Real-time data will alter how brands’ sites work | Opinion | New Media Age
JONATHAN BRIGGS
Real-time data will alter how brands’ sites work
24 February 2011 | By Jonathan Briggs
The ‘web of now’ is probably as significant as the mobile and social web, and is highly linked to both
We’ve come a long way since the web of static documents. Today’s internet is a complex place of streaming video, cloud-hosted services, social activity, retail experiences and mobile apps, all buzzing with viewers or customers and all generating vast quantities of data and meta data. From status updates to dynamic price changes the web has become live.
This ‘web of now’ is probably as significant as the mobile and social web, and is highly linked to both, but has received less attention. That will soon change and it will affect how we work with clients. There’ll be more night shifts as 24/7 customer service becomes more common and effective brands will join news organisations in reacting to world events.
Pieces of the real-time web are emerging everywhere from Google Instant to Facebook monitoring, from Twitter-powered news to live analytics and dashboards. Keeping track of the pulse of transactional data and consumer comment will be an essential tool in every business.
Digital agencies will need to design data-collection systems to monitor the events inside the sites, apps and campaigns they create, as well as the rest of the internet where it affects the client. Luckily the data from all of these can be increasingly captured and mashed up using APIs and low-cost services. Taking customer, sales and stock data from inside the business and combining these with web or mobile activity will move from being the preserve of the large enterprise to the SME. The challenge is deciding what to monitor and what to ignore, and this will vary from business to business.
Visualisation of this real-time data will also be necessary, and configurable dashboards, such as Geckoboard, show what’s possible. Already some brands, such as Gatorade, have designed Mission Control-style rooms where teams watch and react to the flow of activity.
Both monitoring and visualisation present tremendous opportunities for digital agencies if we can persuade clients of the value that these insights will give them. We need to become more data-savvy and learn to provide deeper insights into what the data means. We’ve already seen the difference between agencies that simply install Google Analytics as part of a web build and those which offer their clients detailed interpretations and suggested actions.
The next step will be agents. These are computer systems that react to changes in data. At their simplest, they operate like Google Alerts but could be programmed to change a price or update an AdWords bid. At their most complex, they may become ‘intelligent’ rule-based systems that collaborate to reason about the world on our behalf.
Big companies have had agent-based systems for a few years but it’ll be the opportunity to take these mainstream using newly emerging tools that will be important for agencies and their clients.
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Article on 'web of now' and implications for companies and what this means for data use and insight.