I’m thinking about the webinar I’ll be giving with Compete.com on September 28th (formal announcement will be forthcoming soon) and “ultralight” data not normally collected in your typical analytics implementations.   Tried to visualize what that would look like and this is what I came up with

I’ll have specific instructions in the webinar and possibly a case study – my main point is to ask the question … “Am I setup to capture activity around my business goals in every way/sense it needs to be tracked”?

I’m guessing the answer will be no.

How much of the activity around my business am I actually capturing (that’s what the chart above measures)?   In the case of this business data is in silos and is often difficult to combine.

I know there’s probably a better way to represent this – but right now between all the data sources I have listed in the chart at the beginning of this post and all the campaigns running I count 180 cells – and of those 82% are not enabled (data isn’t being captured) – a lot of that is normal as the data is in silos, after all (for example you would not expect to see Restaurant.com data/transactions  showing up in Google Analytics or SeamlessWeb – one could attempt to connect the data – but it would be a lot of extra work and custom programming to do it at this time – or if you had a data warehouse – maybe this could be done).

Of all the data there is “out there” to be capture on the business that I based this chart off of, only 9% of it is actually being captured – and most of it is in a silo.

On the other hand, can Social Media ROI be represented when so much of the data you’d need to measure it – is essentially “ultraviolet” – hidden from normal site?  I don’t think so.

The webinar I’m giving with Compete.com will address how one deals with having so much data that still needs to be tracked and how it might be organized.

Another way to look at data is comparing data sources to each other

Think of it this way – say your business has a community manager – where is the activity of that community management in Social Media going to show up in this scenario above?

- Facebook (Fan Page)

- Twitter account

You probably won’t see activity around community management reflected in your Email Campaign data, probably not even in FourSquare data – since most check ins are happening on their own, by people who want to share their loaction.  I suppose a business can run a campaign giving away stuff to the first people who show up and check in (The Gap did something like this last weekend).  Overall, your not going to find a lot of the data you need to prove community management works from the data normally available – that is why it’s so frustrating to come up with realistic ROI numbers.

We can compare data sources and see how much of the data being collected is reflected in another source of data.

I know my viewpoint is biased by working in Web Analytics – the more I look at these charts, the more the best place to get the most data we need is Site Analytics, as incomplete as it is for this business, for example.

When looking at datasources such as GrubHub, for example, it’s almost impossible to see how you could tie Social Media activity to such a data set – it almost presupposes a data warehouse and a Social CRM system.

Where’s the “common key” that can be used to tie data together?  A lot of work would need to be given to finding useful ways to combine data.

Having said that – the excellent session I attended yesterday on Pimp My Reports from Stratigent covered basic dashboard creation and it occurred to me that dashboards don’t solve the data collection problem this post uncovers and details.

Just because you can combine data from disparate sources such as email and twitter, and sometimes create additional metrics around them, you can’t create data you simply don’t have or never collected.