It’s pretty cold in Miami – coat weather. Not quite freezing like the rest of you. But cold. A few points from day 1: I’m impressed with Jeff Robertson of Delta. It’s the first time I’ve heard a loyalty points analyst use customer centric language, doing right by people, and meaning it. His reported actions, and the manner in which he reached conclusions, is truly customer centric. His mouth was aligned with his hands and aligned with his heart. A very smart, very brilliant presentation in applied analytics. No cynicism. Loved it. Language. Much of the rhetoric is very similar to what you’ll hear at an eMetrics conference. Some of the words are a little bit different. For instance, instead[…]
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I caught a fragment of comment on an analytics podcast: “Everybody has been asking me, where can I find great analysts that have the analytical skills, the communication skills, and the business acumen?” To which I laugh. Purple hippopotamus time? Mega-swiss army knife time? They are so few and far between. They exist, certainly. But in such small quantities. And there are fundamentally good reasons why this is the case. Maintaining subject matter expertise is a challenge – it mandates keeping on top of new developments and practicing them. It’s time consuming. (Seriously time consuming!) Communication is perhaps a direct statement about the ability to produce ppt’s and being concise. Being a subject matter expert does not lend itself well[…]
I appreciate how people use analytics to inquire. Let me put forward an initial schema: Sometimes an inquiry is geared towards confirmation. You’re only interested in information that supports your original point. Sometimes an inquiry is geared towards a situation. You’re only interested in knowing what was going on. So you can keep an eye on it. (Situational reporting of straight numbers is not analytics. But sometimes people think it is.) Sometimes an inquiry is geared towards explaining a (perceived) an outlier. You’re only interested in information that explains why that thing, that doesn’t make sense, happened. Sometimes an inquiry is geared towards discovery. You’re only interested in learning something new that you can ultimately use to your advantage. The[…]
A very smart person remarked that he liked numbers because they didn’t lie. People lie about numbers. Over the next 30 minutes, I demonstrated how two honest people can have two valid interpretations of the numbers, and have their models supported by the same facts. An hour later, during our measurement science biweekly meeting, I invited the team to analyze a 5×5 RM table, and asked a fairly loaded question about it. Diversity in opinion eventually gave way to consensus around a mean. Several honest people had feedback and conflicting models about the way the world really worked. Each version perhaps more probably true than the last. ‘Truth’ is one of those really strange words in analytics. It’s something we[…]
“L.A. Law Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today“, an article from the satirical media giant The Onion, is funny because it’s painful. The article starts off telling a story about irrelevant content. In this case, web analytics about a really old TV show on Wikipedia: “Our L.A. Law page typically gets 915 views on weekdays and 670 on weekends, so we’re about 40 off the pace,” Wikipedia web moderator Ben Stern said of the entry for the Steven Bochco series, which hasn’t aired a new episode since 1994. “Then again, the day isn’t over, and if our metrics are correct, Corbin Bernsen’s IMDB page should be viewed at least 15 more times before midnight. We generally get some runoff from[…]
One of my favourite sites is KillerStartups.com. It’s everything I love about startup culture and innovation. There are hundreds of independent variables that goes into explaining why some of these startups are going to thrive, and why most won’t. (It’s more complex than biology because people are involved!) My favourite variable is evident utility. Each startup has two paragraphs to convince me to even click to learn more. Do I see an actual use? Does it do something that somebody else already does in a better way? Cheaper way? Is it generalizable. It’s not the most predictive variable of success though. Twitter is a good example of something I could see no evident utility for. Eventually I saw utility, at[…]
We did something very different for last night’s Web Analytics Wednesday Toronto. Out with the invite was a strongly worded request to produce three bullet points on one sheet. The hypothesis was that if you give analysts a platform for sharing some work with others, they will take it. The expected outcome was lower turnout with a higher intensity of participation, and a higher perception of value. Six sheets were presented by: Martin Ostrovsky (Repustate), Brian Cugelman (Alterspark), Kevin Richard, Heather Roxby, Greg Araujo, and myself (Syncapse). They were excellent and sparked very active debate. Fifteen people in total came out, including web analysts (Mark Vernon, @web_analyst), creative (@mimc03), data miners (Gar et al), developers (@chrismendis et al), managers, directors[…]
Shaking the next Web Analytics Wednesday, at Bar Wellington – second floor. You’re invited to bring 25 copies of a single sheet of paper that contains: Three bullet points of analysis, preferably with an actionable recommendation or finding Data that supports your analysis A reference to the data source Your name, company, contact info, website, blog, twitter handle, and so on It’s not a dashboard. It’s web ANALYTICS wednesday. Why? You’ll leave with something in your hand and feel smarter for experience. We rarely get a chance to share our craft with other practitioners. Why shouldn’t practitioners have a chance to put up? The agenda We’ll start at 6:30pm and we’ll get up and move around with our sheets. You’re[…]
It was only towards the tail end of the second year of university when anybody tells you about the pearson tables. It’s a glorious thing, all alone in there, hidden away in PASW. You run it for a number of variables, and it gives you a beautiful matrix showing the strength and direction of relationships among them. It can be disastrously misleading. Violence can dull sensitivity. Still, it can be used to rapidly validate mental models and rule others out. I cope when I’m confronted with a large dataset. I identify what is it that I’m trying to figure out. Then lay out all the independent variables that I think might relate into explaining that variation in something dependent. I[…]
Fun was had by all – there were quite a few people from out of town who came out – and a very diverse group appeared to get along well. The venue of The Counter went over well, and will probably be the preferred place for crowds in the 35 person range. There were a couple of inside-track discussions, and I think we’re in for quite a shakeup in the next couple months. One theme that continued to come up are challenges in overlap and general effectiveness of our programs. Complaints about unresponsive institutions continue to roil, yet some wins were celebrated. We toasted Mike Sukmanowski’s victory in what appears to be a clean install of Omniture over at the[…]