Big Data & its sibling, Little Data [Article HT @dsearls]

Mark Bonchek has a suggestion for those businesses fascinated with Big Data. Writing in the HBR review, here’s what he’s got to say (HT Doc Searls)

If you want to build loyalty, spend less time using data to tell customers about you, and spend more time telling them something about themselves.

Personal Tracking. Unwanted. Big Data. [Blog Post]

Doc Sears detects a change in people’s attitudes towards unwanted tracking of their digital activities, & has several links in that blog post. He quotes Erik Cecil :

“The backwash that’s coming is a tsunami that hasn’t hit yet. Right now it’s a wide swell over deep water. But you can tell it’s coming because the tide is suspiciously far out. So we have all these Big Data marketing types, out there on the muddy flats, raking up treasures of exposed personal data. They don’t see that this is not the natural way of things, or that it’s temporary. But the tidal wave is coming. And when it finally hits, watch out.

Big problems with Big Data [Article]

Stephen Few cautions us against falling for the marketing hype of Big Data. He highlights the horror stories of Americans whose credit ratings have been irreparably damaged by credit card companies, by opaque algorithms that churn out credit assessments, with countless errors, & no recourse for those impacted by such mistakes to have the errors corrected!

Where’d You Get That Cool Shirt? This Software Knows

In case you hadn’t already noticed, everyone wants to sell you something.  (No, not me, at least, not yet! ;). In the ads race, a company has developed software that can automatically identify SPECIFIC products in visual media, & then serve up relevant advertisements. As this article says, “As one example, the software matched the sunglasses worn by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in an image accompanying a news article about the movie stars to similar pairs available on Amazon. A reader online who hovered a cursor over the object would see the tagged link for the product.”