If you’ve ever targeted an email marketing campaign to a specific demographic, assigned a category to your blog post, or chosen a hashtag for your social post, you’ve used data classification. Classification is basically the process of chunking up or organizing your data, into different groups or under different labels, so that you can quickly isolate and bring together all of the things that belong to that group, so that you can do something with that group:
- monitor it as part of a metric,
- investigate it and compare it to other groups,
- work with it, like with targeted marketing campaigns, or
- plan with it.
In this post, I’ll discuss the problems that arise from unclassified or improperly classified data, and give some pointers on how to create and apply your own classifications.