Data Journalism:

Using Small Data for Big Impact

10 November 2015
Singapore

SPRENGERS, Bjorn
CMO, PropertyGuru Group

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

Like most Internet companies today, PropertyGuru processes terabytes

of data daily, as users across Southeast Asia use our variety of platforms
to buy and sell homes, or simply just to keep themselves up to date on
the real estate market. Data is collected at every point of interaction it
is inevitable simply to deliver on our promise to help property seekers
to make more confident decisions.
At PropertyGuru, we also believe that one of the key drivers for both
new user acquisition as well as visitor engagement is content marketing,
where rich, useful and proprietary content is used to differentiate
ourselves from our competitors, and provide utility to our consumers.
This white paper serves to illustrate PropertyGuru as a case study
for data journalism, one of our content marketing strategies and an
opportunity under-utilized by many brands. We believe that while it may
be tempting to be drawn by the promises of Big Data, the immediate
opportunity is with Small Data.

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

Content Marketing
Content marketing has become an increasingly popular practice as
audiences become jaded with traditional forms of advertisements, and
advertisement blocking or circumvention services become increasingly
sophisticated. The Content Marketing Institute defines content
marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and
distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and
retain a clearly-defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable
customer action (What is content marketing, n.d.). Using content as a
marketing tool is not a new innovation. Rather, digital media has made
content marketing far more scalable with an almost ceaseless variety of
channels to distribute and amplify.
There are many fundamental reasons for the shift to content. Figure 1
below shows how content consumption has increased over the decades
as channels for content delivery increased. The rise of mass media in
the 1960s denotes the first big wave of content marketing in modern
history. This included communications platforms such as television or
radio that featured brands within narrative content, for instance, through
product placements and branded programs. The internet, and mobile
access has brought about a second renaissance of content, by providing
even more channels to consume content ubiquitously.

Figure 1: Hours per week of content consumption by channels in the United States (Schaefer, 2014).

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

Internet, and particularly social media provides an element of scalability

to content that traditional advertising does not. Good content is
shareable individuals will share engaging, quality content with their
friends or personal networks. Furthermore, with the ability to create
content in the hands of users, content does not need to be created with
big budgets to become viral.
Scalability aside, content marketing is always-on, while traditional
campaigns are fixed to a time period. Digital content can therefore
deliver impact when users are searching for solutions to problems they
encounter. An individual looking for a vacuum cleaner when hers or his
breaks down will come across a video review or a model recommended
in a list of reliable household appliances in their search. This information
is likely to influence their subsequent purchase choice. In contrast, a
television or print ad of a vacuum cleaner is unlikely to have an impact
once the media buy expires and is likely to incur substantial waste as
most of the audience it reaches is not actively in the market for vacuum
cleaners.
This concept relates to the zero moment of truth, or ZMOT. ZMOT is
new decision-making moment that takes place a hundred million times
a day on mobile phones, laptops and wired devices of all kinds. Its a
moment where marketing happens, where information happens, and
where consumers make choices that affect the success and failure of
nearly every brand in the world. (Lecinski, 2011).
Content marketing therefore allows us to present our messages to
consumers when they are seeking it. The key differentiator then, is what
would differentiate a single piece of content from the others in the
plethora available online.

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

At PropertyGuru, we have an internal guideline of what
constitutes good content:
1. Good content needs a point of view or a vision,
created with someone with in-depth knowledge
or passion for the topic.

2. Good content is crafted with a clear target

audience in mind.

3. Good content has utility it needs to have a clear

benefit to the target audience.

4. Good content is ownable the brand is a clear

author, and cannot be easily replicated by
competitors.

5. Good content serves a business objective, such

as branding, acquiring leads, or retaining
customers.
6. Good content needs to have a call to action
which allows the company to extract a benefit,
such as the sharing of the content, or getting the
user to download a mobile app.
7. Good content is shareable, with the most
commonly shared content either data driven and
insightful, or emotionally evocative.

We look at Data journalism as a key strategy to create and

amplify content that people find relevant, love and want to
share.

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

Data Journalism
We like to use the term data journalism to describe our content built
around data. Data journalism draws on the growing availability of data
sets and data analysis tools to uncover and tell stories like the impact
of vaccines on infectious diseases, the continuing problem of school
segregation, or the differences in working hours across industries, often
presenting the results through compelling visualizations or interactive
applications. (Samuel, 2015).
Celebrated data journalist David McCandless, as part of his work,
emphasizes that data journalism is bringing together sizeable bodies of
disconnected facts and making sense of them through data visualization
(The beauty of data visualization, 2010). We prefer journalism, rather
than storytelling, to emphasize the timeliness, relevance and impact
of the content to the reader, and place less emphasis on the narrative
aspects of the content.
Data journalism, in our usage of the concept, hence, is distinctive
from big data. Big data refers to datasets whose size is beyond the
ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage
and analyze (McKinsey Global Institute, 2011, p. 1), often in the
vernacular of zetabytes or brontobytes, rather than the commonly used
denominations for storage, such as terabytes. Big data also suggests
a high velocity of data capture and / or processing, and involves the
combination of unstructured and structured data sets. Big data has
also given rise to a new form of technical specialization, that of the data
scientist.
In practice, we see a large variety of companies process datasets to
provide predictive, actionable value for themselves or their clients.
American retailer Macys, for instance, analyzes over 73 million items for
sale in the space of an hour to optimize item pricing (Davenport, 2014),
while Thomson Reuters financial analysis tool Eikon uses social media
monitoring to track buzz on stock prices and gauge sentiment.

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

Unfortunately, big data has

become a marketing buzzword
of the worst variety, used to
cover such a wide degree of
tools and products that it has
become difficult to pin down. The
term, in and of itself, is valuable.
For instance, at time of writing,
Googles suggested bid for the
term big data was a pricey
SG$15.91 cost-per-click.
The data journalism that we put into practice however, looks at smaller
scale data (or Small Data) to derive insights. It involves the data that is
already at our fingertips which has a tendency to be overlooked when
it comes to content marketing purposes: market information, website
traffic data, customer information and published, public data. We use
these data sources to create content that is engaging, ownable and
allows us to build authority with our key audiences.

Case Study: Real Estate Data Content

PropertyGuru operates in the real estate space. One of the most exciting
perspectives anyone in that space can bring, is a data-driven prediction
of the prices and volumes in the market.
Some months ago, we formulated a hypothesis around using our
data sources, and market outcomes. We ran an experiment to test the
hypothesis, and plotted PropertyGuru enquiry data (as a proxy of market
demand), real estate agents listings (as a proxy of housing supply),
against state published real estate transaction information. We found
that with a time lag of 3 months, the regression model proved highly
significant with an adjusted R2 = 0.72, F(3,20) = 20.72, p < 0.000. In
particular, we found two significant predictors of transactions activities number of enquiries ( = 0.08, p < 0.000) and price ( = -4.82, p <0.001.
Figure 2 below illustrates the best-fit line plot between actual
transactions, and the inquiries we received on PropertyGurus platforms.

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

Figure 2: Best-fit line plot between actual transactions, and inquiries received on PropertyGuru,

with a 3-month time lag.
3.5

2.5

Transcations

1.5
Transactions
Predicted Transactions
Linear (Transactions)

0.5

-1

-0.5

-1

Enquires

5 of 6

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

With the ability to predict real estate transactions, we are able to create
ownable content pieces to forecast real estate market performance
within the next time period. This is different from what real estate
consultancies, who rely on past transaction information and insider
knowledge sources, can provide. This information provides us great
cachet with a consumer audience.
Furthermore, we were able to use these data sources to create
individual, customized monthly reports for another of our key
stakeholder groups real estate agents. For each of the 30,000 agent
subscribers of PropertyGuru in Singapore, we crunch 200,000 data
points per month, sort agents into cohort groups based on their
transactions, property and location specializations, and rank them
within their cohorts. Through this process, we are able to provide a
performance score for agents based on their listings, enquiries and
advertisement views, and serve customized recommendations about
how they can improve their score vis--vis the top performers within
their cohort. These insights are timely, relevant, and eminently useful
to agents, as there are concrete, data-driven actions they can take
to improve their outreach on our platform, and hence, see better
performance subsequently.

Conclusion
While Big Data holds great potential benefits for marketers and business
in general, Small Data offers the most immediate untapped potential.
Data journalism, we believe, is a powerful strategy to create and amplify
more impactful content. Data journalism also allows us to uncover
exciting new insights and stories from an ingredient data that we
already have available. Marketers that adopt this practical perspective
and are also able to work laterally within their own organizations by
connecting the dots with internal stakeholders like their Chief Technical
Officer (CTO) and Product Specialists, will be the winners in the
increasingly cluttered content marketing space.

Get more great content!

Read more examples of how PropertyGurus
content is used to generate conversations, user
engagement, and fulfil our mandate of keeping
the market open and transparent.

Read Now

Data Journalism: Using Small Data for Big Impact

Bibliography

Content Marketing Institute. (n.d.). What is content marketing.

Retrieved October 15, 2015, from Content marketing institute.
Davenport, T. (2014). Big data at work: Dispelling the myths, uncovering the opportunities.

Boston: Havard Business Review Press.
Lecinski, J. (2011). ZMOT: Winning the zero moment of truth. Google.
McCandless, D. (2010, July). The beauty of data visualization.

Retrieved November 12, 2015, from Ted.com:
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization
McKinsey Global Institute. (2011). Big data: The next frontier for

innvoation, competition and productivity. Seoul: McKinsey Global Institute.
Samuel, A. (2015, September 14). Data is the next big thing in content marketing.

Retrieved from Havard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/2015/09/data-is-the-next-big-thing-in-content-marketing
Schaefer, M. W. (2014, January 27). Six arguments against content shock.

Retrieved October 15, 2015, from BusinessesGrow.com:
http://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/01/27/best-content-rise-top/

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