Edward Tufte recently taught a course in Austin, TX on data visualization. His lectures were thought provoking and powerful. As a data analyst, a tremendous amount of responsibility falls on us to report data soundly and ethically.
Tufte asked, “How long does it take to turn a metric into a target?”
Think about this. As we set marketing campaigns and metrics are revealed, we begin to set those revealed metrics as the new targets–the waterfall of results that we seek. The “sampling to please” approach Tufte described is not the right approach if we truly want to understand what big data is revealing for us.
Big data is a barrage of information. There is a market need for making sense of the vast data floating around brands. People Pattern exists to make sense of the information and to present valuable elements in sound, actionable ways.
When it comes to harnessing insights, it falls upon data analysts to distill meaningful findings from unstructured data and share structured information with market experts. Human behavior will always be leaky but by identifying fundamental truths within a set, meaningful findings can result in powerful, effective, campaigns.
In seeking to harness data, chasing waterfalls can dilute the results by gathering data that doesn’t provoke meaningful action.
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