Wikibon and SiliconAngle contributor Isha Suri has posted six rules rules for a successful marketing strategy in the era of Big Data on Wikibon. The new data gathering and analysis technologies give marketers a powerful new toolset for developing strong, personalized, online marketing campaigns. But to do that they need to understand the basics of Big Data use and develop new data analysis skills. The most advanced, she says, can become data scientists themselves.

Her rules are:

1. Expand Your Data Sources: Big Data allows researchers to go beyond the limits of internally generated, structured data to capture large quantities of unstructured and semi-structured data from a variety of internal and external sources. Social media sources can be particularly revealing of individual customer and group activities and opinions that can provide information to help marketers focus their campaigns.
2. Customize KPIs: Unconventional data metrics such as click-stream paths, social media postings, and customer interactions can help marketers know what their customers are doing in the 23.5 hours a day they are not interacting with the marketer’s company.
3. Use Smart Analytics: Traditional data analysis tools designed for relatively small quantities of structured data are not sufficient to handle the much larger volumes and different data types of Big Data.
4. Use Purpose-Oriented Technologies to Address Specific Challenges: Attempts to use the wrong analytics package for the problem will waste time, money, and resources.
5. Develop Your Skills: Marketers are becoming data analysts and should aspire to become data scientists.
6. Pick the Right Visualization Tools: The right data visualizations can make data analysis easier and help develop important, un-obvious insights.

Like all Wikibon research, Isha Suri’s full Professional Alert is available without charge on the Wikibon site. IT professionals are invited to register for a free membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to comment on research and post their own Alerts, white papers, tips, and questions. It also subscribes them to invitations to the Wikibon Peer Incite meetings, during which the Wikibon community meets to hear from users who are solving common problems using advanced technologies, and to the Wikibon newsletters written from those meetings.