The Data Imperative

"The most important [thing] is cultural change about how to use data."
An interesting cultural shift in business? Seems intuitive but perhaps not. 
How 'big data' yields productivity and profits -  This video is excerpted from the interactive "Competing through data: Three experts offer their game plans" on McKinseyQuarterly.com http://bit.ly/olLwDg

Love Data

To follow up on my "For those that love infographics" post, I wanted to share a TEDx talk from Jer Thorp.   It's called "The Weight of Data". Beyond his enthusiasm for data and technology it is a very real and human way to show how data can be valuable in storytelling.

Collusion tracking visualization add-in from Firefox

First, I am a digital marketing professional and proponent of personalization and the value that cookies can provide to enhance user experiences (in both professional and personal life). With the news that Internet Explorer 10 will be released with web tracking defaulted to off and watching this latest TED video from CEO Gary Kovacs it gave me pause to see how people are gaming the system and how data collection on the web is still very much a nascent space.



I used the the Firefox add-in called Collusion to show the number of people that are tracking me as I migrate the web. I visited five sites and found 25 companies tracking.  This is a really interesting tool and one that brings up valid privacy concerns. Beyond ad exchanges, and ad servers who are all these other companies and how are they getting tags placed?

For those that love Infographics

Infographics are the new hot thing these days and you see them everywhere. I personally believe they are valuable tools in providing context and storytelling. If you have data and looking to roll your own, below are some emerging applications that make it easier to bring your story (and the data) to life. Also as inspiration, included are a couple of links to sites that aggregate infographics. 

Information is Beautiful - from David McCandless
Infographics from Good.Is Magazine
Infographics from Mashable.com
Cool Infographics
Daily Infographic - organized by topic

For those who want to geek out...
DataVisualization.ch
Flowing Data



Easel.ly is my personal favorite lately. More functional than most of the rest and more customizable.


Visual.ly is interesting as well but it's really about tapping existing data sets to tell a story. Not as customizable.

Google Knowledge Graph

Google recently introduced the Knowledge Graph. No it's not a social product aimed at competing with Facebook. Knowledge Graph is  very interesting evolution of search from a user perspective. It aims to provide more human thinking to it's algorithms.

How it impacts advertising/marketing is still to be determined. Really underscores the POE framework and thinking about search from all angles.





Down the right hand side you can see how these results are instantly more relevant.

For more on the evolving nature of search check out the latest on Bing from GroupMNext