Ok, so IBM wants to build a smarter planet.  And I have to give them props – IBM gets it.  Data does matter.  It is the way to making smarter decisions.  It is “better than guesswork, more accurate than intuition, the stuff of great insight”.

 According to IBM, “Every day we are creating 15 petabytes of new data. That’s 8 times as much data as there is in all of the libraries in the United States combined.”  Ok. I am sufficiently overwhelmed.  I do not have the desire to try to make sense of that, nor do I have the means to pay IBM to make sense of it for me.

But unfortunately most end up doing nothing with data and still rely on the guesswork and intuition.  You know the old adage, “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.”  Well, how do you analyze 15 petabytes of data?  One byte at a time. 

I say crawl . . .walk . . .run.  Start small and see real ROI.  Use real objective data to find out the cost of keeping a customer, the cost of finding a customer, or the effectiveness of your last marketing campaign.  Capturing data, engaging with clients and analyzing information is not scary, and there are affordable solutions that exist today. 

Building a smarter planet is a wonderful goal, but right now I think most people would rather just start with making a smarter marketing decision.