A Highly Evolved Form of Corporate Entertainment

Geoff Moore (of the Crossing the Chasm fame) opines about Analytics: “sorting through all the hay to find the needles ” in a predictable and repeateable manner.

Money quote “The problem is closing the loop. To complete the journey from generating the insights to using them to drive operating procedures that can systematically capitalize upon them in time and at scale has been the exception rather than the rule. “

Whether it is Business Analytics, Web Analytics, or Blog Analytics the issue is the same: if I’m spending money, how can I directly correlate action X with predictable action Y? (and please make sure you deliver the insight that will drive further predictions/results directly to my inbox, no more than 3 bullet points) In short, according to Moore, you can’t. At least not consistently.

I’m not so sure I agree. Just to clarify, he writes specifically about Business Analytics, not Marketing Analytics (although clearly Marketing Analytics is a subset of Business Analytics). Most forms of traditional media can be measured by marketing approved and accepted ways (although they may not always be accurate, they have become a benchmark).

Measurement and progress, whether it is in finance, operations, or marketing is obviously the way businesses determine success (at least the for profit ones do). Clearly the ability to predict, measure, and benchmark spending and results will only increase overtime. Even for “experimental” forms of marketing, measurement and the ability to predict results will continue to be key.  Especially if newer forms of marketing are to gain the same accepted credibility as traditional forms of marketing.

Insight, If You Wade Through the Prose

Stowe Boyd has written a pretty insightful posting on “Social Architecture and the Future of Online Markets”. In his typical somewhat circuitious (I say that with admiration, not criticism) manner he lays out an approach to the interest sharing spheres-of-influence of individuals, social networks, and markets.
For anyone that has read (or is comtemplating reading) Blue Ocean Strategy, the themes and aproach will sound familiar.

For those that don’t want to read his posting (or the book) here are his bullet points summary:

• “The social architecture I have handwaved (individuals, social networks, and markets) at here will come to underlie all the successful applications of our day, and the earlier apps will rapidly adapt to this model or be eclipsed by other apps that do.
• In the near future, all ecommerce will be socialized: where a user’s transaction will feel as if it is taking place in the context of some social interaction — like reading a review at a blog about a camera, or a vacation — rather than the online catalog or classified experience supported by Amazon and eBay.
• All truly significant applications will span all three tiers of the social architecture model, and will demonstrate their worth directly by the creation of a market that brings buyers and sellers of some critical resource together in a new way.”

A Big Megaphone and a Test

Senior Scoble reporting on a blogosphere test. Interesting idea, although I can’t help but wonder if the real value is not in testing blog search engines (a snoozer in my book), but rather in testing the concept of idea velocity throughout the blogosphere. In blog time, I’m writing this late compared to Robert’s acutal posting on this test so I’ll post again on any updates.

In my mind the real value (if calculated) will be the spead and breadth of how this test is adopted and spread via blogs. Geeks with Blogs started the test, Robert reported on it. By the way, here’s my contribution to the test: brrreeeport
I’ll venture to guess that many readers of Scoble’s blog are tech-centric to some degree, so the caveat in any attempts to estimate the idea velocity to the general blogoshere should be put into a centricity context (technololgy related blogs) vs the blogoshere as a whole.

Rather timely, I read about a similar SEO test today in the Wall Stree Journal.

The Holy Grail – Predicting Word of Mouth’s Impact

As noted by Matt Galloway and Steve Rubel, Cymfony recently launched a marketing resource center. Matt provides his insight regarding this new resource, I agree with many of his points.

What I found fascinating was one paper in particular that dealt with the predictive power of online opinions. Granted, the paper is “dated” (data on the blogosphere in my opinion ages like dog years) but the findings are encouraging: the study found that about 20% of the time, there was a correlation between the efficacy of WOM and book sales ranking on Amazon. Clearly this is a microcosm: The blogosphere; one type of product; and a controlled environment. I would however venture to guess that if repeated, this number would be higher today.

(Complete non-sequitur: Amazon will start to offer author’s blogs on its site, could it be a coincidence?)

Marketers and CFOs frequently ask about ROI, especially regarding newer technologies, and applications. Who can blame them? ROI is a way to seemingly mitigate the risk associated with the investment of newer products and services. Clearly the entire WOM industry (yes I know, some will argue that it has been around forever) suffers this today desired concrete proof. Direct, irrefutable, and consistent correlations between WOM and its impact are not always available today. But clearly that will change in the not so distant future.