Data as marketing
Via Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data blog, I came across this fascinating visualisation of Netflix data, published in the New York Times. It shows the top 50 most rented Netflix movies, zip code by zip code for several US cities.
It’s very nicely done and it’s very engaging. It made me think of Scott Brinker’s ideas on data web marketing:
“Data web marketing is about growing customer relationships, increasing the visibility of your firm, and building brand equity through the production and delivery of data.”
By giving their data to the New York Times (and maybe helping with creating the visualisation, I don’t know what the deal was), Netflix have created a huge amount of attention for their company and their brand: not only lots of NYT readers playing with the maps, but lots of blog posts like Nathan’s, Stephen Baker’s and this one talking about it. I think Scott is right that data web marketing is soon going to be a big deal.
Hi, I'm Bill Roberts. This blog is about how and why you should publish data on the web, in a way that lets machines read it as well as people. So I'm going to be talking a lot about the semantic web and linked data.
