Data, data, data. From every direction lately, I’m being hit with urgent reminders about the imperative for local media companies to master data.

Every day, I’m more convinced: This is the next wave of threat — or opportunity — for local media companies. That’s how disruptive innovation works: You either grab the opportunity, or you are overrun by it.

As Big Data marches down upon us, I’m reminded of Longfellow’s poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” It tells how, on the eve of the American Revolution, patriots gave warning of the British Army’s advance by hanging lanterns in the belfry of Boston’s Old North Church:

“One if by land, two if by sea.”

I’m hanging out three lanterns. Big Data is bearing down on us right now — by land, by sea, and from every other direction.

I’ve blogged about it before, focusing mainly on the opportunities in advertising and marketing. I have written about being the first to offer Big Data solutions to advertisers. And I’ve given a vivid example of how this can work.

But the Big Data opportunity for local media companies is actually much bigger than that. If you ask yourself what data there are, and how they could help our business, the answers are almost overwhelming:

• Data about our subscribers. Not just their names, addresses, and phone numbers, but the huge amounts of other data — demographics, lifestyles, interests, and other information — available from Big Data sources.
• Data about our digital audiences. Not just pageviews and unique visitor counts, but the vast amounts of data generated by their actions on the Web, revealing interests, characteristics, purchasing paths, lifestyles, and much more.
• Data about everyone else in our markets — those who don’t subscribe to our print products and don’t use our Web sites. In the dawning Big Data era, you will fall out of the race unless you have the Big Data profiles of all the adults and households in your market and can help your customers reach the right ones for their products or services.
• Data about the businesses and organisations in our markets. This information isn’t as new to us as the types above, but there’s a lot more of it now. With Big Data analytics and lead generation tools, we can see who the best prospects are for our advertising and marketing solutions.

Add up these categories and there are millions, maybe billions, of valuable, actionable data points available within our markets. And millions more are being created all the time.

With that realisation, a new vision of a local media company is developing in my mind. It looks like this:

We have become the leading masters of local Big Data on individuals, households, and businesses and how best to reach them — unmatched by any other local competitor. We can do all of these and more:

1. For advertising and marketing customers, we target by characteristics and/or behaviours, using targeted digital display, e-mail, social channels, mobile, and desktop. We also use our clients’ customer lists to generate look-alike prospects and market them through the channels to which they respond best.
2. For our sales teams, we identify best prospects through their digital behaviours and nurture them through the decision funnel until they become our customers.
3. For the content we present, we use Big Data to understand which content resonates with our users. We produce more and more of that content, becoming more relevant and more integral to people in our communities. This is driving steep gains in traffic and engagement on our Web sites and apps.
4. We use Web visitor behaviour data on our sites to personalise content and to manage our content meters to induce a larger number of frequent users to subscribe.
5. For circulation sales, we generate look-alikes of our subscribers and market these non-subscribers through the channels to which they respond best.

We have some of the necessary data for these things, but we need better analysis. And there’s much more data we need to acquire, integrate, and interpret.

These are big opportunities. But I’m confident there are many, many more.

We just don’t have enough experience with, or knowledge of, the potentials of digital data to see them yet. The more we learn, the more we will see.

Who could help us with this? Lately I’ve been looking up resumes of “data scientists” on job boards. Excerpts from a couple of resumes:

• “I have direct work experience developing innovative and creative solutions for data extraction, transformation and loading, data staging, data analysis, and modeling complex data relationships. I strive to create actionable results through practical and creative solutions to both known and evolving problems.”
• “Taking anything from operational data warehouse environments to unstructured data archives, I am responsible for determining and creating the data architecture plan to support ongoing analytics, reporting, and modeling exercises. Familiar with the following tools: [followed by a list of more than 20 analytics, digital advertising, and reporting tools, only a few of which are known to me].”

What’s forming in my mind is a picture of a data scientist position at my company, Morris Communications. We have data scattered everywhere, so we need someone who has the data skills mentioned above.

It also needs to be someone with strong entrepreneurial instincts — someone who can see which of our existing data and what additional data — can drive better decisions and shape new business opportunities.

Some of the Big Data pings hitting me lately are coming from vendors offering to help us. Here are some quotes from various marketing e-mails I’ve received in just the last week or so:

“One of the roadblocks to delivering personalised experiences across channels is the heavy lifting it takes to centralise customer data, build profiles and targeted segments, and push them back to your customer touchpoint tools.”

“The concept of ‘identity’ is having an identity crisis. While there has never been more data available for reaching customers, there is a lack of resolution, both conceptually and practically, around the industry as to what it really means.”

“[Our company’s] goal is to turn information in business insights to enhance production, cross-channel distribution, and value creation. [We] have helped media owners understand their audience and assist their clients to make informed media choices.

Some of the media verticals are:

• “Publishers: Digital tracking and predictive modeling, content and position analytics, subscription analytics, and user benchmarking, journey, and funnel analytics.”
• From a Marketo white paper: In a business of any size — especially one with an engaging Web and social media presence — buyer interactions can number in the thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions. Without the right tools to automate the planning, execution, and measurement, even the hardest-working marketer can be overwhelmed by the complexity.”

New, data-driven business models are developing all around us. Our companies are sitting on sizable repositories of data, and we could quickly gain more by deploying the right strategies. And outside our companies, there are massive repositories of data about local people and businesses that we could integrate into profitable new initiatives.

So I’m hanging out three lanterns, folks. Big Data is pouring into and out of our markets. Let’s mobilise and develop the killer data-driven strategies we need to maximise the opportunity.

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