(Lovely reminder: Please pay attention to the words in the Gifs, they are related!~)

You are been watched, there is a machine that spies on you every hour of every day.

The other agency may consider you irrelevant, but we don’t. Not matter you are ordinary people or superman, we are here to observe your habits and try to provide you the best services and products.

Dear followers, have you ever watched Person of Interest? Or most recently Furious 7? If yes, you are already familiar with the “God’s eye” that knows every movement of you. (If not, try it!~They are both fun to watch!~)

In this Digital World, our life is almost like being watched. Big data gave users the power to look into others’ life and analyze their habits.

The good thing is most of these analysis result in a more convenient life for customers and a more accurate and visualized prediction for marketers. But sometimes it will also have some side effect—-Privacy. Is there anyone enjoy being watched every minute?

So, next time, you’d better make sure to delete the cookies on your computer if you don’t want to be traced or close your “location” while you don’t want to be bothered.

As a marketer, today I want to talk more about what we can benefit from Big data and what we should be careful about it.

Why we want to use Big Data? Because the data size is huge, the source is diverse and the speed of accessing those data is almost in real time. Most importantly, Big Data is objective. We human beings are so emotional and tend to have unconscious bias. For example, marketer XYZ may prefer choosing white people to be his target since he is white while the Big Data can objectively tell him that based on all the sample data, black people are more likely to be his customers.

However, Big  Data can never replace human. Because they can only tell you what you asked. What kind of data to look into? What sample size we want? What survey to conduct? Big Data can’t answer those questions till now.

We need those experienced marketers to set the direction, to guide us to take advantage of the Big Data and to find the flaws in it.

Big Data is a powerful tool, but it’s not Aladdin’s Lamp. It is a precious mineral field that waiting for marketers to explore.

Sure we can make predictions and decisions based on the past behavior data. But we have to analyze and test those predictions to be more precise and we must let human be involved in the process. Because machine don’t have a mind that we have. Did you remember Pinterest’s Joke(See details in James’s blog)  that they simply trust every bit of data they got and send out the emails to those customers congratulating their new marriage. However, it turns out a lot of customers just browse wedding related stuff for other reasons rather than their own marriage. The data simply assume that browsing wedding related things equals to getting married soon. This surely pissed off some sensitive single lady.

The lesson we learned from Pinterest is that data alone is not enough to make marketing decision. Hah, cheers, we marketers are not going to lose job because of Big Data!

But, there is always a but.

Big Data has 4 V: Volume, Velocity, Veracity and Variety. (Click here for more in detail) Accordingly, marketers in the Big Data Age has to be familiar with statistic measurement, be quick at handling new data, be agile of segmenting the data, and be versatile to deal with diverse data. See, the tool is upgraded, therefore we have to upgrade ourselves too. There are a lot of things to watch in the Big Data World.

Are you watching?

XOXO, see you next week!