Businesses need to know how to measure the impact of increasing amounts of data being gathered and used to determine what works, what to select and how to apply it. Three areas of concern can be identified concerning the digital world. They are the social impact, mobile application, and data analytics or data analysis. 

The social use of data can be useful or harmful. Newt Gingrich had a campaign to gather more twitter followers and boasted 1.3 million were acquired. However only eight percent could be verified as human. The rest were bots! Meanwhile the MTV Video Music Awards program set a twitter record of 8800 tweets a second and ten million total during the course of the event. Analysis of these determined that Miley Cyrus fans were behind most mentions and retweets which MTV used to promote sales. Bruno Mars also garnered 170 thousand mentions, which were tied to the artist's web page by Warner Music to increase orders for his music.

Mobile applications can also cut both ways. One business launched a campaign that included a coupon, but the downloaded coupon could not be read at business outlets. The resulting backlash damaged the business. Vail Resorts in Colorado was more successful. A million customers there have used a process called Epic Mix, a ticket that contains an RFID chip. The chip records such activities as the number of days and vertical feet skied that are used to create awards. These are auto-posted to cardholder Facebook accounts to impress friends. The data is also applied to trigger mobile device offers, provide slope updates, dispatch weather conditions, offer current pricing, obtain slope usage data, and numbers of local vs. out-of-town users.  The resort saw a 200% increase in ticket sales after applying Epic Mix.

Data analysis in larger businesses is supervised by a Chief Marketing Officer. Tenure of a CMO is often measured in months, not years, but today he or she may become the new CEO as data analytics become the defining feature of most businesses.