“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[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
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[…]
Joseph Carrabis just published the final in his three part series, the Unfulfilled Promise of Analytics. It’s worth a read. Pop some corn and leave a thumb ungreased to pound that space bar. Joseph concludes with an invitation for others to carry on where he left off. So here goes: Where to from here? A point of view. In my view – analytics is a science that is in service of an entity. It’s not about the pursuit of truth but rather the pursuit of competitive advantage. Anything that stands between us and that goal is an obstacle to be obliterated. There are 7 axioms that I consider to be the most relevant foundations and anchors. I’ll add more axioms[…]
#ChangeCampTO happened last night in Toronto. It was a gathering of some 240 people ranging from engaged citizens, community organizers, public sector people, private sector people, social media technologists, journalists, and yes, the social analytics guy in the room. The purpose of the gathering was to develop a civic engagement toolkit. The overarching goal of this movement is fairly ambitious – we want the headline on a newspaper, the day after the Toronto civic election, to read: “wholly shit, people care”. I was at Table 13, and did I ever luck out with my group. We spent the time actually talking about tools – focusing on the how instead of the issues. It’s this leap to go from issues-based thinking[…]
If you’re in the #smm or #measure community, you know the impact that tweeting has had on the English (written) language (online). Never before has the @ and # been (ab)used so much. But what about the impact it has had on how we consume media together? Twitter is an awesome utility. Through it, we find out how our friends are doing, organize trouble, learn, alert, shout, entertain, push, prod, pull and otherwise – communicate. People are amazing adapters. We had to be over the past million years. It’s our competitive advantage. We’re always finding new uses for things and repurposing them. Twitter is no exception. We’ll find some new way to use the medium. During Friday night, and continuing[…]
A massive thank you to Patrick Glinski (@glinskiii) for hosting Web Analytics Wednesday (On a Tuesday) last night. The venue was great and it was all well organized. Also a big thanks to Jim Sterne (@jimsterne) for coming out and Lee Isensee (@OMLee) from Unica for sponsoring the event. I didn’t expect to join the panel – but it was nice to have been loudly trolled up (eh – @Jason_Dee ?). I also enjoyed giving the first stabs on what are really hard and really early solutions. What I wanted to talk about, but couldn’t, was the launch of our product socialTALK™ today. It’s exciting because it addresses the human process issues that are common in social media marketing. It’s[…]
Tonight is Web Analytics Wednesday in Toronto…On a Tuesday! This is quite a big deal for us, especially since it’s really the first time in the past two years that we’ve hosted it on a Tuesday. So, we’ll probably see new faces. Hopefully they’re all smiling. Jim Sterne will be there. Last years’ Web Analytics Wednesday panel was quite fun and it’s great having Jim back in town. I imagine that social media measurement will be all the rage. I look forward to those discussions, and I’d like to pick up on some of those and share them on back in this space. If I’m seeing you tonight – great. If not, see you next time. .
Communities played an important part in the online gaming experience during the early 2000’s, and I think there are lessons in there for today. Time for a story. It’ll be fun and egregiously self-deprecating. My first Real Time Simulation (RTS) game was Age of Empires I, back in 1998 or so. And I loved playing it online. Problem was – the online experience really sucked because most of the players were jerks. The experience sucked and the game lagged like hell. By 2000 I had joined my first gaming community. They were referred to as gaming clans, and you could identify its members by having a telltale tag at the front of a name. MNPE_username, JCV_username…and so on. There was[…]
On the Report, Colbert pokes fun at the proliferation of ever seemingly invasive social network technologies. I want to cover off Blippy, Twitter, and go into the impact for social analytics. I’m excited. I think you should be too. Exhibit: Blippy http://blippy.com/ Why would anybody do this? Because shopping, for many people, is social. Paco Underhill has argued, at least on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, that people continue to go to malls just to be around people. And, while I’ve never claimed to understand why certain groups of people like to shop with one another and ‘try on’ clothes and so forth, I’ve certainly observed that behavior. That’s why I could foresee a constituency of people who would want[…]
Jim Novo wrote in response to the last post: This is an interesting line of thought Christopher, perhaps I can help with a bit of a framework. And you’re right, product is the root of Marketing decision making. I hope my attmept at a chart below makes it through the CMS without breaking… Brand for any product is a continuum between Product-centric and Image-centric, example: ……….Product Centric………..Image Centric Beer…….Sam Adams………………Budweiser Image-Centric Brands tend to have commodity status, which begs the need to differentiate by creating some kind of unique Image. Product-Centric Brands differentiate on hard Features and Benefits. If you think about the Marketing for Sam Adams, it’s all about ingredients and customization. If you think about the Marketing for[…]