Trying to make sense of the amount of data that comes in every week is a monumental task. It bends your thoughts in a different way. There is a difference though in analyzing data base on experience and analyzing data based upon asking the questions the data set might help us answer.

The type of analysis that is based on experience only is the easy one. You put your time (for a few years or months, depending on the industry) and then you are entitle by seniority sake to opine about all the work that is being done by your team, because you’ve done it before.

The thing is, for internet marketing, that does not work well. If you have done it before, over 4 months ago, the odds are that the tactic or strategy you used in the past has evolved and changed. That goes for the actual channel as well. For the sake of full disclosure and openness, my last conclusion is based on experience.

How to Succeed in this ever changing environment?

Learn. Evolve and ask questions that have not been asked before. You will probably find yourself struggling at the beginning but the journey to a new discovery always pays off.

Look at the data and use your experience to ask the right questions, not to suggest answers that might be biased.

Are you a senior manager?

Use your experience to guide you in the search for answers but give your staff the space to be creative and test, always test. Sometimes experience based on traditional marketing can skew the questions and assumptions in the wrong direction.

Take a fresh look at the business objectives and ask how can my new channels can provide support to those objectives and use the historical data to setup more successful test environments. Marketing campaigns online are all about testing - they are not traditional marketing. They are not supposed to be thrown out in market to see what happens.

Traditional vs. New Marketing

Turns out you are a brand as well. Not only the [insert yours here]’s (corporation, agency, startup) brand that you work for is important. You need to take care of your brand name. That will help you perform better in a corporation, agency, start up or even your own business. Much like Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah took control of his personal brand through his involvement in social media to raise his profile to the level where job offers from corporations came to him rather than looking for them.

This means, at a very high level, that if someone types in your name into Google you should probably own between 40 to 60% of the page. I am not suggesting you go for “reputation management” services such as naymz.com or others. These services you pay for and don’t allow you a lot of flexibility.

I am suggesting the following: