Guest post by Mark Granovsky.
We are in the third decade of a modern gold rush to mine corporate data. As multidimensional data analysis (MDA) continues to accelerate, the hunt has intensified to find new “seams” to explore.
This post explores a trove of corporate data that has remained relatively untapped until recently—the data that is generated by live events and conferences. We believe this data can yield highly actionable intelligence in discrete applications or when implemented within the marketing stack.
Given the tsunami of business data today, it’s hard to believe that any new source could go overlooked. Until recently however, data generated from live events on attendance, engagement, sales and other metrics has received far less visibility than other silos across the enterprise.
Some of this may be due to a false perception that live events are on the decline. It may also be related to the fact that event data has been only loosely tied to the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) outlined by data-driven firms. As the activities and behavior from events are digitized and optimized online, however, live event data can now be tied quite easily to almost any business outcome.
Better Inputs. Better Outputs
Modern business analytics require quality inputs to optimize outputs. Live event data is as pure as information gets. With the right tools, any enterprise can collect and manage every data point in the event process. Because live event data is quintessentially organic it is of higher caliber than online data generated by content farms, click bait and other intermediaries that can skew outputs.
Going DEEP
We’re only skimming the surface of the potential event data offers the enterprise. While the possibilities are endless, a popular new approach termed Data-Driven Enterprise Event Planning, or DEEP, provides companies with the tools to excavate and leverage the highest quality data first.
DEEP tools were designed in response to the moated methods employed by previous event management systems. While these systems were useful for transforming paper and pencil data into digital depositories, they were built a little like bank vaults. Although the data was relational and object based, it remained optimized for legacy use and was not all that extensible.
Most of all, the data that existed in legacy management systems did not lend itself to massive aggregation, and as a result, could not be meaningfully mined for “big data.”
Big data involves arbitraging huge tranches of data to yield often small but meaningful disparities that can exploited for business advantage. The more heterogeneous the data, the better. While the data is already there for the taking, it can be difficult to get at the data you want and analyze it efficiently.
Analytics tools like Google Analytics and more recently Tableau have mitigated some of the headaches involved in big data, assisted, of course by the widespread adaption of cookies, behavioral analytics, the popularity of funnel analysis and more. While running Google Analytics is not the same thing as data mining at the NSA, it still involves analyzing disparate data that is generated online and it can still pay off big.
Seeing, and Seizing, the Potential
Which brings us back to the data generated by live events and how DEEP tools, essentially, work.
Just like online data, data from live event signals can now be tied to lead scores, participation rates, user experience, product adaption, conversion goals, or and the myriad other business outcomes that exist within a Marketing Resource stack. Just like online data, live event data can now thrive within the same ecosystems that drive CRM, marketing automation, digital marketing and more. Unlike online data, however, live event data captures person-to-person interactivity in a dedicated commercial setting.
With the use of DEEP tools and other advances in event technology is now possible to mine your event data with the same rigor and sophistication as online data. While the insights yielded by online data have long been documented, the value offered by event data is only now being revealed.
Mark Granovsky is founder and CEO of G2Planet, a developer of enterprise event management software. This post originally appeared on the G2Planet blog. Republished with permission.