I grabbed this data from the Toronto Open data site. I loaded it into Google Refine. I used SPSS to understand just what was going on. I’ve stripped this post of political editorial, so if you’re here for that, this post will dissapoint. The story: Always read the data dictionary and description. In this instance, I have a file containing a sample of a sample of all the service calls to 311. Toronto has a single call center routing system called 311. It’s pretty efficient, in that it’s a single department, and that any citizen can dial and report something, and get routed through to the right place. It’s an example of very good policy learning. The disclaimer is that[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
Duane Brown‘s launch of Eat:Strategy was a success. Speakers included Brian Cugelman, Jon Lax, and Cheesan Chew among many others. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that marketing strategists and design thinkers got into the same room and talked to each other. Duane’s format was effective. Speakers got 20 minutes to present, had to really stay within the time limit, with QA happening one on one during the breaks and over lunch. It’s a great format and Duane really pulled of a great venue and a great launch. A massive thank you and recognition to him for his leadership. Memorable takeaways included Brian Cugelman’s communication framework, which is a unification and reinforcement of scattered communications literature. It’s excellent,[…]
Nearly 3/4 of the respondents to the WAA Outlook Survey cited ‘making the data actionable’ a top concern and priority. Just under 1/3 of respondents reported using web analytics as an input into budget and planning. Great. So what are we going to do about it? To make something actionable, you have to understand what people are trying to action. And there’s huge industry variance. KPI identification is at the core of what web analytics consultants and leaders do. So, that’s all known, and not a research question. We know it. And sometimes, the website just isn’t that core to how a firm makes money. It could be. And relevance can be found through compelling business cases. That’s all known[…]
Amanda Wood and I will be presenting/paneling findings from the WAA Industry Outlook Study 2011 this coming Wednesday. Members of the WAA are welcome to dial in for it at noon. Quite a few surprises and a few trends on what’s happening out there. A few shifting priorities which are important to note. It’s good timing for this webcast too, as many of us start to refocus for September and the usual Q3/Q4 madness.
The previous post in this space questioned if open data would make for better public policy. There are causes for optimism. Further to that, the City of Toronto just launched its wellbeing map, based on that open data. You can find it here. Explore.
What do you think causes branding? I’ve been asking myself that, part of my series on being skeptical of root assumptions and theories, and took the opportunity to work through something in a foreign land. I spent some time in real Mexico, and couldn’t resist a first exposure. I went to a ‘Mega’, without really knowing what it was, and took in an in-store experience. The brand was unknown to me pre-exposure. A rare opportunity. So I walked in, and the first thing I notice? Banners hung throughout the store told me that everybody wanted to be Julio Regalado. I have no experience with the brand or the frontman. But everywhere, literally down every isle, there he was, with that[…]
There’s a pretty big movement afoot in Canada. It’s called the open data movement and several levels of government are getting on board. It’s the movement for governments to make large datasets freely available to the public. It’s pretty rough going right now. I’m reading reports that the sets frequently lack a data dictionary and suffer from some pretty bad accessibility issues. The early efforts are to be commended. I’ve spoken to several government statisticians who are both excited and frustrated by what they’re able to share with the public, and where they’re totally blocked. They’re bullish on this movement. These pains in the public sector mirror those in the private sector. Will open data cause better public policy, and[…]
Jim Novo is right about the relevance of financial data to marketers. There’s a wealth of information in those transactional records, and most companies don’t have analytics practitioners embedded within those departments. Just as reporting (reportage) isn’t analytics, accounting isn’t analytics. There’s something to be said about the parallels between finance and analytics. Both have prediction, definitions, jargon, simulation, machine learning, ratios, rules, laws, and statistics. Both become confused with bookkeeping and dashboarding. One is older than the other. If accounting/finance is an 110 year old, marketing analytics is 18. There are very specific rules in bookkeeping, handed down for centuries. There are very specific standards in finance, handed down since at least the Renaissance. Should we be so lucky[…]
Some excellent work by Jerod Santo and his Hacker News Trend visualizer. Pretty sweet. Hacker News is a nice, social curation program. It’s a pretty good indicator of what data developers and hackers are thinking and doing in many markets. It’s one of the main bellwethers of the bootstrap community, and there’s typically a lot of content that I find interesting. All trend lines that follow are adjusted for size of community at the time. The first chart, below, describes the persistence of analytics and the rise of specific, applied uses – the a/b test. It also shows that the term ‘data science’, as a category of interest, had a bit of a bubble in late 2009. That’s great, but[…]
Analytics at the marketing / technology interface. What a jam. On the one side, there are massive time constraints on developers who struggle with super tight deadlines and last minute tweakings. On the other side, you have marketers who are buffeted by super tight deadlines, little time to plan, and tend to follow an anchor-and-adjust mentality. (Don’t we all?). Much of the frustration within analytics derives from watching both sides of the equation, and actively attempting to collaborate between two groups. I can sum up the fight between the two as: Marketer: “You go too slow!”IT: “You tell us about a project at the last minute!”Marketer: “You’re too slow!!!”IT: “You don’t know how to make choices!”Marketer: “You’re too slow!!!”Analytics: “Guys,[…]