Monthly Archives: August 2015

August 20, 2015 · 12:08 pm

Coleridge And Your Data

Someone probably made you read Samuel Coleridge‘s Rime Of The Ancient Mariner along your educational way. It contains a couplet that got me thinking about data:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

We spend so much time collecting and attempting to analyze data and yet it seems difficult to “drink” from the overwhelming amount we have.  I wonder if we keep an eye on the reasons why we gather data in the first place.  In my mind, there are  two main reasons to collect data:

    • To form actionable business questions
    • To measure how where we are today is different from where we were yesterday

Let me take a second to discuss them.  When we gather information from a customer or potential customer, we should always have a reason for doing so.  Otherwise we’re just filling up our data storage with bits we’ve got no need to store.  A recent IDG Connect study found that the biggest hurdles facing companies in terms of data were poor data quality and excessive data, so we need to think before we gather.  Some of the information they will give you (name, email, maybe a physical address); other information you’ll take yourself (usage patterns on the web and/or mobile, information our of social profiles, etc).

We ought to be using some of that data to educate our fans about our brand and industry.  That falls under the “actionable” category.  What results do we want from them?  How can we tell if we’re moving the needle?  One big day of traffic might be an aberration but trends tend not to lie over time.  I like this quote from the report:

The true value of Big Data is in the ability to leverage it for development of an informed strategy. Organizations need to move beyond a focus on just managing data to extracting trends and insights that will drive business outcomes.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information you have, you probably have too much.  It’s probably not properly focused.  We need to collect as little data as possible – it’s much easier to drink a glass of water than an ocean.  It should be just enough to generate insight and not enough to foster confusion.  Which are you doing?

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August 18, 2015 · 9:30 am

Lightening The Load

If there is one thing that seems to have happened over the last 15 years, it’s the growth of ADD.  That’s right – it seems as if most of us have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder which manifests itself via an inability to stay focused and patient as we use our devices.  After all, what’s more frustrating than clicking on a link and waiting and waiting and waiting for the page to load?  Sometimes it’s due to a lousy connection to the internet.  Most of the time, however, it’s probably due to how the publisher has built the page.  I can hear you muttering that “he’s gone all wonky today” but stay with me.  There is a broader business lesson here.

Web pages are a series of elements.  The page code processes them and does everything from display pictures to send analytics data to a server  to format text to pull ads out of a marketplace.  Each of these things takes a little time and the more of them there are, the longer it takes the page to load.  Graphics intensive content – slide shows, autoplay videos, etc. – take a VERY long time to get ready.  I think part of why people use ad blockers is because they very often cut load times substantially.

GQ, according to an article I read in Digiday, focused on decreasing page load times.   Maybe that was less convenient for their writers or editors, but they decluttered their article pages, moved to a unified content management system, and did some other things that resulted in an 80% decrease in page load times.  That focus on their reader has paid off:

For GQ, having a faster site, along with features like new article pages and article recommendation widgets, has paid off in helping audience growth. Traffic jumped to 11 million uniques in July, the first full month of the relaunch, from 6 million in June, per the site. (Those are the site’s internal Omniture figures; comScore’s July numbers weren’t available at press time). Median time spent on the site rose to 7.8 minutes in July, from 5.9 in June. The benefits have extended to advertisers. With people spending more time on the site, along with bigger and repositioned ad units, the interaction rate on ads rose 108 percent.

The lesson for any of us is that staying focused on the customer experience pays off, sometimes in ways we don’t anticipate (who would have thought ad interaction would rise!).  Maybe lightening the load made their wallets heavier. Not a bad tradeoff, right?

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August 17, 2015 · 11:02 am

Business Jams

Grateful Dead: Backstage Pass

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was driving around this weekend listening, as I often do, to The Grateful Dead. Like them or not, you probably are aware that they were the world’s preeminent jam band, even if jamming as a concept that is as old as music itself. What’s interesting about jamming is that the music is never the same. Oh sure – ideas get recycled from one night to the next, but the entirety of the piece of always pretty different no matter if we’re listening to The Dead or to some great jazz.

What’s interesting is that some bands will cement the better ideas into songs. That is how some bands write. They just start playing until some good ideas surface. Those ideas are memorialized, lyrics added, and voila – a song. It’s not a bad business concept either.

When musicians get together to jam, they come from a place of openness and collaboration. They are there to experiment. While some jams start with the framework of an existing song or just a blues jam in G, most of the time you’re off following musical ideas thrown out there by the other musicians. You’re guessing about what will work at some points. To do that well, you need to keep an open mind.

Brainstorming is business jamming. You need an open mind and a willingness to go where the music (thinking) leads. Sometimes you happen upon a great riff – a fantastic business thought – that can be preserved and turned into a song – a product, or maybe an entire business.  You might think that some brilliant new innovation was the result of careful planning.  The execution probably was, but I’m willing to bet that the underlying idea came out of some mental jamming by a person or a group of people.

When I used to play music seriously, jams were fun.  They involved getting the right people together – people who have both the technical and mental abilities required as well as whose musical styles meshed well with the others in the room.  I can’t think of a better way to lay the foundation of a successful enterprise, can you?

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