Short before Christmas I decided to send a few emails to re-connect with some of my fellow colleagues, acquaintances and clients of the past. I also used that occasion to ask those contacts one particular question for a market research we were conducting in Belgium for a telecom operator. We were having difficulties recruiting respondents for face-to-face interviews and in those cases I use to leverage my network to speed up the recruiting phase of the project. What happened next was a shock for me and led to think about data obsolescence.
Is your network still “alive” ?
I used my Linkedin account to make a selection of people I wanted to reconnect with. Rather than sending a group message through Linkedin (which I find highly inconvenient because replies are sent to the whole group), I picked up the email addresses of my contacts and sent them an individual email.
Short thereafter I got an email back from a woman I didn’t know asking me to stop sending emails to one former colleague I wanted to reconnect with. I sent her a quick reply to apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused and she called me 1 or 2 minutes after. She understood that my email was not yet another mailing sent to thousands of people, and wanted to inform me that my colleagues had passed away.
This reminded me of yet another friend who died in 2014 and whose Facebook is still use my friends to post short notes and memories. In other words the Facebook wall turned into a memorial.
Removing dead connections
This all prompted me to think about the obsolescence of data. By and large 1% of the population dies each and every year. For some companies, the danger of data obsolescence are real and need to be addressed. In the case of Linkedin the procedure to remove the dead connection is not obvious and should be initiated by a family member or a fellow colleague for instance. In other words, the decision to remove a connection is human-triggered which I find reassuring on one side, but dangerous on the other side. What will happen if no triggers the removal process ? You’ll end up with unreliable records in your database.
Do you have a strategy for dead records
If you use your database for Big Data purposes, you need to ask yourself how (not whether) your data will become obsolete. Some of you may just want to drop the records after a certain period of inactivity, or prompt a user-triggered response to verify the person is still active. In any case data obsolescence should be identified as a risk when carrying out your Big Data project and this risk should be addressed.
Posted in big data, Marketing.
