Data Means Business

Every day as you leave work and hungrily head for home, a major battle is fought in the war for big data and it happens right under your nose. Or rather, right at your fingertips.

All day long you’ve been using your work computer, searching Google for leads and .gifs, and you’ve been making data. We’ve all been making massive amounts of data. Now, this data doesn’t just go into some big data limbo and sit around with nothing to do. No, it gets collected by the channels we use to create it.

Every time I Google “omelets for dummies” and then click on a link for an embarrassingly easy omelet recipe (cheese omelet – how do they do it), my search usage creates a data point that Google then makes good use of. Next time someone types in “omelets,” maybe Google will autocomplete for the potentially omelet-challenged. In a later search for recipes, Google might place the site I found higher on the results page. With the apps and sites I’ve been using on my work computer (like Google), I’ve been generating valuable data and those apps and sites have been pouring it back into their servers to create a better user experience.

But here’s where the first shot in the war for data is fired.

Work is over. I pack up my laptop and I get on a train and I take out my phone and I search for a falafel place near my apartment and I do this search with…Bing.

Boom. The War is On. The Victor Gets the Data.

The companies around us, from Apple to Microsoft, Google to Yahoo, are obviously fighting for our business. But now, especially as the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) movement grows bigger and people are working and playing over two or three or four smartphones and laptops and tablets, companies are fighting just as much for our data as for our business. It’s that valuable. Revenue can fund a marketing campaign but data can revolutionize it.

At Rapleaf, we like to think that we know this better than most (fine – at least some 🙂 – this is why we help marketers take data and do awesome things with it, all in the name of me getting that killer Western Omelet recipe.

At the end of the day, more business means more data and data means business.