You have access to more information than you can possibly consume. More information than anyone has ever had access to before in the history of the planet.
And yet having exactly the right information, in exactly the right format and at exactly the right time still seems to be an elusive prospect.
“Death by data”, “analysis paralysis” and of course “information overload” have become commonplace terms. People tell me they feel they are drowning in data.
This impacts the way you run your business. Irrelevant information buries the valuable fragments you require. Too much data (especially contradictory data) makes decisions harder, rather than easier.
As a person involved in the gathering, analysis and interpretation of information, I strongly believe that relevance trumps quantity.
I believe that it is my responsibility to be the filter between a universe of information and the specific needs and intent of my client. So my efforts go into achieving a balance of minimising information and maximising those nuggets of actionable insight.
I am very interested in evolving how research can best be delivered to people who have too little time to consume it. In other words, how information becomes insight.
So I find it incredibly depressing when I see costly, supposedly professional research that is simply information dumped into a document.
A tourism organisation recently shared a report with me that had depleted a fair chunk of their research budget. And there was no filtering, no context, no understanding of the clients’ questions and intent – simply 100 pages of information. It was rather like requesting a specific recipe and being given the stock-control list for the local supermarket. The client was left trying to figure out how on earth this information could help them make a decision or take appropriate action.
And in exactly the same way, your customer experiences these pressures when they are trying to make decisions that require them to source information about you.
They trawl through information in order to facilitate a decision and come to your website or offline channels with specific questions to resolve.
Do they find themselves struggling through seemingly irrelevant information while they search for the nugget that answers their question? After all, they don’t want to know everything, they want to know your phone number, whether you allow dogs, what the nearest airport is.
If relevance trumps quantity every time – are the key questions your customers have clearly signposted and findable on your site? (I’m currently working with Stephen to address the very issue on our own business website, because I don’t think we do it anywhere near as well as we could).
I think businesses (research companies included) can learn something from search engines in this instance. Faced with almost unimaginable volumes of information, the search engines understand that information is essentially valueless until it is relevantly matched to the individual searcher’s intent.
I suspect that most people would gladly trade an ocean full of information for the one bit they need right now. And as businesses, we have to remember that when we present and sign post information to our customers.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Opinion, Research tools, Tourism market research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.