Data is a company’s most important asset. After all, cleansed and accurate data can make money or save money. And what business wouldn’t want data that improves productivity, increases business process efficiency, enhances customer acquisition, and identifies up-sell and cross-sell opportunities?

“BIG Data” - Is this just another trendy buzzword over the past few years?  We’ve certainly heard this phrase tossed around often enough.  Marketers discuss the importance of capturing information from big data while database engineers struggle to implement the tools to clean and capture all this big data.

One man’s idea is another man’s misinterpretation. Depending on how language is used, or whether or not it’s even a similar vernacular to your own could impact any outcome.

Massive amounts of information flood companies daily - social and digital data, customer email, purchase history, and more. All this information arising from multiple sources must be integrated and governed to ensure it is a TRUSTED source of information. When diligently maintained and properly cleansed, your database is a marketing goldmine.

Big data is big information. Imagine the snowball rolling downhill in the snow, gathering more snow, and becoming so large that it is now out of control. That is the bird’s eye view of big data. The up close and personal experience, however, is one of stumbling upon a gold mine. There is a wealth of information to be had, but if Business Intelligence (BI) Workers do not know their industry trends, the information may never be mined, used beneficially or simply may be passed up.

If you were born before the mid-1960’s, you might be familiar with the phrase, “All we want to know are the facts, ma’am.” However, most people seem to recall, “Just the facts, ma’am” to be the famous repeated statement on Dragnet which were never actually uttered by Sergeant Joe Friday of the popular 1950’s and 1960’s TV series. The latter statement came from a parody of the television show. It’s funny how easy it is to confuse facts with skewed memories.

As more people are actively engaged in the world of data, the quality can have a tendency to become skewed, mismanaged and exponentially vast! The information that is being stored is gathered from a multitude of sources and entered by throngs of employees just tapping away, doing their jobs, hoping to complete their data entries by the end of their work day.

The data starts off good. Always reporting the correct information, always showing up when called upon, you never had issues with your data when it was fresh and newly input. You would rely on it to provide correct information and accurate output and it didn’t disappoint you.

There’s a reason there are massive amounts of information, links-upon-links to articles and much conversation about data quality. It is because that is the key necessary to deliver good information. The quality of data is in direct correlation to the percentage of qualified leads and sales for your business.

The proverbial New Year’s ball drops and out of the gate are the CEOs and salespeople, chomping at the bit, all commencing to set the course for a profitable 2013 year. The marketing department is already creating campaigns and tweaking them twice, assuring a successful rate of return. What can the marketing resources do to create a high percent rate of interest?