The next WAW Toronto will be on July 28. It’s being held on the second floor of Bar Wellington. It’s free to attend and You can sign up to attend here. The invite: “Developers make it possible to measure anything, statisticians and dataminers work models, IAs finesse interfaces, analysts mash and managers action. Effective Analytics takes an orchestra. Lets talk to each other and see whats possible.” Historically, WAW’s attract a strong contingent of web analysts, social analysts (many from Syncapse), IA’s, a few dev’s, recruiters, vendors, and yes, two dataminers. And it’s a great mix. Let’s keep that mix and expand it. Additional invites to business strategists, eScientists, Marketing Scientists, and specialized developers.
Author: Christopher Berry
Jim Novo wrote: “The people that come to the party with relevant facts are the people who get to contribute to Strategy. That’s not to say that all Strategic decisions are fact-based, but these decisions begin with facts. So, if R & D and the CFO have relevant facts, they get to play. If Marketing does not have relevant facts, they don’t get to play. If Marketing s not involved in the Strategic decision making, they end up being “handed” problems rather than having a chance to solve them.” Strategy formulation, from the C-suite, ought to be informed with facts. Ideally, there’s a mix of aspiration and forethought involved in there. So resolved: Yes, analytics should play a role in[…]
Verhoef and Leeflang (2009) come forward with some pretty compelling evidence about the state of marketing departments and their influence on strategy. I stopped reading JAM in 2009, so the original paper escaped my attention. The updated 2010 version in “New Theories” did capture it though. You can get the paper from either source. You can also read the following summary: There’s an issue with marketing departments themselves and their relationship with strategy at the C-suite. Its influence within an organization, on strategy, is waning as compared to R&D and the CFO. I thank Peter and Peter for writing the piece and will now shove into analytics. So, marketing has an issue. There’s good evidence to support that assertion. I’m[…]
“Here is a people of two distinct races, speaking different languages, with religions and social and municipal and educational institutions totally different; with sectional hostilities of such character as to render government for many years well-nigh impossible; with a constitution so unjust in the view of one section as to justify any resort to enforce a remedy. And yet, sir, here we sit, patiently and temperately discussing how these great evils and hostilities may justly and amicably be swept away forever. (Hear, Hear). We are endeavoring to adjust harmoniously greater difficulties than have plunged other countries into all the horrors of civil war. We are striving to do peacefully and satisfactorily what Holland and Belgium, after years of strife, were[…]
There are three major ideas on the brain as of late. Ideas might be a dime a dozen. When I spend several hours thinking about each though, they become worth more. I can’t and won’t talk about the first. (Nod.) The second revolves around frustration with the difference between ‘design strategy’ and ‘business strategy’. Specifically – there being too much rigor in the one, and too little in the other. There are issues with the heuristic-based way of thinking, and with the algorithmic. I’ve finally just understood enough about the problem to be able to articulate it, and now going through that rage-phase where the more I research and the more I learn, the more I become upset about the[…]
The Marketing Science conference was really quite inspiring and informative. The conference generally followed this formula: I spent much of time alternating between Rooms 2, 14, and 25 – so I can only comment on 1/12th of the conference. So I’m not representing the diversity of the conference. A lot was said. I’m saying what I saw. (Preemptive apology aside to all those who spoke that I’m ignorant of, okay?) Opinion mining and sentiment analysis brought out the most flood of insults. Though, image macros were sorely lacking, it really did seem like insults were being thrown. The presenter would put forward a model and test it. Most of them are engaged in creating predictive models. It’s what they do.[…]
I’ve been heads down with the team for awhile pounding out a study examining the value of a Facebook Fan. The results of that study were presented at Internet Week on Friday morning and can be downloaded here. I have hopes. I hope it throws some wind into the sails of people who are doing good social media marketing strategy. Absolution is frequently sought in simple numbers. The importance of activation strategy should be very clear in the charts and text of the paper. The second is for the lack of misquotes. It would be really nice if it wasn’t misquoted. The third is that I hope you’ll find it useful. In sum, take a look, and feed on back.
SOCIAL MEDIA DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!! Do you remember Morbo from Futurama? Yes. Well, I certainly do channel my inner Morbo periodically, especially around the INFORMS Marketing Science Conference time of year. This the fourth time I’ve tried writing this post – and not make it sound like I really am being Morbo. Here goes. The conference is next week and I’ll be in room 14 – soaking up all the papers at this curious nexus of marketing, social media, data mining, statistics, and modeling. Here’s a flavor: On Thursday, Sabris and Grewal are presenting: “A Blog-eat-Blog World: A Multivariate Poison Process Model of Competitive Performance Implications of User Generated Content”. And of course, I’ll suffer at 4:35 when[…]
Error happens on both sides in sentiment analysis / opinion mining. Assume you wanted to understand, quantitatively, if the books published by Penguin are better received/perceived by customers than say, DoubleDay. One way to crack that problem would be to go to Amazon.com and mine the opinions. It stands to reason that books published by one company would receive a higher weighted average star rating, wouldn’t they? But what if that was inadequate, and you wanted to understand the general mood and tone of what was being actually written – presumably so you could learn and adjust? What then? Assume extraction and a well-formatted file. In other words, assume a dataset. Consider two machines, m and n, that operates on[…]
London was certainly an adventure and a lot was learned. It was a whirlwind 20 hours. I spent a lot of time listening at eMetrics. There was a very large contingent of search and email marketers there – looking to see what this social media thing was all about. The panels on that topic were geared for that audience and it was particularly interesting to hear how others are explaining the opportunities in social media. I can’t/won’t share the details of private discussions that happened over the course of the day and next night. I spent a lot time talking at eMetrics. I went to London with Three Calls To Action of the Audience: 1. Join the WAA’s European Research[…]