Marketing Data Care and Nurturing – A Lesson from Amazon

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the dominant cloud computing provider in the world. They host hundreds of thousands of other websites and apps via a cloud infrastructure, enabling those sites and apps to use precisely resources they need but nothing more. Very efficient, very smart. They are cloud computing gods. They are data experts. And yet, last week they allowed a simple typo to break the Internet (or at least part of it), causing an Internet “brown-out” that lasted several hours. Not good data care.

How did this happen? Simply put: one of their internal users was typing in an extra digit or two while fixing a billing issue – thereby taking offline a very large number of servers instead of just a few. Ooops.

Needless to say, Amazon is putting data care controls in place – and right quickly at that(!) – to avoid this in the future. For a top service provider like AWS, they will no doubt learn their lesson very quickly and take pains to avoid it in the future.

This example shows how dependent we all are on data. Even in the more down-to-earth realm of your marketing campaigns, think how much each single piece of data matters. Let alone as an aggregated whole.

Pay attention to the little data details: conversions, costs, counts, bounces, web visits, unit sales . . . .If you make a mistake, it’s unlikely your mistake will receive any press (which is probably a good thing). But certainly some customer, partner, stakeholder or internal employee will suffer because of that mistake. So care for your data. Feed it. Nurture it. Treat it with the importance it deserves.

While your customer data, POS data, and product data is nowhere nearly as important as your customers (or partners or stakeholders or employees) – your data care and nurturing habits have a direct effect on all of them, every day.