Recently I’ve had the opportunity to sit through a lot of discussions around the use and translation of market intelligence. Most of these have been focused on the usability and functionality of the various sorts of tools that grace our industry and help us “listen to the conversation” in the Social/Digital space. There are a lot of these floating around. From Radian6 and Techrigy, to PR Newswire and my new favorite, Dow Jones. Everyone is casting out lines and focusing on listening to all of the noise out there. What’s even more interesting is the there seems to be such little focus on what all the noise actually means. It’s one thing to display a pretty graph, bar chart, or impression metric, but in the end… What is that really telling you…? It gets even more interesting when you start trying to set up the knowledge paths between business functions (Legal, PR, Sales, Marketing) where you have different audiences with different needs trying to make sense of it all. In the end, the data needs to be real time and have the ability to translate into key insights for business strategies and tactics.

It’s a multi-dimensional world out there. The relational database is so yester-year.