Pat LaPointe wrote a pretty interesting article for MediaPost Publications. You can check it out here. My response is pretty much ‘Yes, And…’ I don’t understand why some people are making inductive inferences that online word of mouth is somehow reflective of offline word of mouth. (As a certain company appears to be making). I share his concern and skepticism. Let me unpack that. A whole generation of quantitative market researchers are supposed to understand that if you take a small, random sample of a population and expose them to a treatment, then you can make an inductive inference on how the entire population will react to that same treatment. The probability that the inductive inference is accurate is a[…]
Category: Uncategorized
Consider the impact of the mechanical clock and the curved lens on early analytics. The mechanical clock enabled consistent, scale, time. You won’t optimize what you won’t measure. And Europeans most certainly started optimizing time. They’ve been optimizing work per time unit, productivity, since the renaissance. Countries that didn’t have a method of measuring productivity simply didn’t optimize it. Worse, cultures that didn’t value the standardization of time simply didn’t value productivity. Why care about productivity when you have loads of population to toss at a project? It put whole swaths of the globe at a competitive disadvantage. The curved lens, aside from giving us astronomy and microbiology, enabled great strides in miniaturization and productivity. A skilled worker could work[…]
“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[…]
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. .
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[…]
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[…]