Drowning in the data deluge? Get a feel for how much data is available through these facts and stats, presented by Elizabeth Crinejo. No wonder marketers are overwhelmed!
From the session “Drowning in Data, but Thirsty for Insight?” given by Elizabeth Crinejo and Melissa Mines at ConnectToConvert, August 21, 2017.
Transcript
So, one of the things when we were looking at this process that we have and our approach to data, this is one of the quotes that kind of came to mind, and in a lot of ways it synthesizes what we need to—who we need to be or the kinds of people we need to have around us in this world of big data.
So, from here this is really the primer here. We need to be synthesizers looking at the right information at the right time in order to make those important choices that we make every day, which means, you know, dollar signs in or out, making those choices wisely. That’s what data is here to do for us.
So, let’s just take a step back for a minute because when we were looking at this world of data, in a lot of ways it sort of surprised us all of a sudden, and I think it’s something that we often overlook. The technology is very young, just looking at some high points here. So, this is the history all the way from like 1990, and if anyone was marketing back in those days where like SEO was white on white text on your page, which is, you know, now frowned upon, but, you know, that was okay because no one understood, and then we got these smarter systems. It helped us get better content. We got better at delivering better content, connecting better to our people. You know Google was amazing in helping us have a nice match to quality.
Some couple of things that you want to think about that happened: first e-commerce transaction 1994, tablets 2002. So, then our desktop data doubled because now we could get data for tablets. We could get data for desktops, right? IPhone in 2007, same type of traffic in triplicate now because we can get mobile; we can get tablet and desktop, all these different worlds.
So, every single metric we looked at in one place we now have in triplicate with some extras, right, because shortly thereafter we started having voice to text, which is adding a whole other way that people search.
In 2015, mobile wins. It’s now people are leaning to their mobile more than their desktops. So, lots and lots and lots of data, and now we’re just in this really amazing scramble because programmatic, artificial intelligence. People are walking around with little wearable data trackers on them, and there’s tons of data.
Some of the biggest places where data is impacting things is in healthcare because we now know so much more about people and in advertising in Google, just like in the last couple months—I think in the last month it came out of beta, where you can now track from an impression on a computer to a person walking into a building because—and purchasing— because of the technology on their phone.
So, the thing to get here is that it’s really impressive how fast this data has grown, and if there’s any places where you feel behind the eight-ball, just know that we’re actually growing right along with this, and as Gartner put it, really the news these days is—the news about big data is it’s not big data; it just is what is, and really it’s ours to come and figure out how we’re going to approach it, and, yeah, there’s a lot out there.
You know 60 seconds, here’s a couple stats. One hundred and thirty six thousand three hundred and nineteen emails get sent. How’s that for a challenge for your email marketing efforts, right?
Pretty noisy, and that’s in 60 seconds. So, times that by how many 60-second passes we have in a day. There’s 2.4 million Google searches, 1,400 WordPress posts because, you know, Google has told us content is key.
So, we put a lot out there, right? So, there’s just a lot that we have to deal with. We’re now in the world where it used to be the case that there was 2.7 zettabytes of data out in the internet universe, and a zettabyte is one trillion gigs, okay. This year we’ve already produced 1.46. So, 2017 forward we’re in the zettabyte-a-year world, and it’s going to be what it is.