eMetrics is coming Toronto next week. There’s still time to register, and I have a discount code if you want to attend. Tweet me at @cjpberry and I’ll shoot it on over. This will be my third eMetrics in three years, and as such, I’ll offer a few predictions. The panel I’m moderating on Wednesday will go off swimmingly. There will be some controversy as the panelists tussle over what’s really important in the qual/quant mix. There will be enough sparks to ignite some lively debate that evening. The whole Syncapse Measurement Science team will be there in force that night and on Thursday. They’re going to see just how other people present their material and they’ll have quite a[…]
Month: March 2010
Social media data. Huge amount of volume. Huge amount of complexity and simplicity in structure. Time for a radical metaphor. It’s like the night sky. With the naked eye, you can see thousands individual dots of light. And, humans being human, if you look long and hard enough, you’ll see patterns and start associating events with those patterns. See below. I offer some evidence to back up that claim. Of course, those relationships are one possible interpretation. (And fine. I accept where they’re coming from). If I used something significantly more powerful, like the Hubble, and trained it at a fairly dark part of the sky – (and they did) – you’d see this: Right there – next to the[…]
Pat LaPointe wrote a pretty interesting article for MediaPost Publications. You can check it out here. My response is pretty much ‘Yes, And…’ I don’t understand why some people are making inductive inferences that online word of mouth is somehow reflective of offline word of mouth. (As a certain company appears to be making). I share his concern and skepticism. Let me unpack that. A whole generation of quantitative market researchers are supposed to understand that if you take a small, random sample of a population and expose them to a treatment, then you can make an inductive inference on how the entire population will react to that same treatment. The probability that the inductive inference is accurate is a[…]
Consider the impact of the mechanical clock and the curved lens on early analytics. The mechanical clock enabled consistent, scale, time. You won’t optimize what you won’t measure. And Europeans most certainly started optimizing time. They’ve been optimizing work per time unit, productivity, since the renaissance. Countries that didn’t have a method of measuring productivity simply didn’t optimize it. Worse, cultures that didn’t value the standardization of time simply didn’t value productivity. Why care about productivity when you have loads of population to toss at a project? It put whole swaths of the globe at a competitive disadvantage. The curved lens, aside from giving us astronomy and microbiology, enabled great strides in miniaturization and productivity. A skilled worker could work[…]
The Syncapse Measurement Science team put together an experiment on sentiment analysis, as applied to social media measurement. As promised: Link to the White Paper: syncapse-sentiment-analysis Link to the Data Set: The Geurilla Analytics Project _ Sentiment The paper will speak for itself. We can discuss it here and on Twitter.
“Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.”Source: The Economist, Feb 25, 2010 Yes, Hal. Yes. Statisticians are certainly a sexy lot. I coined the rather curious term stratistician – a cross between a strategist and a statistician, over a lunch with Mark Dykeman on Friday. A lol ensued. Then[…]
The Quest for Simplicity in Social Media Measurement (#smm) is one that will dominate the year. Trying to produce something simple out of something complex is…complex. There are seven axioms that are guiding a lot of my thought in dealing with that complexity: 1. The purpose of analytics is to derive competitive advantage for the organization / firm / entity. It follows that the purpose of Social Media Measurement is to drive competitive advantage. If the end result isn’t competitive advantage – then it has no value. That unto itself is a value statement. Simplicity drives competitive advantage because simple is more actionable than complex. I’m often asked questions that have very complex comprehensive answers. I have to sort out[…]