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[…]
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[…]
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[…]