Neuger Communications Group

The Library of Congress recently announced it had taken possession of five terabytes of data from Twitter. That’s roughly five trillion keystrokes of information – some interesting, most mundane, many personal, and occasionally some insightful or historical ones.

If you were to sit at your keyboard and type five characters a second, without a pause, you’d catch up to this database in about 31,000 years. That’s a lot of data. But if it’s of no consequence, so what?

There has always been a huge difference between data and useful data. Given the ease with which information can be collected and shared, the challenge of finding the useful is harder than it once was. It feels like there is an endless amount of data to evaluate and assess. Deciding what to review and how to review it can be major decisions.

One client of ours recently said that we did a terrific job of finding needles in the haystack. In fact, we are looking for multiple needles. And, while it’s counter-intuitive, finding those multiple needles is actually more difficult than finding one. You see, we’re looking for multiple needles, and we’re looking for the patterns they make. What do prospective customers want? What combinations of events trigger a buying decision? How effective was a particular advertisement, or an effort on social media, or a direct mail campaign? Who visited a website? Did they find what they needed?

If the data is available, we can draw out the patterns that are meaningful for a particular client, help direct efforts and measure results. It doesn’t matter if you use Twitter. It doesn’t matter if you care what a SQL database is. What matters are quantifiable results, achieved, in part, on the basis of quantifiable analysis.