I’m not a data scientist and, in all likelihood, neither are most of the folks who keep using the phrase “Big Data”. I keep hearing marketers, startups and random executives talking about “Big Data” like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Big data is a buzzword lately and, like a lot of buzzwords, it gets used a lot and often so incorrectly that it’s lost all meaning.

My favorite quote about this subject is:

“Big Data is like teenage sex: Everyone talks about it. Nobody really knows how to do it. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it. So, everyone claims they are doing it, too.”

As if to perfectly illustrate this point I was recently followed by a Twitter bot called  @ChronicFarting; the description is “A robot that replaces big data with chronic farting #botAlly”

The account is hilarious, tweeting quotes and articles that said “Big Data” and replacing them with the phrase “chronic farting. As a marketer I love this account, because of the number of times I’ve listened to someone tell me that “all my competitors are using big data to supercharge marketing.” Usually without any explanation of what is being done. Never with an explanation of  return on investment (ROI).

One guy told me that he had heard that many dogs have been connecting to some form of  complex API (he also wasn’t really clear on what API meant) to access Big Data to track the neighborhood cats.

Ok… that conversation never happened. But it feels like it did. I go to way too many marketing conferences and  I’ve heard far too many presentations on “Big Data” taught by people with no background in data science, economics or even a working proficiency with SQL.

Anyway, here are some examples of the tweets my new favorite account is putting out:

Be careful of biases in chronic farting,

— Chronic Farting (@ChronicFarting) October 24, 2015

Ah, we did so well to not mention the ‘chronic farting’ phrase til now ;) #datatransformations

— Chronic Farting (@ChronicFarting) October 24, 2015

Off to Abu Dhabi. Really looking forward to working on social media & chronic farting issues w/

— Chronic Farting (@ChronicFarting) October 24, 2015

So What is Big Data?

Wikipedia says: “Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target, as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.”

Google offers a slightly more succinct definition: “Data sets that are too large and complex to manipulate or interrogate with standard methods or tools.”

Notice that although Big Data can be (and usually is) a massive amount of data, true Big Data is defined by how has to be data is processed. Meaning there is a difference between Big Data and simply a lot of data.  

I have seven terabytes of photos and videos on several hard drives and I keep them organized in Adobe Lightroom. Since Lightroom is a common tool for photographers to manage catalogs of photos, it’s not a special data processing tool. Seven terabytes of  photos are sorted in pretty much the same way as seven gigabytes. No matter how much data you have, it’s about the sorting method– meaning you can have a petabyte of data and still not be working  with “Big Data.”

Why are Marketers Talking About it?

I get it: the “Big D” is flashy and you want to flash your clients. Facebook, Google, Bing, Twitter and every company that offers an online advertising platform is working with Big Data. Information about online and offline behavior like shopping habits or home ownership help marketers to better target customers with relevant advertising. These large ad networks end up with a lot of hard-to-sort, complex information (Big Data) that is difficult to process into something meaningful.

However each of these companies has teams of people who turn Big Data into usable data that can be shared with the public. By the time your average marketer is drawing a correlation between an email address associated with a credit card, DMV records and public records showing marriage and homeownership they are doing so using pre sorted data from Google, Facebook or another platform.

Using the Google Keyword Planner or looking at Facebook insights is not working with Big Data. I’ve worked with teams run by economists who had full access to Twitter Firehose, whitelisted status on Facebook and payed for data form Epsilon, Data logics and filed FOIA requests constantly to the U.S. voter registry.  Seeing the insights that can be gleaned from this amount of data caused me to understand why data has become a form of currency in our modern world.

While not being able to mine this data may be limiting for some people, I would say average Joe online marketers owe a thank you to those teams who give you useful information without making you become a data scientist. So, can we all stop adding Data Science to our LinkedIn Skills?

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