The numerati make an appointment with your data

November 26th, 2008

Marcus Sautoy writes can you predict what the next numbers will be in each of these strings of digits?

123454321234543212…
11235813213455…
993751058209749…

The answer?

The first sequence has a clear rhythm to it. The second is a little more tricky, but look closely and you might notice that it uses the previous numbers in the string to build the next one. This is the Fibonacci sequence, nature’s favourite set of numbers, The third sequence is much trickier. At first it looks random but if you come at it armed with the right knowledge you might recognise that it is part of the decimal expansion of pi, starting at the 44th decimal place. Once you know this you have total control over the sequence and can predict every twist as it speeds off to infinity.

This is the opening sequence in They’ve got us all figured out a review of a book entitled The Numerati : How They’ll Get My Number and Yours by Stephen Baker. Something that I describe as the Black Gold of the 21st Century and also the Data flow wars Data, and the extraction and refining of that data to support commercial communications is about to become mainstream – this new currency will become the black gold of the 21st Century – in the future we will fight over oil, food, water and data. If we are living in a world that is increasingly networked, if we are living in a world where social interaction is a primary function in our networked society on the mobile and on converged platforms, then you need data analytics that can understand these social data flows. This is beyond the traditional fare of analytics. Click here for whitepapers on Social Marketing Intelligence.

The reviewer, Marcus du Sautoy writes

Mathematics is all about spotting patterns, finding the underlying logic in the seemingly random and chaotic world around us; and using this information to predict future behaviour. Traditionally maths has been used to make predictions about inanimate objects, like the orbit of planets or the weather. But as Stephen Baker explains in The Numerati, mathematicians are increasingly turning their attention to human behaviour. What if those strings of numbers are records of the things you’ve bought, places you’ve travelled to, websites you’ve visited, parties you’ve voted for? Find the pattern in the numbers and mathematicians will be able to predict – with surprising accuracy – what your next move will be.

Data, is becoming a red hot issue. And there are two sides to the story. [1] We are already measured, what gets measured gets made, its just that we do it very badly. Take Barb for example, or comscore. But we increasingly leave trails of 1′s and 0′s, Couple that statistic with this one: in 2006, 161 billion gigabytes of data were generated, and by 2010, 988 billion gigabytes of data will be produced. These are almost unimaginable flows of raw material. But it’s not just the scale of the data flows that is impressive. It is the combination of social and social media networks that are forming the all-embracing infrastructure of contemporary society. So these data flows, pinpoint accurate, are the traces, shadows, and trails of human interaction. They allow for the first time the ability to completely overhaul the metrics of communication, which in turn provides the means to rewrite the methodology and accepted practices of commercial marketing and communication. This development is not only enabling, it is defining. Over to du Sautoy

A social network-cartography
Until recently, the abstract language of mathematics seemed to have no relevance to the murky worlds of consumer trends, political preferences and dating. The change that has made the rise of the numerati possible is digitisation. All of us today leave an extensive trail of numbers wherever we go. Almost everything we do – from visiting a website to texting a friend – is translated into ones and zeros, which are stored somewhere and available to those who know how to access them. For example, every time we enter a search into Google, a simple code called ASCI translates each letter we type into a string of 0s and 1s, which are sent out across the internet.

[2] we can use data intelligently, we could use data as a tool for ourselves, it does not need to be all bad. But its a question of ethics, and application. For example

Most of us have no idea how much of our lives are being tracked. If we did, we would probably be horrified. At the same time, it is hard to deny that the numerati do much that is good. Baker’s analysis is pretty balanced, and he spells out why we should be grateful to the numerati, as well as concerned in some areas. Increasingly, for example, the numerati use their skills to monitor health care; homes for the elderly are being wired with technology that can record fluctuations in weight or a decrease in mobility, triggering a hasty visit from a doctor. If you’re joining a dating agency, you want to exploit the skills of mathematicians to find the perfect partner.

Whilst there has been an almost obscene amount written about advertising in the form of delivering conventional advertising furniture in the digital age such as targeted ads, there has been little written about how data is going to completely revolutionise the business of business, the business of marketing, and indeed the business of getting stuff done. Companies are daily involved in a complex process of playing offensive and defensive roles. These are protecting existing revenues (defensive), and increasing revenues and acquiring new customers (offensive).

Yet the dots are not joined up: marketing, media, and data need to be symbiotically connected to each other, so that precious company resources can be deployed intelligently at the right place and at the right time. The decision on how much to spend and where to allocate marketing resources will evolve as the once-siloed data warehouses, those dusty museums of customer records and other nefarious bits and bobs of data, become the living, breathing hubs that will enable those decisions to be made on a daily basis.

In a paper that I have recently authored for Microsoft I write, the smart CMO and CIO will start to understand that by deploying a data-driven approach to marketing as a core strategy, he or she can begin to enable his or her company to be more agile, more flexible, more accurate, even more accountable, and at speeds that currently seem light years away. The CMO and CIO will realise that one can now take a holistic approach to the entire customer lifecycle, where the emphasis is no longer on the word “management.”

The above statistics demonstrate that there is no reason why this will not happen. Of course, data mining and data warehousing proponents will make the claim they do this already. Yet they do not integrate refined data into marketing and media tools, and systems dynamically, nor do they include a key element that enables the massive uplift in marketing effectiveness—the overlay of refined intelligence from social data flows.

Importantly du Sautoy summarises

There is a tendency within our society to view science with suspicion, whether it is stories of nano-robots infiltrating our body and messing with our DNA, black holes appearing in the Large Hadron Collider in Cern that will swallow up the universe, or genetically modified crops sweeping the world and destroying all in their path. All scientific progress involves steps into the unknown, and that inevitably entails risk. That is why books like this are valuable. Once you know about the science and its implications, you are in a much better position to distinguish sinister developments from mere hype.

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