Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 23, 2011 in Photography | 0 comments

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Homogenization

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 22, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 2 comments

During a series of candidate interviews yesterday, I took notice of one particular facet of the resumes that got me thinking. Every candidate listed their academic standing – what degree, plus their GPA (grade point average). For those not familiar with the American university system, GPA is a numerical score between 0 and 4.0 that is supposed to indicate a student’s overall academic achievement, with 4.0 being perfect marks and 0.0 being something along the lines of setting fire to the dean’s car and using all your exam papers as toilet tissue.

What got me thinking was just how deeply irrelevant that score is. GPA tells me overall how good you are at school, but it masks so many variables that it’s nearly useless. For example, let’s say I’m hiring for a marketing intern whose job it is to create content. Compare these two GPAs:

Student A: 3.0
Student B: 3.1

Which student should I hire? Basic common sense says, hire the higher score. But what if you broke down the scores some?

Student A:

English: 4.0
Mathematics: 2.0

Student B:

English: 2.2
Mathematics: 4.0

If I’m hiring someone as a content creator, Student B, despite the higher GPA, is clearly the worse choice, because content creation demands outstanding writing skills, but the homogenized GPA score masks that entirely.

Think carefully about homogenization of metrics! Are you masking critical details? One valid criticism of Klout scores, for example, is that they don’t tell you what the person is influential about. A Klout score of 60 is meaningless if I’m marketing B2B software and you’re influential about beer making.

Even our most basic analytics should be called into question. Segment out your data! All web traffic is not the same. You may have an average number of visitors to your website, but perhaps visitors specifically from social media convert at a higher or lower percentage than the rest of your traffic. Find out which segments of your audience truly want what you have to offer and focus your attention and analysis on them. As I often say in my marketing metrics talk, if you’re selling Gulfstream airplanes, you really only need 3 people to read your blog a year… as long as two of them buy an airplane from you.

Beware homogenization. It’s convenient to want to wrap everything up in one big number. Ask questions of scores and averaged measures to see what’s behind the averages. You might find some very profitable, highly un-average niches in there that could change your business overnight.

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What cake can teach you about metrics

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 21, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 2 comments

What if you read a cake recipe that went like this?

1 inch of flour
1/4 inch of milk
1 inch of sugar
1/2 inch of butter
1/8 inch vanilla
1/2 inch of eggs

Mix all ingredients until they are 2 1/4 inches high. Put in an oven for 30 minutes and check with a ruler every 15 minutes to see if cake has reached a height of 2 1/2 inches. Remove from oven and serve.

What’s wrong here?

Baking a cake can’t be done in inches. It’s simply the wrong metric to use. Are inches and rulers valuable? Absolutely. Are they the right metric for every situation? Of course not.

Why is it, then, that we in marketing are all so insistent on one magical measure? We want just a Klout score or just an ROI, etc. The next time someone insists that they need a simplified, single dashboard metric of all your marketing performance, remind them that they are far more comfortable with 5-6 metrics (cups, teaspoons, inches, temperature, ounces, etc.) for a simple cake.

Your business is more complex than a cake. Treat it like one and measure it with metrics that are appropriate for each of your performance indicators.

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How to make Pareto curve charts

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 18, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 2 comments

One of the more useful ways to graphically see the cumulative effects of something happening in your marketing data is the Pareto, or powerlaw chart. Creating these is easier than it sounds. I’ll assume you have access to spreadsheet software. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll use the free Google Docs web-based software.

First, you need data that can be modeled by a Pareto curve. Any time you want to measure the cumulative impact of something over a fixed period of time, you have the opportunity to use a Pareto curve. For example, you can download data about a particular campaign in Google Analytics, download data about how many times an email campaign was opened, download data about how many times a tweet was clicked. These would all be good candidates for Pareto curves.

Let’s take a look at a example tweet. Here’s the bit.ly basic clickthrough data for my tweet about the November 5 Leave Your Bank day.

Now let’s head to our sample spreadsheet. You can access it via this public URL.

You’ll want to set up the date, clicks from Bit.ly, the percentage of total, and the cumulative total columns as shown in the sheet.

Next, create a chart by however your software creates charts. For Google Docs, choose Insert > Chart. Highlight the first and last columns, make the chart as pretty as you like, and you’ve got yourself a Pareto Chart.

Want to add more than one Tweet? Just start another table and add it into the chart’s ranges.

By the way, does anyone think it’s strange that:

• These Pareto charts look nothing like normal powerlaw curves?
•  These Pareto charts clearly indicate that the majority of the clickthrough action on these Tweets is not anywhere near the date or time that they were published?

As Tom Webster says, do your own work. In this case, by charting out the clickthrough activity on the 3 most recent blog posts I shared on Twitter, I see that not only is there no best time to tweet for me, but that the real action on a tweet happens long after I publish it, which means that timing of my tweets isn’t nearly as important as some other factor. That means it’s time to go dig deeper into the data and find out why.

I would strongly encourage you to play around with the data you have access to and see what light you can shine on it. There’s a good chance you’ll walk away with more questions than answers, but at least they’ll be better questions, right?

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Social media riff-raff

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 16, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 8 comments

Yesterday during the Social Media Plus LinkedIn session, this bit of advice was shared by the speaker and retweeted by the audience:

When I poked back at this chain of thought:

…a couple of the folks clarified a bit:

If LinkedIn or other social networks imposed an actual cost on the number of connections you were permitted to have, then I think this viewpoint might have some validity, but unless your connections are flat out spammers, then there’s no harm in keeping people in your network who aren’t exactly on target for your audience.

Allow me to illustrate some of the riff-raff in my network. Knowing me, knowing who I am and what I do, these people would probably have been culled years ago if I took the above advice.

Here we have this guy:

And this guy:

Remove them from my LinkedIn network right away, right? After all, an applications engineer and an assistant athletic director should be worthless to me as a marketing professional, yes? Not so fast. The applications engineer in 2005? That’s now Chris Brogan.

And the assistant athletic director and freelance writer? That’s now the Social Media Plus conference keynote speaker, Jason Falls.

My counter-advice to the idea of culling the riff-raff from your network is this: look at your social network like a nearly risk-free investment. You can place wild bets on all of the people asking to connect with you, and if you build relationships with them over time, some of them are not going to pan out and some of them are going to be superstars. Some, like the gentlemen above, will completely transcend what their original base of expertise was entirely – but you won’t know that today.

Here’s an analogy to close this topic out: if you planted a field full of corn seeds today, you would be a fool to immediately declare the field a loss tomorrow if none of it had turned into fully grown crops overnight. Likewise, just because your LinkedIn network isn’t full of superstars today, don’t declare it a loss and start culling the riff-raff. Have time, have patience, and work on building the relationships today that will turn into powerful friendships and business partnerships in the weeks and months to come.

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