First – I’m asking for patience as I learn the creative side of building web sites and blogging; these are new experiences to me.
I grew up in a non-digital age. Report cards were mailed home (and in some cases, easily manipulated). GPS was hi-tech gadgets for a pilot of an airplane to understand.
The year I was born, we had a rotary phone. I bought my first house at the age of 24 and had a cordless telephone/answering machine combo and a VCR. You went to a video store to rent videos.
I began my career in the customer marketing & technology field traveling cross country with a two-way pager, a 20+ digit calling card and MapQuest print outs. You asked random people for recommendations to a local restaurant. And this really wasn’t THAT long ago.
With over 20 years in the Customer Marketing space, my career focused on collecting, measuring and using individual data for a multitude of projects. I take credit for over 18+ customer programs from donor databases, to automated CRM solutions, private label credit cards, customer analytics, and many loyalty & rewards programs in the U.S.A. and Europe.
I’ve written terms and conditions for customer programs with a focus on data. I’ve purchased demographic and social data on individuals from 3rd party vendors to integrate into already vast amounts of individual data collected by retailers. I’ve lead programs to create algorithms to predict your shopping needs while roaming on a website.
In my 20 years, I’ve seen a lot happen and a lot of change: pagers and flip phones to smartphones that help you manage just about anything. And if you can’t find a product that isn’t connected, there is probably an opportunity waiting to happen.
Today I continue to work with companies who are trying to understand their customers on a deeply personal level with the help of the digital age. I help them create engagement and loyalty with individuals by integrating traditional data with the mass data create today by the IoT (internet of things).
Although I want to share my knowledge of personal digital data – this will also be a learning experience for me too. The playing field is changing daily, and new devices create new data about individuals and their habits.
~ digital data doubles every two years! That’s today times two, times two more in two years, and again in another two years. And this data is not going away.
Marlow