of data on living standards around the globe” – a data set spanning 2,000 different indicators, hundreds of which stretch back over fifty years.

The vast collection of data will be accessible in French, Spanish and Arabic (besides English) and stored here. What stands out about the World Bank’s unprecedented publishing of data is not simply that it is now available, but that it is being published in an intelligible and visually stimulating manner. A quick visit to the database’s website reveals eye-pleasing charts and graphs that make sense of key development indicators and other previously opaque data.

Interesting data

(huffington post)

A major component of what Harvard Business Review calls the “social data revolution” is the fact that data is now presented in a number of provocative and engaging formats. Until rather recently, the general population did not particularly care for “data”, as such. The word “data” has long called to mind images of bland spreadsheets and boring calculations. All of that has changed with the advent of “infographics.” As pictured above, an infographic uses imagery and visualization to literally tell a story with data.

People who are interested in topics (but not enough to read books or articles) can get bite-sized chunks of pertinent data from infographics instead. Other companies, such as Mint.com, have made data appealing using graphics-heavy, full-color charts and graphs. While personal finance gurus have begged consumers to budget for decades, Mint signs up 3,000 new users per day by presenting spending, budgeting and saving data in ways that are meaningful and personalized. In short, Mint has achieved the seemingly impossible goal of making personal finance “cool.”

Better marketing intelligence

(Schristia)

Another breakthrough of the social data revolution is the entirely new class of marketing intelligence that has begun to emerge. Marketers know that selling is not just about having the right message, but delivering it to the right prospects. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are providing high-level demographic data that once existed only in a marketer’s dreams. Furthermore, this data is available to absolutely anyone using either service, for free. A casual glance at the profiles of Facebook and Twitter users is all it takes to scoop up all kinds of marketing data, including age, gender, location, marital status, hobbies, occupation and more.

On Facebook, which offers a pay-per-click marketplace, merchants can restrict their ads to finely tuned niches (such as single males in the Philadelphia area aged 20-25 who list music and writing as hobbies.) Twitter has become a full-fledged marketing channel, with companies like Hootsuite offering “professional Twitter clients” that let businesses schedule sales tweets and monitor what others are tweeting about their brands.