7 Ways to be a Data Creative

In 1996, Steve Jobs famously told a Wired magazine reporter, “Creativity is just connecting things.”

 “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while,” the late Apple founder said. “That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” 

Jobs’ quote suggests that when analysis is informed by creativity and experience, great things can happen. I encourage you to apply this thinking to the world of data. 

As much as the social scientist in me would like to believe, strong data strategy really isn’t as much about science as it is about art. In the spirit of embracing that philosophy, I have realized I am not a data scientist. I am a data creative. 

The art of data analysis lies in the connections you make to better understand and contextualize what is in front of you. This is not to discount data science, but rather to call attention to the fact that smart interpretation can go beyond statistical models. Problem solving can depend on creativity as much as scientific knowledge.

 It’s about finding the most crucial stories and actionable insights within data (whether that includes social media data, interviews or focus group scripts, government reports, UX data or something entirely different) -- and recognizing what that means for the audience you are trying to reach.

And better yet, being a data creative doesn't require being born with the data creativity gene or years and years of schooling. You probably already have at least a few of these seven attributes of data creatives:

1. Being a data creative is realizing that audience data on social and traditional media should not simply be monitored and measured for mentions, impressions and click-through rates. Rather, it’s considering the myriad ways different people engage with and use different content to make decisions and live their lives.

1. Being a data creative is understanding how to fall back on your own pop cultural knowledge and liberal arts education to come up with ways of searching and organizing data.

1. Being a data creative is recognizing the most interesting, relevant stories within the ways people use social data – from their conversations, to their emojis, to the photos and videos and memes they post, to their hashtags and beyond.

1. Being a data creative entails realizing how gender, racial, ethnic, geographic, class, cultural and age differences might affect what is included and excluded in the data – and determining how to creatively solve that problem.

1. Being a data creative will inform how you think about digital user experience, audience and consumer expectations. It will help you think about what it’s like to be in a user’s shoes as they navigate the website you’re designing. A data creative might gather additional data (interviews, ethnography or eye-tracking data) to make an experience better.

1. Being a data creative is not only recognizing social influence by social following. It’s recognizing how to connect real-world, real-life, off-line data with people who have social following in order to make a bigger impact on the most relevant audience. (For example, Patton Oswalt tweeting to his 3 million Twitter followers that he’s received a box of “Star Wars” cereal on May the Fourth in the year before the movie release generates awareness of the cereal and serious fan engagement. Plus, it’s awesome.)

1. Being a data creative allows you to ask big interesting questions to get to the crux of a client’s problem – and find creative solutions to answer it.

 Part of my work as a graduate student many years ago was to write a dissertation. I was curious about the effects of digital media on millennials, and I started my work with a big research question: “How do adolescent girls use Instant Messaging to communicate and negotiate identity?” I conducted interviews with a diverse group of American girls' and collected their IM conversations for several months, and then I pored over that massive amount of data. Using those seven principles of data creativity, I found dozens of interesting connections, and then I boiled them down to several themes, using evidence (in the form of some amazing stories) to illustrate them. The final product was a book that I published in 2007 about how complicated it can be for teen girls to navigate school and social lives in the age of social media.

 Marketers can use the same approach. Methodological creativity (and patience) will get you there even without the time or budget for dissertation-style research. Just act upon your curiosity, start digging and make those connections. Then show your clients exactly what these connections mean to their consumers and audiences. You just might come up with a genius content marketing campaign or an unusual social influencer program or a targeted new SEO strategy.

 They will be grateful, and you will feel gratified because insight-based strategy simply feels good. And once you get the hang of data creativity, your ability to make connections and provide strategic direction will improve. In fact, as Steve Jobs said, it will all just be obvious to you after a while.