Week 8 – Downsides of Big Data

Big data refers to data that is extremely large and complex so traditional methods for data analysis impossible to use. It can be extremely useful for businesses’ if you have the resources to analyse it. It could be used to properly segment customers, tailor your brand or product for specific individuals and increase relevance of a product or brand to customers, in the event of a ‘I-want-to-buy moment’ . However, it is really worth it for some businesses to go through and analyse all this data? Sure, it may help some but there are a lot of negatives to using big data meaning it may not be beneficial to all businesses.

Consumer Exclusions  

By exclusively using big data to base marketing campaigns on, we may be missing a large section of our target markets depending on what the product is. Only 30% of Australians use social media more than 5 times a day and around 73% of consumers not trusting what they see online in terms of information, we can assume that many customers do not use social media regularly or not at all.  By exclusively using the information we have gained from big data, it may lead to some people within our target markets being excluded. Depending on their target market, big data analysis may not be critical for businesses, for example, take products for older consumers such as hearing aids. If a company sold this product, it may not be useful to use big data to build marketing campaigns as many older Australians do not know how to use how to use most of social media with only 47% knowing and actively using it meaning, you are only gaining data on half of your target market.

Data Size

There is a ridiculous amount of data on the internet with over with 149,000 emails being sent, 3.3 million Facebook posts being created and 3.8 million google searches being made each minute, there is a lot for marketers to analyse. Due to the massive amount of data available on the internet, big data takes a large amount of effort to sort and structure in order to make it useful for the business. Although, there are ways to sort big data, businesses’ must either hire a service causing extra costs for a business or do it yourself which may be cheaper but is extremely time consuming and confusing. For smaller businesses, it may not actually be worth the effort and time to sort through all this data as they may only have a limited number of regular customers that know about their business and can just communicate with them face-to-face or through their social media pages. For larger businesses, however, who have the money and time to be sorting the data, it may be beneficial as they do not have the same interacts that smaller businesses do but still need customer feedback in order to improve their business.

Bots

Bots are automated accounts that pretend to be normal users. They can be programmed to preform certain tasks such as posting at a certain time, comment on certain posts with keywords, follow users and other tasks that people associate with human interaction. They can be used for simple accounts for entertainment purposes such as the twitter account Big Ben which sends out a programmed message every single hour like a clock. However, they can also be used to manipulate users and create fake news leading to businesses still including this in the data even though, the information may not be real. This may lead to marketing campaigns being build around big data being inaccurate or flawed compared to just analysing data obtained in stores.

Big data can be extremely useful to businesses, but not in all cases and many of them must remember this when constructing marketing campaigns and producing products. We must consider our target markets, the capabilities of the business itself and issues such as fake users and false information.