The buzzword of the 21st century so far is analytics. For those of us in the content creation world it means absolutely everything. Analytics, as a most basic explanation, is the capturing of data to help you understand how people are reacting to what you are putting out into the world. For example, with analytics you can track the number of page views on your site, where in the world those views are coming from, which pages/posts/content is being viewed, how long it is being viewed and whether or not people are staying on your site or returning to the place that guided them to you.
This kind of information in the modern age is extremely powerful because it gives you a metric tracking ability without having to build a survey or other interactive process to gain the knowledge of what people are doing on your website. In digging deeper, though, the big reason that analytics is so important is because it allows the content creators (think advertisers) to track the activity of potential customers and make sure that their message is getting to the relevant people that could become customers, or increase their presence as a customer.
The tools currently available have reached the point where they can require a professional, or group of professionals, to monitor and track how your site is doing so it can be monetized. These people are able to grab the data that is picked up with the suite of tools available to help you see how to broaden your audience or focus your message depending on the goals that you have.
Recently it was reported on techcruch.com that Google, a company known for data mining and collection, is going to jump on the White House initiative for understanding science and information to provide free massively open online classes (MOOC) on understanding how to view and interpret the data that comes from analytics using the Google tools.
These tools have been developed to draw out the data on viewing habits of internet users when they land on a site. Google will provide instruction on how to use the tools, understand the data, and show how that information can be used to help make the best business decisions in accordance with the results.
This is a great initiative to help teach the public how data analytics can work for them and could eventually lead to helping people find a job opportunity in the swiftly expanding world of analyst work for a company in need of an extra set of hands to help them expand their viewership. The information gathered, interpreted, and shared from analytics has an impact on almost every aspect of a company in the modern age. It will influence sales and marketing decisions by informing you who is looking for your products, where they are in the world, and which message you deliver is having the greatest impact on your bottom line. Giving people the opportunity to understand how this modern way of collecting information works can only help develop opportunities for people…and Google.
There is a dark side to this “selfless” action from Google. Since Google is a company known for data mining, how will potentially millions of people taking a training course in the use of their analytics tools affect the number of people utilizing those same tools after the course? While this act helps provide a skill in understanding informational analysis to the general public, it also gives Google 1,000,000+ more potential users to feed their data mining machine.
The majority of our information online is currently available to be analyzed as it is so it might not seem that big a deal to have more people watching over our activities. However, there is still a part of me that wonders what the information sharing community will look like when these students start to become professionals out in the world, and what the new business landscape will start to look like when you have that many more people trying to analyze who you are based on where you spend your time online.
More companies will be capable of reaching out to you in a more effective way, or you could just give in to the paranoia, pack your car, drive into the mountains and disconnect from the world. The nice part is you still have a choice.
