Early yesterday morning I received an email from the campaign reminding me that it wasn’t over yet and there was still time to send that viral video to friends.  They were encouraging me to send to ten friends and they would send it to ten friends…You get the idea.

We all know that identifying a target market is imperative to any marketer.  That is frequently followed by the slow, painful process of compiling a list of likely targets or a “prospect universe”.  Whether you build it yourself or buy it from a third party, it is often difficult to capture more than 75% of a population.  Each new data source shows diminishing returns so you need to think creatively about how to source new names.  Inbound and outbound marketing helps but the acquisition costs can be prohibitive.

This viral Obama video was impressive.  I didn’t hesitate to forward it on and unwittingly gave them my name for a future appeal (OK, I should have read the privacy policy more carefully).  Getting people to share their name and interests in exchange for information or entertainment is a proven acquisition technique and we just witnessed a group that mastered this art.

Can you suggest any other creative examples of ways to economically build a prospect database?

In this wired world, we’re swimming in data – log files, CRM, registration forms, hits, clicks, sessions, the works – but not enough decision makers have the desire or the tools to turn those data (yes, they’re plural) into actionalbe information. They see number crunching as easy as miss out on the most important part, the experimental design. A recent article in Newsweek about Super Crunchers contains an instructive example.

Ayres chose the title of his book by running two Google ads that appeared in random order when someone searched for phrases like “data mining.” The decision was made by the plurality who clicked on the ad for “Super Crunchers” rather than the competing title, “The End of Intuition.”

People looking for an easy way out will see this as justification to test everything with anonymous masses, let majority rule and never speak with another individual human again. But they will find themselves in a poultry-ovum priority quandry – how do you choose which candidate names to test without first testing those names? And it gets worse – how do you know if Google adwords is really polling the right people, in this case potential buyers of your book? Is the result with 500 hits really better than the one with 450 hits?

You can take the intuition out of evaluating an experiment – and I think you should – but you can’t take the essential creativity out of designing a good experiment in the first place.

Remember, friends don’t let friends crunch numbers blind.