Why communicators need to get friendly with data!

‘Data’ was the buzzword of the moment a few years ago. Everyone was talking about ‘big data’ … or just data in general! But as the pandemic reared it’s ugly head and trends moved on (as they do), data was replaced by other buzzwords and trends.

The most recent trend, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping to bring the importance of data back to life! But it’s not just AI that makes data so important for communicators - there’s other reasons we should be delving into the statistics.

Want to be considered a ‘strategic communicator’? Get data.

If you want to be more than just a tactical communicator, then you absolutely need to draw on data and use those numbers, not only to be heard by senior leadership, but be considered a strategic advisor, and to enable you to prioritise your work.

As communicators, we often have access to loads of different data sets - from insights from internal and external surveys, to stats from our digital and social channels, through to reports on reputation and trust undertaken by world-wide agencies.

All of that information provides us with insights we can use to help sway decision making within our teams, and with senior leaders.

Be a trend-spotter, and maybe a trend-setter!

Having access to this data also gives us a unique opportunity to spot trends early, and act on them. If we’re keeping across the data, we can see what’s working, what’s not, and what people are interested in.

The trend-spotting keeps us evolving as professionals, being creative and innovative, and advocate for our profession.

Data and AI go hand-in-hand

AI is great at spotting patterns, so we can use it to help trawl through data quickly and give us insights in minutes that could have taken us hours or days.

But … garbage in equals garbage out! So if we’re inputting crap information or data or asking non-specific questions about the data, then we’ll get poor results from AI. Applying a layer of common sense won’t go astray either!

Want to know more about the latest comms trends?

Check out episode 18 of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast, for three big global comms trends you need to know!