“The End of Facebook” trumpeted the headline. 46 points in 46 minutes on Hacker News. “Facebook Screws Social Media Marketers!” trumpets Business Insider. “Facebook is losing teens” states Global Web Index. Here we go with the bandwagon. Hop on! Only that this time isn’t going to be quite like the last time(s). Teens have fled to their smartphones They’re computers they can control. They’re computers that aren’t tied to the family room, where parents can seen them. Small screens offer a degree of privacy and intimacy that larger screens, even the tablet, just can’t replicate. Facebook saw that a long time ago and snapped up a few cool startups. Ditto Twitter. Ditto Google. And the rest of us are behind[…]
Month: December 2013
A strategy is a set of choices that, when combined, cause a sustainable competitive advantage. Conscious, reinforcing, choices, are powerful. That’s what you learned in B-school. I’m far more pessimistic that strategic choices are generally conscious. I’ll explain. A set of deliberate choices, that constitute a strategy, might be: Because we chose the same aircraft we save money on maintenance. Because we chose the same aircraft we save money on ticketing. Because we chose the same aircraft we compete exceptionally well on specific flight pairs. Because we chose a large set of direct point-to-point flights without going through hubs, we save money on baggage transfer. Because we simplify baggage, we can turn planes around more reliably. Because we turn planes around[…]
Speaking at a data conference is hard. Programming data conferences is hard. It’s damn hard. It’s hard to predict who’ll show up in your audience. It’s hard to predict if what you’ve planned to say will align with your audience. It’s even harder to predict if who you’ve chosen to talk will align to who is likely to show up. Image below most certainly related. I’ve had incredibly patient mentors when it comes to this. And I’m still optimizing. And I still find it tough. Heuristics for speakers: Shilling doesn’t work You never close a sale during a presentation. Worse, you turn leads off. Putting your ad first puts the audience last. If it’s about causing awareness of your product[…]
It’s the results, genius! It’s the results. The purpose of any sort of data analytics or data science is to get results. It isn’t about the spreadsheet that comes three weeks after the campaign. It isn’t about sandbagging numbers. It isn’t the few slides in the Quarterly Business Review. It isn’t even data entertainment. It’s the results. Great! So what’s the deal? Why is so much time expended on activities that don’t directly tie to getting results? Analytics Maturity It’s because of maturity, or the sum of experiences that an organization/culture chooses to remember. Very good models of analytics maturity exist. Stephane Hamel has a great one. Stances inform tools and tools cause experiences. Where you stand affects which, if[…]