The Guardian today announced its new Open Platform, and influential technology bloggers and analysts took notice. The Guardian is providing content and data APIs to enable and encourage developers to build third-party apps. Developers can monetize their creations with advertising, but will eventually be required to join an ad network.

As anyone who has picked up a local newspaper lately can attest, the death of print media is not greatly exaggerated, but a grim fact.  The Guardian seems committed to the kind of innovation that may help it to weather the storm.

From our perspective, it’s pretty amazing to see the much-heralded age of big and open data becoming a reality. Open access to news and data sets is sure to open the floodgates for insights from new methods of quantifying and visualizing reporting.

Tags: data, news, research by admin
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Joel Spolsky writes an excellent post on anecdote, pointing out how compelling vignettes are often strung together and used to support conclusions.  As a marketer I’m a big believer in the power of the story, but the oft-quoted “the plural of anecdote is not data” (long, indeterminate attribution here) definitely applies to brand and opinion monitoring. The most obvious problem is that anecdotes are not systematically selected; they’re selected as supporting points while other, conflicting anecdotes are inadvertently or deliberately ignored.

For those selling opinion monitoring into the large organizations, it’s a balancing act between providing the core, statistically valid analysis of the data, while “storytelling” with enough of the vivid anecdote for the client to hear the customer’s voice and engage. While opinion percentages are revelatory, an incident like Motrin Moms (summary from AdAge) tends to speed the adoption cycle dramatically.

Tags: customer voice, measurement, uncategorized by admin
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