Good Quality Information

Business of all types run on good quality information.  Information can be true, false, or subjective and sometimes you can actually prove when factual information is true or false, but often times you are looking for information that is true without being able to determine, for sure, whether it is true or false.  All you can do is make a judgement call about the quality of the information based on it's source, how it was derived, and whether the assumptions it was based on are valid.  People, including scholars, disagree about the validity of certain data.  Often Republicans and Democrats disagree about the meaning of data.  CNN often has a more liberal interpretation of data than Fox News.  So data, and the meaning of data, is often subject to the interpretation of the interpretor.  Subjective information is just that, an interpretation of factual data.

When we go out and look for information, we are looking for the factual data and not the subjective interpretation of the data, because when we collect enough factual data it paints a picture of reality for us.  Our reality may be somewhat subjective in nature based upon what factual information goes into it, but we can test our realities by creating our own study.  My favorite study is a real life analysis of customer behaviors or a real life analysis of other data, based upon data collected within a computer system.  For instance, a website analysis tool can show where visitors to your website go, how often they are on your order page, what percentage order, how often they visit, and what searches placed them on your website.  This is useful so that a website can be modified to fit the visitor, the visitor can be collected differently to get the right kind of visitor, or the website routing can be changed to make it more useful to the visitor.

Information Technology (computer system) information can also tell many things about your customers buying habits, can help you order the right products at the right time, and can help you improve your operational efficiency.

Please review the following resources for more information about good information:

• Information Quality - Meeting Customer Needs
• The Importance Of Customer Data Quality
• Customer Data Quality: A Sales And Marketing Leadership Issue
• Amazon.com: Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management

Google Is My Friend

Rather than telling you specifically where to go or what specifically to do, I have been telling you to use Google to find things or look up information. I do this because that is what I do. Whenever I have a question of any kind that some person may know, I do a search. You can use Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo, or any number of other search engines, type in your question, and up comes a list of possible answers. Some will be better than others but you look through them and hopefully get the answer you need. Learning to search and research to find the answers you need will be important as you grow and build your business.

Need a tax question answered? Search the question. Need to incorporate? Find somebody who will help you. Want to understand business concepts? Search the concept. Search is not perfect but it can be a great start.

You do need to understand that some information is better than others. Sometimes turning to a professional for help will be in order. But a search may give you basic information to know whether you need more help or not.

When you are building and promoting a web site, search can help you determine what is possible and how you can accomplish it. Do you want a feed on your blog site? There is a way to do it and information abounds for how to. Make sure to look at multiple sources though because some people will want to charge you for what you can get for free elsewhere.

I could do all the research for you and list specifically where to go and what to do, but most of that information does exist on the internet and there will be questions I don't answer for you. So do what I do and Google it.