Marketing predictions versus reality in 2014

All Twitter, the unofficial resource,  published this infographic:

From Media Bistro

Take aways

There are five predictions covered, According to the Infographic, two came out true, two came out false and one had mixed results. Mixed results is a de-facto false, as no one can make investment decisions based on something vague

If we look carefully, the true predictions are not big data related. They are the results surveys carried out, with responses Yes or No

• Did you integrate email with social media? Yes? No?
• Did you leverage data from social media to gain insights to your customers? Yes? No?

The so called "true" predictions are in fact built-in in social media and everyone, not only marketers, answer yes to these questions. For example  on LinkedIn I send InMails, invitations, requests for references , etc to network efficiently. I engage with people after reading their tweets, google and bing them. And so does everybody else I know.

Big Data predictions?

Analytics is  the process of collecting, processing and analyzing data to generate insights that inform fact-based decision-making. 

One type of forecasting are election polls. We refined those to the point that a few hundred, maybe one thousand interviews can predict election results in a nation of a few hundred million people population. But this is not big data, as Peter Theil says the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?

Not all polling professional firms are equal, although they use similar algorithms. Some are better, because the people in those companies are more skilled at interpretation data. We used to call this statistics. Now we may call it Big Data, as we expect some voice to come out of a machine generated melange and tell us what to do.

In this context, 100% of all predictions made using algorithms for marketing trend predictions in 2014 are inconclusive and do not inspire confidence. (See Larry Fink, CEO of Blackstone  dilemma) 

Fortune cookies

I invited my son to a fast food Chinese restaurant , 

My fortune cookie said: You will soon be honored by someone you respect.

My son cookie said: Before a evening of romance, don't forget to turn off the cell phone

Both tickets are prophetic and applicable to the entire population of the world. The rule is: the vaguer the prediction, the better chance has to occur.