For those of you at WIT last year, you may remember a guy wearing a strange hat and blabbing on (dreaming on) about something he called ‘Searching without Searching’.
Well, that guy was me and I’m a believer in trying to imagine what could be – what would be great – without thinking too much about how it could be achieved. I make no apologies for that. There are lots of brilliant people out there capable of doing amazing things – capable of implementing imagination with tools and technology. I just like thinking how I might keep them up at night.
As someone who is occasionally looked at with slightly puzzled expressions, it’s always reassuring to read others rambling on and even talking quite sensibly about one’s slightly silly ideas.
These aren’t my ideas of course – they’re notions that bubble around in the ether that people like me pick up on shape to our own peculiar fantasies in our dreams.
Chris Boorman talks here on Mashable in an article he calls, Why Data Mining Is the Next Frontier for Social Media Marketing.
He makes a wonderful observation, which, I think highlights the potential in what we can look forward to doing with data in the future.
He talks about current CRM systems as… (Systems that) essentially enable companies to see their customers in the rearview mirror.
However:
The customer data available via online communities like Facebook is both richer and more forward looking. A financial organization with access to such data would not only know that a customer had a checking account, savings account, two CDs and a mortgage, but also that the same customer was interested in golf or gourmet cooking — information that could be useful in planning future marketing initiatives
In a nutshell: data about what someone might like to do tomorrow or next week – what someone’s aspirations are rather than what that person did last week or last year. Data, not about something they’ve already bought (and not from you) but rather about something they’d like to buy – and you have every chance to be clever and sell it to them.
As with all great new things doing this is not without its problems.
Social data is big. Very big. Apart from the physical architectures able to support processing petabytes, most of it is useless.  There is a lot of ‘noise’. It’s a gold panning activity – almost literally.
There are also problems with customer identification. With aspects of privacy and people ‘liking’ things in variously walled communities, attaching all this activity to a specific individual is far from trivial.
The data comes from many different sources too, and collating this into one place – some notion of one format (one Master Data) is another thing that’s going to cause sleepless nights for those clever people I talk about.
It’s exciting though and, as I have a habit of going on and on about, being able to demonstrate some understanding towards your customers – being able to proactively communicate about something you know they are thinking about is hugely powerful.
A constant stream of ‘generic’ emails is mundane at best. Someone tapping you on the shoulder and giving you a tailored itinerary to that holiday destination you’ve been ‘talking (dreaming)’ about is massive.
I’m eagerly waiting to see when this will start happening.
There is a certain online travel agent I deal with that still seems to not realize that I like going to one particular place despite my buying 15 round trip tickets there over the years and none to anywhere else.
So perhaps I shouldn’t hold my breath.
