Introductory talk by David Boyle (Insight Showcase, Nov 23, 2015) arguing that rapid technological change—especially ubiquitous, inexpensive smartphones—has put the “future” in people’s pockets worldwide. He emphasizes the need to understand, measure, and use data (social, research, reports) to make better business decisions and frames the session as training to develop that practical data fluency.
Chapters
To set the scene, I think. Why are we here? Why do we need to bother with this kind of session? Why do we need to spend time on this topic? And why do we all come to work in the morning? And the answer is, in part because we live in the future nowadays. Because we've swapped from an old world that we understood pretty well to a new world of these strange and wonderful technologies in everybody's pockets, that very, very futuristic in how people discover and engage and consume our content. The world's changing at such an incredible pace that we have to spend much more time than we did before and trying to understand what's going on, trying to measure what's going on, and trying to work out what business decisions we should be making on the back of it. These strange little devices are one part of that strange transformation, this ability to just reach in and consume a piece of content from anywhere in the world and from any time in the world. That's the kind of market we're competing in these days. There was a phrase, though, that I really liked, that on any given area of technology, the future is already with us. The future is already here. It's just not very well distributed yet. If you look around, you can find the future. It's just that we don't have it in our pockets. Of course, we all have this future in our pockets. But you might be tempted to think that it's just affluent people that have this technology in their pockets, or it's just kind of rich nations. But this particular phone with all these capabilities I ordered from Walmart on the weekend for $9.82. It's an Android, fully functional Android phone, only three megapixel camera. So it's not going to change the world of photography. But I can watch my Netflix. Give me it to the kids for Netflix and YouTube. So this statement isn't true anymore. The future is definitely here and it's very evenly distributed all around the world. Anybody who wants one can be in this world now, can be in the future, can consume in all these ways millions of new people every day who had no chance of finding our content in the old world, now have absolutely every opportunity in their pockets to find our content in the new world. Billions of people around the world that really weren't opportunities for us before, but now really very much are. So this is the future that we're in and we need to understand it like never before. We need to wrestle with how it's changing and adapting like never before. We need to spend more time together doing Things like this that weren't a priority before. And if you think about the kind of things we're looking at today, some data, some reports, some new tools we're going to look at later on social media measurement, I think of them as a lot like all the other tools that we're using every day to engage with this sea of data that's out there. And we need to get good at using them like we got good at using these tools as well. So it's almost like a superpower being able to reach into your pocket and predict the weather for the day and work out whether to carry an umbrella or to reach in your pocket and look at the stock market ups and downs. Not that I have any money on the stock market, but some of you might have. And I don't know, my superpower is working out whether I need to do more walking or not during the day and keep fit. It's so easy and simple now to just know how many steps you've taken and just stay on top of exercise. So this is us reaching into our pockets every day, looking at data beautifully visualized and available to us and making hopefully better decisions as a result of it. And that's exactly why we're here today. Same thing, isn't it? This time we're looking at some research data and some reports, some social media data and some reports, but it's the same thing. And just as I've got really good at reading my steps count every day and got a little bit fitter and a little bit more exercise as a result of that, I think those of us that think about the data we're presenting today and get really good at looking at that data and get really good at reaching into that whenever we need to, going to end up making much better business decisions, I think so. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the data, hope you learned something and hope it plays a role in your life alongside the steps, stock markets and weather.
