People often ask what they should do with a stack of data that they want to mine for insights. (think primary observations or secondary online research)
Having just read John Kolko's book, Exposing the Magic of Design, I thought I would share one tried and true methid. Let's talk Clustering. I took his ~7 step approach and sketched out a "how to" reference to help you out in your next endeavor to sort through the noise and find insights.
In a nutshell, clustering is a great method to organize and make sense of a lot of observations / insights / single pieces of data. Data becomes information. Information becomes knowledge. What I really like about his method of clustering, is that he encourages clusters of 8x or more to be broken into smaller clusters. I also like the fact that there is a distinct, "record and normalize" step, so that all of the great learnings from the clustering session can be shared...something that is often overlooked.