Ilia Krastev, CEO at A Data Pro, presented the importance of information in the digital economy during the Digitalk Conference 2022. Ilia talked about how businesses can effectively use information in the digital age, and what does information mean for the digital economy.
The world is changing at a rapid pace, and most of the time such change revolves around technological developments and information. We live in a decade more abundant in information than any other. This begs the question – how do we use that information for our benefit?
What is the digital economy?
The digital economy is a broad term to describe the economic processes and transactions based on digital technology. It is important to differentiate between the internet economy and the digital economy, as the former is based on internet connectivity.
The internet, big data, cloud computing, and many other digital technologies can collect, store and analyze information. New digital technology drives innovation on every level and fuels economic growth. Even though we might not realize this, the digital economy affects all aspects of society and our everyday life.
How do information and the digital economy connect?
Information is the backbone of the digital economy, so anyone who wants to be a part of the modern digital economy needs to understand how to utilize information effectively. Here we have to make a clear differentiation between data and information. By information, we mean any knowledge derived from reading, observation, or instruction. While information is a group of data that carries meaning, data itself is the individual unit and does not carry any specific meaning.
Understanding the digital economy is still a challenge. It is a complex system revolving around not only big data or the creation of a website, but the utilization of information to create better opportunities for innovation and business.
Democratization of media and dramatic increase of data and information published daily
Information is more accessible to us than ever before. Today, millions of articles are published every day, compared to around 250,000 some 22 years ago. Such a volume of information is challenging for anyone who wants to be a working part of the digital economy. To make use of the information companies receive each day, they have to make sure to extract it as soon as possible. This means that in the modern digital economy, it is not about the cost of information, but how fast you can get it.
How does information impact the digital economy?
Information is the key component of the digital economy, the power that drives innovation. As mentioned above, we deal with large amounts of data and new information (in the form of both online and offline content) every day. Therefore, facilitating the relevant information to our goals is what determines success in the digital world. The question is – how do we get all of that information?
A short answer would be “by using monitoring services, which allow us to extract and analyze the information we need for our goals”. With such a quick flow of information, we can even argue that only businesses engaging with information processing and analysis are a real part of the digital economy.
How is the information used in the digital economy?
Businesses can use monitoring services to make the best out of the information they receive in media and other sources. Interestingly, some studies suggest that 79% of enterprise executives think that companies that do not leverage big data effectively, will lose their competitive position and ultimately face extinction. The most common things businesses want to monitor include reputation, regulations & sanctions, market trends, and target audience.
Reputation
Reputation is one of the most important factors when making business purchase decisions. Monitoring reputation is all about building trust between the client and the business/organization they want to look into. Having a positive reputation is important to all brands across the world because reputation can easily influence the decision. Most people, for example, take into consideration the reputation of the brands they choose to buy from. Thus, proper insight into a company or a person’s reputation can help businesses make smarter purchase decisions. Reputation analysis can include various types of research such as background checks, research into any negative media coverage, or even negative comments on social media.
Learn more in our Reputation Management e-book.
Regulations and sanctions
Having adequate information about the current state of any business clients want to be involved with, is the first step towards a smart business decision. In such cases, media monitoring services conduct Risk & Compliance research into any regulations or sanctions against an organization or even a government body. Insight into the sanctions list can provide a lot of important information into preventing financial fraud. It is also one of the few ways businesses can protect themselves from fraud or irregular payments.
Learn how we our R&C services can assist in such checks.
Market Trends
Any business that wants to stay relevant in the digital economy should be interested in current market trends. Media monitoring services use social listening techniques to explore customer opinions and attitudes towards brands and products. Listening to what the consumer says is one of the best ways to understand where the market is headed. It is also a useful way to improve the relationship between consumers and businesses.
Gain more insights through our Media Intelligence services.
Target Audience
Before developing any kind of marketing strategy, a business should understand the audience they interact best with. That way, products, and services will be aligned with what the customer wants. Also, your marketing efforts will be used for their specific target, rather than focusing on a wide group of people, who do not have an interest in your product/service.
Gain more insights through our Media Intelligence services.
Levels of Data Discovery
The first and most important thing to do before extracting knowledge from the information is getting the information itself. Information is abundant, but getting proper knowledge from it can be ensured by following certain steps.
How to use and extract information?
While data is public a lot of the time, there are still limitations to what companies can use when monitoring for information. There are intellectual property rights that determine ownership rights of data, as well as trade secret laws. That is why a lot of businesses put huge efforts into protecting their information and confidentiality.
For this reason, media monitoring services work with publicly available information from official websites, government websites, online media, or social media.
Preparing information
Another step before extracting knowledge from information is data cleaning and preparing. The raw data we extract initially is difficult to analyze. That’s why we take measures to clean it and prepare it for further analysis. Cleaning data makes a dataset more dependable and accurate, allowing for a more complete analysis.
Knowledge extraction
The most important question of the day is – how do we extract knowledge from all of the information we have?
The answer to this is that we use several technologies. Named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and natural language generation are some of the technologies that help media monitoring companies automate the process of extracting knowledge. Most of these technologies are based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which helps improve the knowledge extraction process by up to 70%.
- NER – Named Entity Recognition recognizes and categorizes the most important information in the text;
- Sentiment Analysis is a natural language processing technique that helps us determine whether a text is positive, negative, or neutral;
- Natural Language Generation is the process of producing language from data, using AI.
Making decisions based on the information
After extracting knowledge from all of the gathered data, data analysts can evaluate, analyze, and get insights from it. To get the most out of the data, business analysts will use data visualization techniques such as charts, maps, or scatter plots. All of these processes make it easier for businesses to make effective decisions.
Furthermore, proper data analysis helps determine the level of accuracy in information. In an age where we deal with fake news every day, it is more important than ever to monitor media and determine what is true or not.
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