Archive for December, 2009
Data is becoming more important to persuade clients, management, peers and other stakeholders to stand behind marketing investments. The trouble is that many marketers are not comfortable with data, and particularly the abundance of data. We often shy away from it preferring to use more qualitative ways to make decisions.
This avoidance of data has clear limitations and is not necessary with the growing number of elegant tools for gathering, analyzing, interpreting and displaying data in a way that persuades others to share the story. Data formatted into stories, frames facts and organizes information to help guide the audience to a natural conclusion and prevent them from “checking out” at the sight of cold hard numbers, along the way.
Moreover, the relative quality of the display adds strength to the value of the data behind the presentation. A high quality design communicates that the data is worthwhile “romancing” helping make the data, and the information derived from it, more valuable.
Some of the tools below claim to make data more fun. Do they deliver on this promise? You be the judge. They work for me.
1. Sample methods for displaying data
Augmented reality, dashboards, heat maps, mash-ups, networks, and tag-clouds are just some of the ways to visualize data. However, it’s difficult to write about these in a blog. Better to work on a Slideshare presentation. That said, I’d like to introduce a couple of tools for telling stories with data in this posting:
a.) Visual Literacy
Visual Literacy is an e-learning service that has a very interesting “Periodic table” for visualizations that can be found at http://bit.ly/NjWI8 . When you run a mouse over the various elements shows ways to visualize data. In the example below the mouse was run over “Sd” or “Spray diagrams”. (You will need to click on the Bit.ly link as the bottom table is just an inactive screen shot.)
b.) Gapminder
Trendalyzer is a software program that helps animate statistics, which was initially developed by the non-profit Gapminder Foundation in Sweden. The company was subsequently acquired by Google in March 2006. This program was first picked up by the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and they graphically depict changes over time. Please click on the following site for a review of these animated statistics http://bit.ly/7kOOUe and/or refer to the static screen shot below.
2. How to start visualizing data?
Data visualization is becoming important so it’s worthwhile for a marketer to bring in a specialist into the organization or contract the work to an outsider who is adept at telling stories through data and visuals. Whether the work is done internally or outsourced marketers should consider the following process in finding ways to best present data as support for their stories:
a.) Define your objectives and goals
- What is the main message of the presentation?
- Why does this message matter to the audience?
- What data is available to support it?
b.) Work from the viewer’s point of view.
- What are their audience’s needs?
- What benefits can you provide for them?
- How can you support this?
- What are the “hot buttons” to push with the audience?
- What is the process and way forward?
c.) Review the amount of data available as it will drive the visualization
- How many variables are there?
- How is the data ordered?
- Linear? Tabular? Hierarchy? Network? Geographic? Time based?
- Establish rough concepts and visuals for telling the story
- Experiment
d.) Select the best treatment based on the available data and how you want to tell the story
- Dashboards? Graphs – relationships, time series? Heat maps? Mash-ups? Networks? Tag clouds?
e.) Select the best tools for telling a simple story with visuals and a few words
- Graphic sources – Gapminder, Many eyes by (IBM Alphaworks (a social media website of data and graphs) and Swivel (another social network for visualization).
- Software - there are many commercial platforms available.
- Visual sources – Flickr, Google Earth, Google Images, Picasa, etc.
People relate more to stories than they do to data or facts. E.M. Forster refers to the difference in the following paragraph: “The King died and then the Queen died” is a fact. “The King died and the Queen died” is a story. Both sentences have a causal connection but the latter works better because it connects on an emotional level.
A number of people are comfortable with data just the way they are comfortable with facts. But when data is visualized it can become much more powerful because it connects on both a rational and emotional level. As such, marketers who are able to visualize data will have a competitive advantage over those who do not.
