Mashable data
January 21, 2010 Leave a Comment
Whilst I was at the Entrepreneur Country event last week, I heard a talk from Stephan Shakespeare, strategy director, of YouGov. Among many interesting points that he made, particularly around the widening debate of transparency in government, he brought up the concept of mashable data. That is data that can be analysed by a third party and manipulated in various ways to identify trends or patterns. For example, the great retired population in the UK is now manipulating publicly available data they find on the web to highlight issues and provide oversight of government functions that reduce cost and improve efficiency.
It occurred to me that this was one of the key benefits of using Hypertag. That is, that at the end of every campaign our customers get an excel spreadsheet that has all the raw data on it, that can be manipulated, graphed, analysed and manipulated as the user wishes. This approach of mashing data has been used by us internally for years as we have used it to bring context to campaigns for our clients and as we have compared them to other campaigns to help clients benchmark. Increasingly, as we are doing campaigns that gain greater and greater usage, the amount of data is increasing exponentially and therefore our clients have an even larger sample size to review. Clients are already using this to spot issues that can directly impact business decisions positively on a day to day basis – what products to push, when to push them, why certain products sell better than others etc.
Furthermore, as more clients choose to combine our core Proximity system with surveying, the value of that data is increasing in its value and depth.
For more information on what data can be produced and is readily available for our clients, get in touch.
Jonathan Morgan
p.s.
Following on from my blog on mashable data, I read with interest about Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the internet, launching www.data.gov.uk just today as part of this trend to making data more transparent, and allowing third parties to mash that data as they see fit.
I am sure Hypertag will follow the same sort of approach in the future and allow third parties to write applications to mash the data themselves.
