Tag Archives: business thinking

May 6, 2015 · 10:39 am

Reading The Words, Missing The Meaning

Let’s start today thinking about a language you don’t speak. It’s very possible, assuming that it’s written using the Latin alphabet, that you could pick up a book and begin to read out loud in that strange tongue. Of course, you’d have absolutely no idea what you’re reading. You can say the words on the page but you can’t explain what they mean.

Keep that image in mind as we change the topic to data. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with clients and gone through their analytics reports with them and the aforementioned image has popped into my head. I don’t mean that to be derogatory to the people who pay me, nor does it mean that I’m fluent in analytics and they’re not. It raises a business point that is something we all need to keep in the back of our minds as data becomes more integral with everything we do.

Here is a small example. Most of us see “direct” traffic in our analytics reports. In theory, those visitors typed in the site URL or clicked on a bookmark they set on a previous visit. That’s a partial truth. The reality is whenever a referrer is not passed, the traffic is treated as direct traffic by Google. Think that’s an unimportant bit of information? How about in the context of mobile traffic not passing referrers at all (and I bet mobile is a big and growing part of your site traffic)? The point is that it requires both the knowledge that the “direct” bucket isn’t an absolute as well as some further analysis to figure out the truth.

I’ve seen the same sort of issues crop up in attribution modeling (what source was responsible for the sale).  The groundwork for proper attribution hasn’t been laid and so the reports aren’t accurate.  Sure, any analyst can puke out the data in front of them but the good ones – the ones who can interpret the words and not just say them – will tell you why there is a problem and fix all the links you’re putting out there to accurately reflect what’s going on.

“Keith,” you say, “I’m not a data scientist.”  Neither am I.  What I can do – and you probably can too – is to ask questions, especially when someone tells you they are dead certain about what the data is saying.  Be sure they’re not just reading aloud in a language they don’t understand.  Get beyond reporting and into meaning.  It changes everything.  Agreed?

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May 1, 2015 · 10:05 am

Cooking For Customers

This Foodie Friday I want to write about something I picked up during Gordon Ramsay‘s AMA session on Reddit this week.  You can read the entire transcript here and for those of you who only think of Chef Ramsay as the screaming maniac  on Hell’s Kitchen it’s worth the read.  One of the questions concerned his views of the Michelin Guide, the oldest international hotel and restaurant reference guide, which awards Michelin stars for excellence to a select few establishments.  Chef Ramsay’s restaurants have won many Michelin stars and his restaurant, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, gained its third Michelin star in 2001, making Ramsay the first Scot to achieve that feat.

Ramsay at BBC Gardeners' World Live 2008

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These stars can make or break a business, and unlike reviews on Yelp or elsewhere they are given by a carefully trained team of reviewers after multiple visits.  Given his track record on winning them, one might think that Ramsay had figured out how the system works and cooks to win the stars that propel his business.  Not so much:

So the stars are awarded to the restaurant. And sometimes the chefs think the stars belong to the chefs, but they belong to the restaurant. The service is just as important. Michelin’s had a hard time in America, because it was late coming to the table. But if there’s one thing I respect, it’s consistency. They manage to identify consistently, and it’s all there for the customer. So when people ask me “What do you think of Michelin?” I don’t cook for the guide, I cook for customers.

That is good guidance whether your business involves a kitchen or not. First, there is a recognition that his business – and yours! – are taken as a whole and reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the team.  The front of house service is just as important as the food.  Your customer service is just as important as the quality of your product or professional service.  Second, his focus is not on catering to the reviewers.  It is squarely where it belongs – on his customers.

Each of us can ask if were cooking for reviewers – our bosses, our board, our stockholders – rather than our customers.  We need to think of the business as a team effort and not as some reflection of our own worth.  The statement, above, is a great reminder of that to me.  You?

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April 29, 2015 · 11:58 am

Rivers

I have rivers on my mind today.  Maybe it’s because I spent a lot of time over the last couple of days talking about streams of information and of video.  The nature of media these days is that we’re on a mostly self-directed rafting trip immersed in these streams.  Except that they’re really rivers since “streams” speaks to something much smaller than the torrents of content with which we deal every day.

Coincidentally, I came across something in the Phi Beta Kappa blog that resonated on both the nature of our content world and our business world:

It was the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said that you can’t step into the same river twice, giving us a memorable illustration of the principle that things change. The very nature of things is change.

Amen.  I’m not the only one to have written about FOMO – the fear of missing out on something changing in your social or other streams because it happened while you weren’t paying attention.  There are lots of tools available to assure that doesn’t happen by sending you alerts when a significant person posts or an important bit of data comes to pass.  Nevertheless, I’m sure many of us feel a need to dip our toe in the river constantly, both to stay in touch as well as to take the temperature.

It’s more the change that occurs in business which is my focus.  I laugh when people talk about five-year plans.  Where were your video marketing plans back in 2010?  How about mobile?  Is what you’re doing today what you contemplated then?  I doubt it.  That’s not a complaint; it’s a recognition that the river keeps flowing and the water you photographed when you did your strategic plan is long gone by the time you’re ready to implement it.

Keep the notion of a river in mind as you approach business.  While it runs within the same banks it’s never exactly the same.  You need to embrace that flow and learn how to swim with a changing current.  There is a reason that so many songs and literary works deal with rivers as central to a community and to life.  How you deal with it is the difference between a wonderfully exciting ride or drowning.  Your call!

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