Jim Novo wrote a Web Analytics Association Review on Firm Created Word Of Mouth. I strongly recommend the read. Although the paper was published in the most recent edition of Marketing Science, it was based on findings that span four decades. The first finding reaffirms the ‘strength of weak links’ hypothesis. Let me explain: Like people tend to clump, alike. Among my friends, more than half own iPhones with occupations centering on technology and the Internet and most have roles that are heavily steeped in data. Three quarters would be classified by Forrester as being Tech Optimists and Creators. A majority live in the inner city. Not everybody in my circle are uniformly this way: I used the word ‘more[…]
Month: September 2009
It’s been a busy week in the world of social media measurement, or social analytics, as I like to call it. Anna O’Brien, Marketing Science analyst extraordinaire, wrote a very good post on the topic. Her primary point, enough with the phony people, is polarizing and necessary. The secondary point: social monitoring is not social measuring is also apt and important. My interests like in the measurement side: content analytics and metric analytics. There’s a lot of utility there. A few months ago Joseph Carrabis did a very interesting sentiment analysis on Zappos’ twitter stream. “Tone optimization” will no doubt end up being a major offering sooner rather than later. Let me explain. Optimizing a web campaign can be very[…]
I had the good enough fortune to talk with Stephane Hamel, a director of the Web Analytics Association, and Andrea Hadley of eMetrics last Friday while at IMC in Vancouver. As usual with any conference – the really interesting conversations happen in the lobby during the day. Andrea, being the super-networker she is, got me into talking with Stephane about the Research Committee, and fast tracking was to be had. We also talked about the diverse audiences involved in any industry, and how to try to serve each group really well at a conference. There are experts, newcommers, and vendors/consultants. Vendors want to sell, newcommers want to learn, and experts want to talk to each other and recruit talent. eMetrics[…]
My initial feedback: YO #OMNITURE I NO U JUST MERGED AND ALL N IMMA LET U FINISH BUT SPSS’S MERGER WAS THE BEST ONE THIS YEAR – Kanye West So what does Adobe really get for its 1.8 billion? A company in the top 5 of web analytics tools providers for one. A great client base for sure. But there’s a black lining to that white cloud. Even with a client list that most analytics companies dream about – Omniture is hemorrhaging money. Even with strong revenue growth, it hasn’t been able to make marginal profit on that growth. It should just confirm what all honest practitioners admit at a Web Analytics Wednesday: the software is frakencode that’s a time[…]
I’ll confess that one of my favourite lolcats is Skeptical Cat is Fraught with Skepticism. Look deep into that expression. The cat really does look skeptical, doesn’t he? He’s not believing a single word you’re thinking right now. There’s also something about that orange background that makes the expression and the entire image that much funnier. I don’t know what it is about it. But I’m aware of the effect. I think anthropologists have a term for the tendency of humans to superimpose human emotions onto animals – which there is no evidence that an animal actually feels. I can’t remember the term, but it’s funny as hell that we all do it. The reason I bring this is all[…]
I had a great conversation with a producer of Canadian film and television. Over the course of our discussion, which focused on the lack of money for the Canadian Film and Television Industry, I came to realize that there was a fundamental problem in monetization and a pretty hefty gap in motivators. Success for a director or an artist is if a large audience sees their art and appreciates it. They don’t want commercialism to get in the way of their art – for instance – the mere notion that perhaps the protagonist could be drinking a Diet Doctor Pepper causes the blood to boil. Naturally, history is littered with studio and network executives actively messing with the creative arc[…]
At the Marketing Science Conference earlier in the summer, Shaina and I took in the Neuromarketing session. The session was very good, with 3 really great presenters out of the 4. I learned several important reasons why people make the choices they do. For instance, I saw it empirically proven that self-control is like a muscle: you can hold a certain pose for so long, and then that muscle gets fatiqued and weak. Then you can’t hold it for any longer and you break that pose. It’s a very attractive causal variable for periodic consumption and lapses in self-control. Prospection – the ability to think of the future – when combined with anchor-and-adjust tendencies, cause discount-rate curves to deviate from[…]
David Hamel wrote: The issue behind it all is that the web isn’t static, it is constently changing. Ever heard of AOL? Of course you have. Know anyone still using it? Probably not. What about MySpace? Also there is the inevitable the march of time. Your persona for Bob has his age at 52. In five years time, will Bob still be useful? Probably the difference between 52 and 57 isn’t that large. But what if your target demographic is 22? There is a much larger difference between the interestes of a 22 year old and a 27 year old…In conclusion, use personas but don’t let them get stagnate, your personas represent people and people change. Hamel rightly points[…]