marginally subversive

EyeTrackShop's findings: What attracts people to your Facebook pages - and what keeps them there longer?

The wall on all brand pages attracts almost all respondents' gazes. What you post matters. If you consistently create and publish great content -- items that really matter to your fans and add value to their day or contain an appropriate call-to-action -- you're more likely to attract and retain those readers.

Walls also attract the viewer's attention for the longest amount of time. Again, this reinforces the need for compelling content that builds on itself. Working in reverse chronological order (because that's how posts appear), Wall posts should compel the user to scroll down the page, keeping their focus and attention on your Wall. You should cross-reference previous status updates as a way to get visitors to scroll down the page and consume more of your content.

via www.entrepreneur.com

These are quite interesting findings on the use of the Facebook wall for pages that are active.  One of my favorite pages, Magnolia Chicken Station from the Philippines on Facebook does this farely well.  And I like looking at their recipes.  A few celebrities are also doing this fairly well - I like Vin Diesel's page. 

Thanks to Entrepreneur.Com for the idea and the photo below. 

 

On Social Media #Analytics: ComScore’s 2011 Social Reports Facebook leading ...

You already know that social networking sites have been getting huge around the world, but an annual report out today from comScore shows what exactly is going at a wonderful new level of detail, with surprises for even long-time industry watchers like me

via techcrunch.com

Microblogging is growing and the world is connecting real-time.

You probably knew that already, but isn't it comforting to have your thoughts validated by data?

#analytics practitioners need personal integrity, too

I guess nobody's perfect: analytics professionals need to have a sense of integrity as they search for answers for their clients' businesses. after all, their results could lead to misspent dollars - or worse, lives and jobs of people.

Analytics professionals need to understand the responsibility that rests on their shoulders.

 

Created by: Clinical Psychology

Planning for Marketing? Think Finance - Think Lifetime Value

via www.youtube.com

Marketing has borrowed quite extensively from Finance in the last 10 years.

As marketeers, we've started talking about returns on investments - finding the "biggest bang for our buck".

Some (like my former team in a previous company) have started talking about risk management procedures - not just in managing contracts (and employing "options"-like buying techniques), but also in delivering gross impressions and shares.

All these are well and good.

Perhaps this is one way of the marketing department proving themselves to the finance department - an attempt to say that 'we are more than just an expense line on the balance sheet'.

But as marketeers and suport-teams of the marketing department, we have got to do more.

Employing evidence-based marketing, metrics-based objective-setting and results evaluation, real profitability analyses that take into account present and future value of marketing investments --- all these need to be more apparent in the marketing department's language and in the language of its partners in the advertising, media, promotions, PR, research, and digital space.

The Age of New Banking Is Upon Us...

I came across this video just today (a year old, really, so quite old by internet standards).  It is about banking and how consumesr are changing the face of banking.

What I really liked about what Brett King, an author, said in the opening of the video: 

Just because you are a bank and you have a banking licence doesn't mean you have an exclusive on banking.

And another one: 

If customers don't want to come to the branch..., we just serve them where they are.

 

No one ever bought anything in an elevator

The purpose of an elevator pitch isn't to close the sale.

The goal isn't even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project.

No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you're with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over.

via sethgodin.typepad.com. Emphasis mine

Well said.

Gladwell's 10'000 hours and Tim Ferriss - Which one works better?

via www.youtube.com

Interesting thoughts from Tim Ferriss - he of the 4hour workweek phenomenon. I admire him for being a lifelong learner.

I am not sure about his thoughts about Gladwell's 10'000hours.

But you gotta give it to Tim: he is perhaps one of the few (at least in the public's eye) who endorses lifelong learning.

responsibility? take it on!

on #analytics: data availability is no longer the problem

Data availability is no longer the problem.  Accessibility is no longer the issue.  The cost of acquiring data has gone down dramatically.

Neither is the technology behind data collation the problem.  There are a myriad of options that one can collect, store, discover, collate, systematize, analyze, and use data.

The real problem is people's apathy and/or antipathy to data and data analyses.

It's all about changing the mindsets of business managers - specifically of marketing managers who think that their jobs encompass merely looking after advertising and media technologies.

David Campbell, as interviewed by Alex Howard (at Oreilly Radar) has this advice to clients about using their data:

From the data side, we've lived in what we'd call a world of scarcity. We thought that data was expensive to store, so we had to get rid of it as soon as possible. You don't want it unless you have a good use for it. Now we think about data from a perspective of abundance.

Part of the challenge, 10 or 15 years years ago, was where do I go get the data? Where do I tap in? But in today's world, everything is so interconnected. It's just a matter of teeing into it. The phrase I've used instead of big data is "ambient data." It's just out there and available.

The recommendation would be to stop and think about the latent value in all that data that's there to be collected and that's fairly easy to store now. That's the challenge and the opportunity for all of us.

(Emphases mine; from http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/david-campbell.html)

Here's the video of the interview:

 

 

on # analytics: ... and knowing what to do with the answers...

When you've got the answer to the right question, it  begets a new, very important question:

So what?