As we completed the Barack 2.0 project, we had the opportunity to speak with the professors at Wharton School of Business about the data exhaust that is created due to new media platforms and practices.

These are the questions that came out of that discussion:

• What data is required to produce a profit in business?
• What data is worth inspecting?
• You have the data… now what?
• Does it go into a nice report and sit on the shelf?
• Is all of this data collection and measurement meaningless?

It can be meaningless if the data is not useful and pragmatically applicable.

Let’s look at a few concepts that filter out a lot of the noise: 

Perfect Information Definition #1: Information that completely eliminates uncertainty in a situation (as opposed to imperfect information, which only reduces uncertainty). (www.businessdictionary.com)

Perfect Information Definition #2: Information that is accurate, precise and actionable.  (Technomics – H. Lee Martin)

Accurate and precise means that the data is picked up from a reliable source and is repeatable. But what caught my attention was the idea that the information has to be actionable.

What does that really mean? It means you have to be able to do something with the information besides just present it and think about it.

Information, to be truly valuable and meaningful, has to be actionable.

So if you are running your business by the numbers, the steps are as follows:

• Know what data to gather
• Get the right data
• Interpret the data
• Use the data to improve your business

This is especially true with social media, as so much data *seems to be coming out of the social media space.

*Just having a large volume of data does not mean that the data is valuable or meaningful.

Do you think that all of this expensive data and reporting is worth it if you push it against the idea of it being “actionable?”

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