The ability for companies to quickly gather massive amounts of data about consumers has truly exploded over the last few years. Imagine a buffet that suddenly expanded its offerings 100 times over!

But can a company ever have TOO MUCH information? The answer to that question is a resounding, “It depends.”

It depends on how a company uses, shares, and designs strategy around the data it collects. Again, back to the buffet analogy. There is only so much food you can fit on your plate at one time. How can you identify exactly what you want (and need) if you just start grabbing everything that looks good? Your plate would be overflowing before you even got to the hot bar! (This is the Whole Foods dilemma – so much good food to choose from, not enough space in the box!)

Many of you have heard of The Marketing Dashboard. Here are two insightful articles about how companies develop and use this vital piece of technology.

PURSWAY UNVEILS PATENTED PURCHASE INFLUENCE TECHNOLOGY

HOW ALEX AND ANI IS PIONEERING THE FUTURE OF RETAIL

This powerful tool is, at its most useful, a daily (or even minute by minute) snapshot of the most important analytical measures to influence your company’s decision-making. But with so much information coming in, how do you, as Nate Silver says, “Find the signal in the noise?”

GOALS. It is now all the more important that a company continually revisits, refines, and specifies its goals. When a business knows what it is attempting to do, what its value proposition is, what customers it needs to target, and what channels it needs to utilize to communicate its message, the pieces of data necessary to accomplish these measures become clear.

So let’s ask ourselves first – what do we really want to eat?