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As people get more excited by big data, I get excited by small data. It may be small but it\'s powerful.
Digest...
If you look at the visitors who visit your websites or use your apps then they'll fall into one of three groups:
Anonymous visitors.
Observed visitors. These visitors have visited more frequently, so there's more data and more history, and potentially more to learn. Even though you don't know who these people are, you can begin to build up some kind of profile in terms of patterns of behavior and content consumption. When do they tend to visit? What do they tend to do when they arrive?
Known visitors.
So, as a visitor migrates through these segments on her customer lifecycle, the data on her gets richer and more valuable. However, the number of visitors in each of these segments gets smaller. By far and away the biggest segment is the anonymous visitors. Depending on the type of business or organization you are this segment could account for between 50 percent and 80 percent of all your visitors, meaning that the vast majority of the data that's collected, processed, stored, and reported on represents a poor return on investment. It's just numbers making up the numbers, so to speak. The real valuable data is on the relatively small numbers of visitors who are meaningful to you. This is the data you can do something with. It doesn't just tell you how many of them there are but who they are, where they are, and what they are like.
If you're a B2B marketer, odds are pretty good that you have nothing to do with Big Data: relatively speaking, your data set is pretty small. Now it may very well be large to you, but vs. a consumer bank or a retailer, it ain't anything. So there's the opportunity: take advantage and drive insight from the relatively small data set. Not terribly difficult. Take your web analytics, cross tab with purchasing patterns, and you've got a start.