SXSW Takeaways – Use your Data

South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) provided a range of key takeaways around a variety of topics – so instead of one mega-post, I’ve split up what I’ve learned into a range of bite-sized blogs. Today’s focus is the central piece of any organisation – their data.

Organisations have always known data is important, but they are now finding that the data that they’ve stored can be utilised in a variety of ways to influence decisions – to benefit both businesses and customers.  Below are three examples of organisations have implemented data strategies to extract more relevant data from their users.

Iceland’s Ministry of Ideas, a third party organisation that encouraged more innovative thinking  into the country, scraped data from parliament member sites and speeches and then ran comparisons on the keywords with the keywords extracted from a workshop where everyday citizens described their vision of Iceland.  Comparing this data meant that the Ministry of Ideas could establish which members of parliament would be the best fit for leading the country on aligned values.

Foursquare Release 3.0 (launched during SXSW) included their new ‘Explore’ functionality. This uses a combination of check-in data from the user, their friends and the wider community to identify new or popular locations that meet the user’s taste. This functionality is the start of a shift in focus for organisations – as recommendations should be based on the user not on the business that is spending the most money on advertising. This will help keep Foursquare and other platforms authentic and customer-centric; whilst also encouraging users to continue to share their data to improve the accuracy and relevancy of recommendations.

Finally, after the launch of Twitter’s native retweeting (RT) functionality, there was a big divide between users around whether it was the most appropriate way of sharing information. Twitter explained there was no way of being able to track which content was being shared and who the influencers on the network were because the old way of RT-ing meant that all tweets were being stored as text. By removing RTs from the text within a tweet, Twitter created a traceable way of measuring the spread of a message and can now use this as a metric for organisations to show them the level of impressions for promoted tweets.

Data is always going to be the central part of any business, but it’s important that it is analysed properly to ensure it can be leveraged correctly to provide the greatest value to an organisation.