Dark Data

A recent Wiredarticle entitled "Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments," made me think of howrelevant this concept is to business today – not just science. One passage inthe article struck me:

“So what happens to all theresearch that doesn’t yield a dramatic outcome – or worse, the opposite of whatresearchers had hoped? It ends up stuffed in some lab drawer. The result is avast body of squandered knowledge that represents a waste of resources and adrag on scientific progress. This information – call it dark data – must be setfree.”

Think about your company and the amount of “dark marketingdata” that is residing in file cabinets, managers’ heads, and hard drives. Sooften, when we ask companies, “what results have you had with similar effortsin the past” or “what response rates have you seen from this target audiencesegment before” or “what research have you conducted regarding this productcategory” – we just get blank stares.

A lot of time and effort is wasted because data frommarketing projects doesn’t get reported, only parts of the results arepublicized, or it is just not captured. This can be due to a range of issues -- notwanting to publicize a less-than-successful effort to simply changes inpersonnel. We encourage you to develop a system that captures and makesavailable everything you learn along the way. Free your dark marketing data soeveryone can be more successful.