Big data and insight to impress … and it is free
In our current times when data mining gets more and more attention I still see many failing and experiencing meetings going wrong because people have not been well prepared. This happens inside your company as well as on externally.
Do you remember the good pitches and what made them stand out apart from a real good presenter? Most of the time it is data that raises you attention, because:
- Information and insight is king
- Data makes your findings trustworthy
- You might show correlations that no one thought of before
When people present interesting findings people will engage and even if they are aware they will value the time and effort you put into finding this data.
Since we live in a world that is full of data we need to find relevant information and if possible for free. So here are three tools that will help you impress your customer, team or boss next time you present or work on a business case.
Google Trends - google.com/trends
Enter a search term and get a chronological and geographical overview. You even can enter a second search term and compare. For example Beer vs. Wine and I can tell you some very interesting facts there Beer seems to have a revival, but then you can use the search by country and get complete different results again.
Topsy - topsy.com
Topsy let's you explore twitter from social search to analytics to trends. Again using the beer and wine example you will see that today beer is getting more tweets than wine.
Socialmention.com
Lastly I would like to point you to Socialmention if you are researching for sentiment of a brand for example or perception of a product. The site will also recommend top keywords, hashtags and users you might want to interact. It will allow you to export the findings in CSV so you can further tweak the data.
Let me know if you know of other good tools and of course also if you made a good impression on your next presentation.