I apologize for the low post frequency this month. You can read why I’m a bit more conscious of that fact by clicking here. Joseph’s post at that link, about post frequency and Holmes and Watson is a perfect example of what the social science of social is all about. Speaking of the social science of social – the Syncapse Measurement Science team is working on the guerrilla analytics dataset – and I’d like to have both a cleaned dataset and a white paper summarizing the results out within two weeks. I reckon you ought to be updated. There were four Peer Reviewed Research Articles posted in January for your interest: http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/art/756/http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/art/748/http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/art/747/http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/art/742/ I’m really enjoying this WAA program and I[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
I’ve been fairly obsessed as of late with quantifying Social Media Return on Investment, or sROI for short. At the root of the issue is a clash of belief systems. Marketing thought is dominated by two rather large models of thinking. You have the Direct Paradigm and you have the Brand Paradigm. By Paradigm, I mean simply a way of looking at the world. Let me take one step back, and then one step forward. People, in general, can only hold so many variables in their heads at the same time. So, we abstract. We’re supposed to derive some forms of causality that are important, throw that into some overarching architecture, and then use that framework to make decisions in[…]
The link attached leads to an experiment: You can click here to reach it. It’s the first in what I intend to be a series of posting, sharing of data sets, and publishing analysis: a continuation Guerrilla Analytics initiative. I’m not going to talk about the hypothesis driving this particular experiment. It’s a big go in terms of getting some facts on the table. .
The cleanest way I could explain the Butterfly Effect was to say: “Let’s say my shoe is loose. So I decide to bend down and tie it really tighter, inadvertently creating a knot. Let’s say the next morning, I have a hard time getting my shoe on – for let’s say, four minutes. Then let’s say that I miss my bus by just one minute. And the bus has a frequency of thirty minutes. Well then – one seemingly unrelated decision, made 16 hours before and taking all of 2 minutes to execute, has a 30 minute tardiness impact 16 hours later. That’s pretty much like the Butterfly Effect. Writ Small. And Mundane. Without bad acting.” The Star Trek: TNG[…]
ChangeCamp is a nice continuation of what I think should happen. On Thursday’s The National with Peter Mansbridge, I listened to the panel chortle about how meaningless 100,000 facebook fans complaining about prorogation was. The principle complaint against social media participation? That it was easy for just anybody to click a button. Isn’t that the point? To make democracy easier? More accessible? It’s because I believe that we need to reform the government-public interface that I’m going to support ChangeCamp. What’s possible? To Canada: Social Media in 2010 is to the CBC in 1935 is to the railroad in 1889. .
Michael Porter, in “On Competition”, appears to emphasize the importance of trade-offs. Roger Martin, in “The Opposable Mind”, appears to de-emphasize the importance trade-offs. Porter defines strategy is the process of making choices about activities that results in sustainable competitive advantage. Both books make reference to activity diagrams – so there’s unity and acknowledgement that choice matters. At the core: Porter explains the ‘why’ of strategic decision making, and Roger Martin describes the ‘how’ of strategic decision making. The ultimate way of showing trade-offs, in my view, is though the Production Possibility Frontier. What is very elegant about the production possibility frontier (PPF) is that it’s two dimensional and tells a very clear story. There are trade offs between quality[…]
Analytics continues to be a very manual process because of the great disconnect between data collection tools, data analytics tools, data vizualiation tools. The analyst frequently takes data out of the collection tools and puts it into an analytics tools (sadly, an excel spreadsheet where it’s tortured) and then from an excel spreadsheet into a communication medium (Powerpoint, Word, GGOBI, another excel spreadsheet). This movement of data from one place to another is touching. Should human fingers touch data? There have been great advancements within the data measurement tools in 2009: Google, Omniture, Coremetrics, Web Trends, Unica. We’re able to slice and dice and vizualize data like never before within these tools. I applaud that. Progress has been made. I[…]
I’ve just learned of eScience as a result of a book entitled “The Fourth Paradigm”. While I don’t have that much to say about the essence of the Fourth Paradigm yet, I have to admit that I feel immediately at home with this group within eScience. One of the best quotes in the book is: “Need driven versus curiosity driven. Basic science is question driven; in contrast, the new applications science is guided more by societal needs than scientific curiosity. Rather than seeking answers to questions, it focuses on creating the ability to seek courses of action and determine their consequences.” Substitute ‘societal needs’ with ‘business needs’, and I have myself a nice bridge between eScience and commercial eScience. I[…]
If the output of an analytics program is competitive advantage – it follows that it’ll be a source of profit to be optimized as opposed to a cost to be minimized. Web reporting is to marketing as accounting is to business. Analytics is to marketing as management science is to business. This is about as clear of an argument as I can make for the scientific practice of analytics.
Preliminary results from a membership survey suggest a strong level of satisfaction with the work coming out of the Web Analytics Associations’ Research Committee. And that’s heartening, since the volunteers do a lot of work. I’ve participated in some of that research over the years, and it’s always pretty enlightening. It’s good news.