Archive for the ‘Analytical Culture’ Category

Marketing Jump Ball

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Marketing Accountability.

Brand is what you do, not what you say

Marketing Alignment.

Here are 3 free webinars you might want to take advantage of.  You might not agree with these opinions, but hey, it’s a good idea to get out of the echo chamber once and awhile, don’t you think?  Try these online sessions for a little brain stretching:

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Moving Marketing From “The Money Spenders” to The Money MAKERS
April 15, 2009  noon ET    Jonathan Salem Baskin, Jim Sterne, Jim Novo

With 10% of marketing executives being perceived as strategic and influential by the C-suite there’s clearly a crisis of confidence.  I’ve mentioned Jonathan’s blog and book before and here’s a chance to hear a bit of the inside story.  You’ll learn how to exceed expectations of both C-suite executives and customers, neutralize political feuds by organizing cross-departmentally, and how to stop thinking like a reporter and start acting like an advisor

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Everything They’ve Told You About Marketing Is Wrong
April 21, 2009   1pm ET  Ron Shevlin

Are you sick and tired of reading the same old blah, blah, blah, from the so- called marketing experts who just tell you stuff you already know? Then you need to attend this session as the grumpy old man cuts through the morass of bad advice and introduces you to the must-dos in the new world of marketing.  I know Ron personally (as in offline) and even if you disagree, you will be entertained.

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What Online Marketers Can Teach Offline Colleagues (and vice versa)
May 19, 2009  noon ET     Kevin Hillstrom, Akin Arikan, and Jim Novo

A WAA event, open to both members and non-members.  Web analysts are not the first to grapple with multiple channels.  Traditional marketers have always had to illuminate customer behavior across stores, call center, direct mail, etc.  So, rather than reinventing the wheel in each camp, what proven methods can you teach each other?  Three different but aligned approaches on solving the multichannel puzzle, should be something for everyone here.

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Take your brain out for some exercise, will ya?

 

Sales or Profits?

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Seems the previous post (Best Seller Gone Bad) really hit home for people; perhaps we should drill into  this a bit.  So:

1.  Is the impact of your work evaluated against Sales or Profits?  (example)

2.  Do you think this evaluation approach is correct for your job and company?  Why? 

3.  Would you change this evaluation method if you could?

4.  What is holding you back from trying to make this change?

Personally, I always choose Profits if I can; the leverage is so much higher than Sales.  It’s much easier to generate $5 in Profits than $5 in Sales for any given $1 in budget, because there is generally so much waste in the Marketing system.

Update: OK, how about answering this question – when your work performance is evaluated, what percentage of this measurement is based on qualitative factors?  quantitative factors?

From Audience to the Individual

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

Prompted by Avinash’s post on Recency (if this topic interests you, there is much more here), I have to return to an idea that keeps running through my head:

Why do so many Marketing people fail to understand the basic underlying dynamics of Interactive / Online Marketing?  Relative to the Comments on Avinash’s post, why would Marketers not be interested in the Recency metric?  If the Marketers are not aware of it, why would Analysts not push it to them, show them the power of it?

The more I think about this issue, as I have been for several years now, the more confident I become the answer is quite simple: Nobody ever taught most Marketers how to communicate properly to Individuals.  Their training, their experiences, their peers, their conferences, all of it is about Marketing to Audiences.  The nameless, faceless hordes represented by GRP’s.

They simply don’t know how to do it any other way. 

And as a result, neither does whoever they report to. 

Which means any Marketing Accountability or Productivity Metrics, if they exist, are about Audiences, not Individuals.

So, all the Marketers care about are Audiences, these one-off blips on the screen, as opposed to Individuals, who carry longer-term, Potential Value to the Company that can be measured with Recency.

That’s why they allow the blasting of e-mails, they buy untargeted impressions.  They repeat what they know from offline, online.

Sad, really.  A one-way thought process in a two-way world.

What can we do about it? 

I’m going to talk about these concepts with a few Marketers during the AMA’s Digital Marketing Lab at M.planet next week.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Update: I should probably skip Marketing, go straight to the CFO.

Webcast on Web Intelligence 11/19

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Speaking of Web Intelligence, if you are interested in experiencing what the world of web analytics looks like when it meets Business Intelligence, the WAA and our Certificate partner for Web Intelligence, UC Irvine, are doing a Free webcast on this topic. 

Jim Humphrys has the research on salaries and demand in the sector, Shaina Boone of Critical Mass is the practitioner who has both taken the Certificate classes and is applying this knowledge in the real world, and Bernie Jeltema is a UCI Instructor for the Certificate classes.

Here’s the official description:

UCI Webinar: Certificate in Web Intelligence
Wednesday 19-Nov-08 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM EDT

Web Intelligence is a combination of web analytics and business intelligence. As companies expand their reach into the global marketplace, the need to analyze how customers use their web sites to learn about products and make buying decisions is becoming increasingly critical for survival and success.  Wondering how to position yourself for these career opportunities and how specific coursework can be valuable?  This planning session will provide pre-registration educational and career advancement advisement. Also learn more about the web intelligence certificate program, courses being offered in upcoming quarters, and career planning resources available through the UC Irvine Extension and the University of British Columbia, Continuing Studies

  • Jim Humphrys, WL Gore, co-chair, WAA Research Committee
  • Shaina Boone, Critical Mass
  • Bernie Jeltema, Instructor in Business Intelligence, consultant in field
  • To register visit: http://unex.uci.edu/certificates/it/web_intel/

    On this page, you can either sign up to “Stay Informed” about the program (green bar) or Register for the webcast in the box below this bar, which is called Web Intelligence Education Planning Session.

    Broken Online Model Endcap

    Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

    I’m going to leave the Requirements / Model issue to simmer for a while; thanks for all your help exploring it.  I get the feeling people might want to connect with more practical ideas right now and not take on the windmills of the Tech / Marketing Interface.

    So I’ll wrap up with a few relevant links to what others have recently said about this model / requirements problem.

    Facebook COO

    Yesterday, Ad Age tells us that Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said this:

    “Google and its competitors have made answering demands for information very profitable by selling ads attached to search requests, or demand fulfillment, Ms. Sandberg a former Google executive herself, noted.  “What no one’s figured out how to do is demand generation,” she said.  “We need to find a new model and new metrics,” she added.

    It’s the Serendipity problem, right?  You can’t Search for what you don’t know about already?

      (more…)

    Wrong Model, Dumb Money

    Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

    I am not a technophobic Marketeer, an old “resistant to change” type.  In fact, I’m just the opposite, and that’s why I can’t understand why Online continues to Repeat Past Marketing Failures.

    I was one of those kids that built crystal radio sets and messed around with ham radio.  My favorite place to hang out was Radio Shack, back when they were an electronic parts house.  I built all kinds of circuit board stuff with a soldering iron, mostly bugs and telco hacks.  I was a geek when they were called nerds. 

    In 1977 I learned the BASIC language and was writing simple programs for the mainframe at college.  In 1978, I was part of a small group of students who worked on the Synclavier, the first large scale truly digital music synthesizer.  I started working with PC’s in 1987, and had a home computer by 1991.  I was one of those people who dialed up to the CompuServe Forums at 300 baud, primarily talking about computers and music, figuring out how to rewrite .bat and .ini files to get the computer / keyboard interfaces working properly. 

    And at the same time, making lots of  ”online friends” ;).

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    Sherlock Holmes Problem

    Friday, September 12th, 2008

    I think this is probably the last Learning and Teaching issue in Online Marketing (series starts here) before attempting to evaluate and summarize the challenge.  I would like to receive comments from you on the Sherlock Holmes Problem.

    “There are two types of minds — the mathematical and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the dive.”

    Blaise Pascal

    In his post How the Skills of a Night Auditor Translate into Web Analytics, Christopher Berry explores a notion we have wrestled with a lot while developing the WAA’s Certified Web Analyst Test – can you teach someone to be curious in a “business analytics” way?  Or are people just born with / socialized into this skill set?  How do you measure and test someone for “analytical curiosity”?

    We have referred to these issues internally on the Education Committee as the “Sherlock Holmes” problem.  The issue is not the ability to read and interpret reports, or write up findings, or anything like that.  It’s the ability to see coincidences or oddities in the data, to conceptualize linkage or relationships others don’t see, to follow the data trail (or blaze it) right down to Root Cause.

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    Repeating the Past

    Monday, September 1st, 2008

    I’ve been trying to get a few things straight in my head about the way people Learn Online Marketing.

    Will you help me?

    Here’s a Premise:

    The Online Marketing world seems to repeat the same mistakes over and over; it’s almost like every new generation of technology is a clean slate and somehow people expect an approach that was flawed in a previous generation won’t be flawed this time.

    Sure, technology changes, but the fundamentals of human behavior are much more difficult to change.  So you would expect there to be some constants, right?

    For example, putting a high value on “quantity” of activity (remember Hits?) when every past generation has found that “quality” ends up as a more important metric.

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    Consensus Learning Model

    Thursday, August 28th, 2008

    My question about whether you learned anything at SES or not didn’t get much reaction.  I suspect the answers were polarized, with half the people thinking “not really, I go there for other reasons” and the other half thinking “of course I did”.

    Answers to that question might have been helpful, but…

    What I’m really questioning is this: How do people in the web space learn what they learn?  Associated questions are:

    1.  Has quantity eclipsed quality as a yardstick for the success?

    2.  Implications for Teachers / Course Developers of the answer to #1

    There are also some serious implications for “Web Marketing” adoption (in all forms) by the broader Marketing community buried in the above.  To me, this is not unlike the “CRM Problem”, where for years (and still) people confused the Technology solution with the Marketing potential, which set CRM back a decade.

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    You Learn Anything at SES?

    Sunday, August 24th, 2008

    SES = Search Engine Strategies San Jose, for those not in the know.

    And I mean the question literally.  Not did you have a good time, see lots of friends, do a lot of beneficial networking, talk to customers, build your reputation, create content for your blog, etc.

    Did you Learn anything?

    Looking at the stream of blog posts, video, Tweets and so forth – much of it incredibly repetitive by the way, which is a whole other issue for this type of Journalism – I have to wonder if anybody except those new to Search actually learned anything.  You know, walked away with new knowledge they could use to improve their efforts.

    I have more than a passing curiosity about this issue from a macro perspective.  As you might know, I am a Co-Chair on the Web Analytics Association’s Education Committee, responsible for creating the WAA’s Core Curriculum and upcoming Certification Testing.  So I think a lot about Learning and Education, especially as it relates to the web.  And that thinking includes different “delivery models” like Conferences.

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