Q2-The Role of Big Data

Q2 - What is the role of Big Data in the conception of creative storytelling strategies?

Answer to the question:

There are different ways to tell a story.

In Big Data, we call it “Data Storytelling” or the story that the data tells or wants to tell us.

To arrive at a data story to be told, Big Data and Data Analysis specialists must go through a long process summarized in 6 stages.

They are:

Stage 1 - Formulate the right questions

Try to identify the problem about the data and describe the ingredients that compose it for subsequent data analysis.

Stage 2 - Obtain the necessary data to answer the questions

Data will be captured for analysis from various sources such as business files, social networks, spreadsheets, databases, data warehouses, the Internet, mobile phones, the Internet of Things, among others.

Stage 3 - Explore the data

Describe and explain the importance of the chosen data.

Process, clean, and transform them. Identify methods for preliminary analysis by comparing, crossing, visualizing, and observing.

Evaluate if they offer new, differentiated information, if they present anomalies, or if they provide insights for new business ideas.

Stage 4 - Analyze the data

Using statistical and data analysis techniques, build models that can answer the initial questions.

Stage 5 - Explain what you found

Provide reports on what you found, the insights generated from the data, and use presentation techniques to communicate the results.

Resort to Data Storytelling and build narratives from the knowledge obtained to explain what the data is saying and what it can mean for the company and the people involved.

Stage 6 - Turn insights into actions

Go to the market and connect the acquired results into practical business actions to test and obtain business results.

Use Marketing to develop new data stories that can be communicated to the public about the data products developed from Big Data projects.

Role of Big Data in the creative process

The described stages are carried out by Big Data specialists who, at a certain point, will explain to stakeholders the importance of the discoveries about the data.

The presentations take place in Stage 5 to explain what was found in the data and what it represents in terms of business improvements.

It is when the results of Big Data start to leave the specialists’ hands and become democratized for the company, showing what can be done with the data discoveries.

At this stage, data scientists use data visualization software like Tableau to present the data discoveries in a graphical and visual way for everyone to understand.

In Stage 5, Data Storytelling comes in

It is the moment when data narrative makes perfect sense and emerges in Big Data as a new form of convincing those involved.

Tableau software includes a Data Storytelling module to facilitate the final presentation.

Stage 5 is the inflection point in the process where creativity must use Data Storytelling to convince stakeholders about the discoveries that can optimize processes and open new markets.

When the product derived from data discoveries goes to the market, Marketing can make more intensive use of data narratives for the dissemination and commercialization of the product.

Conclusion

Big Data plays a fundamental role in creative Data Storytelling strategies by providing elements for the construction of narratives with the aim of disseminating and popularizing data products.

Insights or discoveries about data will be the basis for the development of data narratives in the creative process.