数据崩塌
2014-04-25
关于论述内容和场景的部分是最让人受启发的：
CONTEXTIFICATION is the trend by which people will be addressed by others based upon their place in the world. This context is their “where” and “when” in Albert Einstein’s space–time continuum. By this I mean that a person’s place in space and time determines their context, and this context determines what information they may be interested in and what data they may be generating as a result. Context is the dominant determinant of what is of immediate interest to a data consumer and, as such, contextification will become the primary driving force behind how organizations engage with their target audiences. Chapter 2 included an introduction to the concept of context services, in which mobile devices are given the ability to know when and where they are in the world. These devices can then expose their users to information based upon these two factors. This process of making use of context services may be called contextification, a process through which companies will find a wide continuum of potential services to provide to their customers. As anyone who has used mapping apps on their smartphone knows, contextification is just plain cool. Apps that know when and where I am, along with my preferences, and then present me with information or options based upon this data are very compelling to the user. With these apps, I can instantly find information that is immediately useful to me, regardless of what I may be looking for at that moment. Am I hungry right now? No problem, here are the closest 10 or 20 eateries. Do I need to put gas in my car? With a click I can find the five or six closest gas stations. Having trouble finding a parking space downtown? By early 2013, there are apps that help you find the closest open parking space. Contextification is a game-changing social trend because it breaks down each of our days into thousands and thousands of individual chunks. Each chunk is one in which we can define our immediate needs and wants, thereby creating a unique, time- and space-boxed market. Each of these markets, necessarily markets of one, can be extremely well defined and thus readily targeted by companies. Because of the specificity, indeed uniqueness, of each of these markets, any company that can meet a customer’s need at that precise moment creates much higher customer value. As a result, the company can earn significantly more of that customer’s business than it otherwise might. By this process, contextification facilitates the creation of limitless new opportunities to identify, define, and then meet our wants and needs. Meeting customers’ in-context needs is just the beginning of contextification. As the technologies and data underpinning contextification grow, there will be an increasing ability to actually predict a user’s future context. From this will grow the ability to predict future needs, thereby creating market “pull” rather than market “push.” This shift will fundamentally change consumers’ definition of good customer service. In the near future, being responsive to customers will be a ticket to market failure. Rather, being predictive of consumers’ wants and needs will be expected. Keep in mind that this shift from responsive to predictive marketing relies on the real-time analysis of vast quantities of contextual data, and that this contextual data will continue to expand at alarming rates. As big as your present data management challenges may seem, they are trivial compared to how complex they will become over the coming decade. To participate in this contextified world, users will necessarily have to sacrifice a degree of privacy. Indeed, the more privacy you’re willing to give up, the greater the potential returns through contextification. As we’re already seeing, some people flatly refuse to make this tradeoff. Others readily throw caution to the wind and dive head first into the context-enabled marketplace. This effect has some generational undertones, as younger users of mobile and social technologies appear to be dramatically less concerned about their privacy than older users. While we’re likely to see these generational trends continue, there will be mounting pressure to “opt in” to the contextification wave because the benefits to the end user will be so compelling. As more and more companies begin to mine the huge amounts of data at their disposal, they are creating and supporting this new dynamic of mass customization in the consumer market. Frequent users of sites like Amazon.com, Google, and eBay will recognize this trend, as these sites actively profile each of their visitors and use the resulting information to sell more products to them, thereby becoming indispensable in meeting customer needs. In the process, these sites become customized to the user’s preferences, present requests, and predicted future needs. This customer-centric approach is leading to a new market paradigm: the Market of the Individual Consumer. Consumers now expect this degree of targeted experience from all their interactions with companies. Companies that succeed at this will realize dramatic growth and improved profitability. Conversely, companies that fail to deliver this customized experience will find themselves increasingly marginalized and pushed into commodity niches of product or service delivery. They will also see their profitability evaporate, as they fail to effectively respond to individual users’ needs and expectations. Interestingly, this focused targeting does not necessarily reduce the quantity of messages that consumers receive from vendors; rather, messages that are received will tend to be dramatically more relevant and will consume more of the customer’s limited attention, further exacerbating the problem of information overload. The market of the individual consumer is both enabled by and feeds the dramatic growth in customer data, so companies are now repositories of vast quantities of customer information and must actively mine and respond to this data in real time. This places tremendous demands on the companies’ information resources. It will also drive significant changes in how successful companies operate. With even further application of contextification, a company might know who my friends are in the city I am traveling to, what their availability is to meet with me while I’m in town, and the name of their favorite local restaurant. This information enables a marketing person to create a hypertargeted message to send to me during those thirty seconds he or she has my attention to get me to buy something. The likelihood that I will respond positively to the commercial (and hence, spend my money) goes up dramatically, since it meets my immediate, contextual need. The effectiveness of the marketing dollars spent by the sponsor through contextification grows dramatically. It is this outcome efficiency that will drive vast amounts of marketing dollars into contextification over the coming decade. This will be particularly true in the mobile space, where contextification is most powerful because the end user is constantly moving through potential markets. Indeed, in 2012 mobile marketing spending increased by nearly 80 percent over 2011, and such growth rates are expected to accelerate over the coming years.[1] You can also find similar contextification on YouTube, where in order to watch many popular videos you must first view a short commercial. The contextification here is superficial and fairly weak; it is based on the content of the video that you’re trying to view. However, it is highly likely that over the next few years the commercialization of YouTube will grow dramatically, particularly as more and more users access YouTube via mobile devices. As contextualization becomes more possible, it will become more probable.
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