Marketing at Scale.

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I once ran a promotion for ZDNet where we asked readers to write short essays as to why they were techies. The prize was a swim with porpoises in the Florida keys. We received over 35,000 responses. “Oh boy, now what are we gonna do?”  That’s a lot of reading. How would we scale? ZDNet had to hire temps to be judges. Unexpected expense there. I was talking to someone recently about a similar project and their approach was to build a reading/grading algorithm. At least to winnow the thousands to hundreds.

I guess you teach the algo some rules (like what?) and let it do its thing. It’s sad actually. When we use social media monitoring to gauge sentiment, that’s also algo-driven. And frankly, that’s not social.

I likes me some big data, no doubt. But when I drill into the big data I’m looking for humanity. The open ended question section of quantitative is a favorite. It’s where subjects, after checking boxes, get so fed up they want to blow out the important insights. It’s where they expect you to listen.

Marketing at scale has to have its eye on the sea of humanity, not the statistics alone. Right Mr. Spock? Peace.