Archive for February, 2013

Against a wave of media coverage — and every tech company rushing to plug their position into “Big Data” — skeptisim is well justified. The rise of data-ism isn’t a panacea to bad marketing. As Nick says, “transparent lens can also be a warped lens”.

Sure we need data. Big data, social data, small data – heck, some days, any kind of data. But data is just one piece of the puzzle.

David Brooks gets at this idea that “everything that can be measured should be measured; that data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology; that data will help us do remarkable things.” Just watch the Quantified Life movement lift off to see this in action.

But this same approach will stop many marketers doing many important things. It will become a great excuse. As one marketer said to me the other day in a fit of determination – “I’m not doing social until its benefits are quantifiable and real”. Good luck with that. Not everything can be reduced to the quantifiable.

As Brooks says, data is useful in understanding some of the present and much of the past. It’s not so hot at predicting the future. As marketers we are going to need to place bets, some of which that don’t depend on data to start with. And if you are wrong. If you don’t execute well, data isn’t going to save you.

This is always be a hard day for all of us that loved Marty.

All you can be grateful for are all the incredible memories of Marty and the time we did get together — and the friends and family that helped us through that terrible time.

Wherever you are Marty, we’ll be having a beer for your today – maybe some back-yard cricket too, a little marty lark memorial game.

. Kia Kaha little brother.

Another great example of why social media monitoring is important. One of many major fake promos out there. Some argue that the major social sites take some accountability for the commercial activity that takes place on them. I’m only partly with them. What we need is real diligence from companies. This will not stop.

We were talking about the “Lifestream” five your so years ago. Now there is the “Worldstream”.

By adding together every timestream on the net — including the private lifestreams that are just beginning to emerge — into a single flood of data, we get the worldstream: a way to picture the cybersphere as a whole. … Instead of today’s static web, information will flow constantly and steadily through the worldstream into the past. … What people really want is to tune in to information. Since many millions of separate lifestreams will exist in the cybersphere soon, our basic software will be the stream-browser: like today’s browsers, but designed to add, subtract, and navigate streams. … Stream-browsers will help us tune in to the information we want by implementing a type of custom-coffee blender: We’re offered thousands of different stream “flavors,” we choose the flavors we want, and the blender mixes our streams to order.

Its a great idea and constuct. 

Finally, the web — soon to become the cybersphere — will no longer resemble a chaotic cobweb. It’s already started to happen. Instead, billions of users will spin their own tales, which will merge seamlessly into an ongoing, endless narrative: the earth telling its own story.