Tag Archives: Reality checks

October 9, 2013 · 10:42 am

Faulty Instrument Readings

I’m not a pilot (although I’ve played Flight Simulator a bunch). One of the things pilots are told is to trust their instruments because sometimes our eyes or other senses deceive us while flying. Things such as graveyard spins or spirals result, and I’m very sure that anything with the word “graveyard” is bad when using in conjunction with flying.

X-Plane 10 Flight Simulator Zero panel

(Photo credit: Wanderlinse)

Business analytics today are exactly the opposite of flying.  You see, there are so many things that can go wrong  – a misplaced space, code missing or in the wrong place – that going by what the “instruments” tell us alone can be fatal.  I’ll go back to a point I’ve stated before – we need to figure out what we’re trying to investigate and why before we ever look at the numbers.  That lets us process the information we’re going to receive in context so we can make decisions.  Knowing your web traffic is up is relatively useless.  What it should prompt is a response into both “why” and “what of it?”  That requires using your eyes and your common sense.  Let me give you an example.

You launch a campaign to increase sales using Search Engine Marketing – pay-per-click ads to use a less-fancy term.  You’re smart enough to make sure you have conversion tracking installed – a method through which you can assess how many people who come to your store via your fancy new campaign actually buy something.  Your developers check the code and make sure it’s in the right place and that the beacon fires when the appropriate action is taken.  However, no one ever does what a real-world user would do – click an ad and place an order – to make sure that the “instruments” are picking up the action properly.  As a result, you think, based on the reporting, that the campaign was a tremendous waste of money since it resulted in no sales.  Your instruments just crashed the plane.

Had you used your eyes and common sense, you’d have seen that the ads generated a lot of traffic and based on your history, some percentage of that traffic that stayed on the site (non-bounced visits in tech speak) does convert to sales.  Since that didn’t happen here, maybe something is wrong.  Click an ad and place an order – did it register?

There is a tendency to trust the instruments but unlike the gauges on airplanes, the gauges we use in business are relatively new and far more prone to error.  We can’t let faulty instruments over ride the business acumen we’ve developed over the years.  That can be a fatal error.  You with me?

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September 27, 2013 · 9:02 am

Fooled Again

Foodie Friday! The subject today isn’t actually food itself but the places in which it’s served. You probably how competitive the restaurant space is – just think about how hard it is for you to decide where to go eat when you go out. Which cuisine? How far to go? Is this new place any good? We’ve all been there.
More often than not these days, people turn to review sites such as Yelp for information.

English: 0

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s not news to any of us that some of the reviews on Yelp (and other review sites) are fake. Great ones may have been posted by the restaurant, bad ones could come from a competitor. Yelp has an algorithm that is supposed to spot and eliminate those issues to a great extent.  The folks at Harvard B-School released a study about it.  What they found is interesting but not terribly surprising:

First, roughly 16 percent of restaurant reviews on Yelp are identified as fraudulent, and tend to be more extreme (favorable or unfavorable) than other reviews. Second, a restaurant is more likely to commit review fraud when its reputation is weak, i.e., when it has few reviews, or it has recently received bad reviews. Third, chain restaurants – which benefit  less from Yelp – are also less likely to commit review fraud. Fourth, when restaurants face increased competition, they become more likely to leave unfavorable reviews for competitors. Taken in aggregate, these findings highlight the extent of review fraud and suggest that a business’s decision to commit review fraud respond to competition and reputation incentives rather than simply the restaurant’s ethics.

They looked at 316,415 reviews of 3,625 restaurants so it’s not a small study. That said, this doesn’t even address an individual who had a nice meal with good service but maybe had a run in with another customer and decides to blame the restaurant with an inaccurate review – I’d call that just as fake as the others.

The NY Attorney General cracked down on businesses that were writing fake reviews.  It’s a problem for anyone who relies on the internet for research.  So don’t.

What?

Yes.  I wrote that.  Instead, use the web to find out about available options and use trusted sites with paid, professional reviewers.  Then put down the device and ask a friend or coworker or family member.  There’s an expression in computing – GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.  That’s what many review sites are like despite their best efforts (and I mean that they try to weed out fake stuff sincerely).  Some of it is the blind leading the rest of us – who knows how educated and daring the palates are of most amateurs?  A bunch of it is fraud.  The problem is we don’t know which is which.

Or maybe we just need not to be afraid to be “wrong” about the choices we make and go and enjoy an evening out with someone?

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September 24, 2013 · 10:23 am

When I’m 64

I was not quite twelve years old when The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper. On that groundbreaking album was “When I’m 64“, which you might think is the topic of our TunesDay screed. Not so fast, dear readers.  The song is a young man wondering what his life will be like when he’s 64 and will he and his lover still be together. I remember thinking at the time that 64 was VERY old and picturing two old folks walking hand in hand slowly down a boardwalk someplace.

Let us now turn to the real subject of the screed this TunesDay:  a guy who turned the aforementioned 64 yesterday.  Here he is performing about a week ago so you can see what 64 looks like:

I know you’re probably tired of me writing about Bruce so let’s think about what the reality of him at 64 is vs. the mental picture of someone at that age most of us might have had when we were in our 20’s.  It’s a good business point too.

We can’t let our perceptions get way out of touch with reality nor can we let our prejudices about an age lead us to market our brands ineffectively.  How customers see them selves as they age is kind of counterintuitive.  In fact a Pew study shows that:

the older people get, the younger they feel–relatively speaking. Among 18 to 29 year-olds, about half say they feel their age, while about quarter say they feel older than their age and another quarter say they feel younger. By contrast, among adults 65 and older, fully 60% say they feel younger than their age, compared with 32% who say they feel exactly their age and just 3% who say they feel older than their age.

Moreover, the gap in years between actual age and “felt age” widens as people grow older. Nearly half of all survey respondents ages 50 and older say they feel at least 10 years younger than their chronological age. Among respondents ages 65 to 74, a third say they feel 10 to 19 years younger than their age, and one-in-six say they feel at least 20 years younger than their actual age.

The Boss is nearly 64 and Mick Jagger is 70.  So while they (and we) might be “older, losing my hair, many years from now,” if you talk to us that way you’re missing the boat.  Got it?

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