In marketing, everybody talks about telling stories. Stories about audiences. Stories about ad concepts. Stories about brands … and about consumers who use them.

Analysts also see stories in data. Looking through lines of data or snippets of code, you can see the threads weaving themselves together to give you a clear understanding of what’s happening; you see offshoots that lead to questions about different segments or correlation/cause and effect. But if you were to show…

Recently, I rediscovered a TED Talk by David McCandless, a data journalist, called “The beauty of data visualization.” It’s a great reminder of how charts (though scary to many) can help you tell an actionable story about a topic in a way that bullet points alone usually cannot. If you have not seen the talk, I recommend you take a look for some inspiration about visualizing big…

Social listening has a nasty habit of being completely soft—all about the words without the context of volume and velocity of conversation—or completely quantitative with little information about what’s actually being said. Unfortunately, this leads to conclusions that don’t help you make better strategic decisions. Whichever way your listening leans, you can’t get a clear picture of a situation or your brand online without both the qualitative and the quantitative.

If…