Extracting Value from the Noise

With the rise of the social web and the  number of platforms that allow for you to post your personal information, the amount of content being created on a daily basis continues to grow exponentially. It is becoming almost impossible to find interesting or relevant content amongst the noise on our Twitter or our Facebook home feed and the trend isn't slowing down. In fact it's getting worse. 

We are constantly needing to improve the ways we use sorts and searches to find the content relevant to us. The content that we want to see - when we want to see it. But if you think that your personal sources of information is tricky to sort, for a company to track the amount of conversation that is taking place about it’s brand and what the conversation is, becomes particularly difficult. 

I once heard the future of the internet described as a "Data stream moving through time" where people have filters that allow them to siphon off a sample of all the information, process it, add to it and then send it back up into the stream. We're not quite there yet as plenty of our data still comes from the world around us as well as from the internet, but with the likes of social media and the decline in offline media, it does seem to be where we are heading as we become more ‘plugged in’. 

As an outsider and someone new to the whole ORM phenomenon I'm amazed by the potential in how it can help us to sort our data feeds. It provides a way for us to get an overview of the conversation happening around a topic or brand (or personal brand) and then allow us to analyse that data. It allows us to pull out a high level overview without getting lost in the sheer amount of data. As the tools improve these insights will become more and more valuable. 

Web 2.0 is the personalisation of the internet which enables this massive growth in data creation with personalized content. Web 3.0 (often referred to as the 'semantic web') is the next step of applying meaning to the relationships between the data sets. "The Semantic Web, at its lowest level, is just an expression of the information" says John Hebeler. With the right tools we can start to bridge this gap - call it web 2.5 if you will. 

ORM tools can give the users a very useful look at the relationships between data, brands and consumers. In this way they provide a step in the right direction not by identifying the actual relationships themselves, but by providing a way to group and sort the information so that those relationships become more apparent.