The good folks at Bing Canada were kind enough to invite me to their Bing.ca launch last week. They’re good people over there. Very friendly and genuinely warm. It’s taken me a week to really formulate coherent thoughts that I could write here. From a search perspective, Bing has very good percentage margins. Of course, I don’t bank percentages, I bank dollars – and therein lies the problem for Bing: getting the volumes while maintaining the clickthrough and conversion rates. In the end, of course, search engines dominate through relevancy, and it’s through relevancy that Bing will win volume. It was observed at our table of quantitative search folks that Bing was more consumer oriented. It wasn’t necessarily designed for[…]

You read that right. The intersection of text analytics, social analytics, and neuroanalytics is incredibly interesting and useful. It’s an old meme, and you read about it’s origin here. “Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to look more like?” is a 4Chan-ism. I suspect that it was written by a linguist. Awesome troll is awesome. It can be roughly translated to: “Has anyone really decided as to even go that far in wanting to do to look more like so?” Subject – Anyone Verb – decided (modified by “really” adverb) Direct object to “decided” – “that” (pronoun modified by “far”) Noun clause that clarifies “that” – “wanting to do” (gerund phrase) Do what?[…]

Jim Novo has really stirred up the hornet’s nest now. His post on “Analyze, Not Justify“, is a great read. Down in the comments Jim links to another post “Fear of Analytics“. It’s another good read. It all goes to the culture of analytics. There are people who are fail tolerant and people who are fail avoiding. I don’t see how people can survive without a healthy balance of failure and success. Repeated success is required for confidence building and repeated failure is required for learning. Like everything, there’s a downside too. Repeated success can lead to arrogance. Repeated failure doesn’t guarantee that somebody will learn, either. The fail avoiding behavior, if it persists too long, results in stagnation and,[…]

Recently I wrote a review on Website Morphing for the Web Analytics Associations’ Research Committee. You can go ahead and take a look at it if you want. I’ll wait. Website Morphing represents a coherent method for automating incremental optimization. It’s not perfect. Morphing will require a heavy amount of human creative and analytical inputs. It’s the social technology that’s one of the big problems with Morphing, not the physical technology under the engine. People with diverse skill sets often have a hard time working together. It’s hard to communicate complex concepts with people who don’t share your vocabulary. Sometimes it’s like being an English Speaker in Germany, an increase in volume doesn’t equal an increase in comprehension. Those skills[…]

I’m presenting “Practical Social Analytics” at NetChange (Twitter search: #netchange ) tomorrow. The challenge of the session will be for charities to figure out how to practically measure the effectiveness of their social objectives, using social media. It’s going to be a great. I’m looking forward to meeting people who are new to me (just because I haven’t met them yet doesn’t make them ‘new’), and hopefully – preferably, building some bridges. There’s some trolling going on. I have been spending a disproportionate amount of time figuring out social media measurement over the past quarter – and an even more amount of time over the past three years on goal alignment strategies: so I come with a point a view[…]

First and foremost: Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? is the continuation of an ongoing push to bypass all the pain and suffering ahead of us on the social analytics front and move straight onto the good stuff. I want to avoid a lost decade scenario, and just bypass the trough in the Gartner Hype Cycle. It’s a lot to ask for, I know, but please – could we just make the decision this time to jump to the good stuff? It’s worth a read and it lays out a very specific challenge. Next is this theme of the “Power of Weak Ties”. There’s an early paper (1954 I think) on Word of Mouth marketing which proves a strong tie between two individuals[…]