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
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.
Hunter Walk
Jeremiah Owyang
Anamitra Banerji
Paul Kim
Bowen Payson
Jeff Lawson
Bob Buch
Mark Hendrickson
Lisa Marino
