Sam Winstanley’s Blog

In the end, the glass of Barolo is desirable and taste’s nice, the process of growing the vines harvesting the grapes, pressing, fermenting and bottling them is a process which is taken for granted.

In terms of what happens in opinion research, the last couple of blogs have really been about fermentation and bottling; its all been about warehousing data. Little has been said about getting the data in or the process which we call Harvesting.

What are the Grapes?

While I am pressing (excuse pun) on with this analogy, a grape is an opinion; opinions about your business or one of its brands are not concrete things. There are potential grapevines all over the internet, internal information systems and there’s still of course surveys; either survey’s that you commission or industry reports that you are savvy to.

These sources of information vary wildly in quality, structure from a raw data point of view. Somehow you want to bring all or some of these sources to paint a full picture, one that can drive some action and deliver improvement.

HArvesting

At this point I could paint a rather blissful picture of the process of harvesting which looks like this:

To combat the disconnection between the simplicity of this diagram and the actual complexity involved in shuffling through data and getting it to sit nicely together in a warehouse. We developed the concept of Harvesters which quite literally take a stream of data and “do stuff” to it in order to make it sit nicely in a standard location for analysis and reporting.

There’s no such thing as a free Opinion

Structured data like that coming from surveys or CRM systems is relatively easy to deal with but rarely standardized. It’s also of relatively known quality, but there’s no surprise that you pay to get it (you either pay your call centre, web site, survey systems/vendors). Therefore this is the cheapest data to harvest.

Syndicated research (e.g. industry reports/omnibus data) data sits slightly in the middle of the spectrum, its got a structure (usually quite a variable one) but its aggregated so its limited, and some historic data also fits into this part of the spectrum.

Conversely unstructured data like facebook, twitter and blogs are almost without structure, generally need some categorization which can also mean a partly human process therefore the harvester is potentially a process in its own right.

Whichever way you look at it, you either pay more to grow the grapes and less to harvest them or the other way around.

Keep focussed on the Barolo and You will Pick the Right Grapes

Throughout the process of building a warehouse, you have to stay focussed on the wine you are trying to make at the end. The un-harvested grapevines will still be there. There’s been too many attempts to build warehouses without a clear vision of what’s got to come out of the other end.

“lets grab all the data we possibly can and see if there’s anything there”

This is NOT the idea, you will never get a good glass of wine from a bottle of random grapes without huge amounts of luck.

If you are interested in finding out more about what we do, or what value it can bring visit www.forgetdata.com or message me personally on twitter @samwinstanley