Fact is, marketing technology works, and is fueling a completely different world of buying and selling, and the stakes are only continuing to rise. As the stakes rise, and more and more interesting applications are developed, the need for Big Data strategies only grows. Amazon is not the only retailer in the world – evident with the recent IPO of Ali Baba…their initial public offering now ranks as the world's biggest in history at $25 billion, surpassing Amazon and eBay combined in terms of total transaction volume. All retailers are fighting with digital strategies - how to build a more competitive and cool shopping experience or how to invigorate their online customer service and support solutions.

As that happens, even greater data sets are emerging, with a tremendous amount of integration between systems, further fueled by accessibility to data through the continuing surge in APIs. We are omni-everything – omni-present, omni-channel and with Big Data analysis and “closed loop systems” – nearly omniscient.

Connecting marketing automation systems with CRM, creating marketing machines with waves of high quality content, and turning customers into marketing machines for your business through an increasingly “alive” social fabric, means that CMOs and their CIO partners need to think hard and fast about their Big Data strategies. This is great news for companies who excel in the collection, management, analysis and activation of Big Data environments.

The next big thing: real time communications humanizing the marketing machine age

Since the creation of Voice over IP (VoIP), voice has become data. This is most obvious in the contact center space, where “your call may be recorded” and reviewed not only by “supervisors” but by “super systems” which can now analyze the tone of voice, and report automatically on patterns recognized, for example, with a single contact center agent.  These "super systems" can also parse your voice for text key words and save these with the call log or use them to do real time information searches for the online agent.

With new technologies, like WebRTC, which turns browsers into screens that connect the agent and consumer (without the need for a plug-in or phone number), even facial expressions can be analyzed, and contact centers or initial retail experts can be evaluated and trained based on turning that “frown upside down” – converting upset or confused customers into happy customers - in real time.  The meta data from these interactions is then captured for later review and improvement.

As we continue to not only imagine these scenarios, but to then build them and roll them out, let’s keep Big Data in mind. It’s a Bigger Deal now than ever, when we add the “human interactions” not just “machine interactions” to the data we are capturing. When we consider the success of Amazon’s Mayday, and all the companies who are now building similar human-to-human digital innovations, real time all the time will become the norm, putting even more pressure on brands, marketers and retailers to up their game.

Bigger data, bigger deal – let’s talk about it in real time.