"Conducting business at the data level is not a practice for the future. It is a core competency, today" writes Josh Jones-Dilworth, the Founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc. a PR consultancy focused on bringing early-stage technologies to market.

"Social media, at its inception, was all about the democratization of publishing and the conversations surrounding it. Today, frictionless interaction is arguably ubiquitous, and a higher-order discipline is emerging — that of data mining, and data analysis. The democratization of data is the natural next step."

"As streams on the web (both personal and private, public and corporate) proliferate, gathering, analyzing, visualizing and publishing data become increasingly important to businesses of any kind. Data is the best way to understand an opportunity, design an approach to it, and differentiate. Data is how we know we’re doing well, or faring poorly. Data is how we make decisions, at every level."

"This new reality is the natural extension of where we are and where we have been headed since the beginning. Our collective data is the byproduct and the artifact of digital life and web living. It is increasingly rich and it is precisely the inner logic according to which we make decisions to buy and sell, act and react. We have, consciously or unconsciously, made data the bonfire, the totem, and the town square."

Comment

At See RM we believe - perhaps uniquely in Belfast, Northern Ireland - that using the social media channels are simply the acts of having the conversation. It is the understanding that comes from analysing the resulting information via a CRM or marketing information system (MkIS) that enables the business to operate more efficiently and profitably.

Original article...