Perry

Hewitt

Tag: analytics

Friday 5 — 7.24.2015
1. Social media success is about much more than mastering the platforms and tools. Finding a voice that resonates, developing terrific content, and building an engaged community require a culture of experimentation and continuous learning. Quartz reports how NASA developed a smart social media strategy that fueled its global reach.
2. Instagram has enabled desktop search for users, hashtags, and locations. It’s another sign that the social network is moving beyond its savvy, mobile-only origins. Its next phase of growth will require enabling consistent cross-platform experience, and driving web embeds of its wealth of user content.
3. Strategy, not technology, drives business transformation, according to this recent report from MIT Sloan. The study also found that a company’s digital depth is a hiring and retention differentiator; the vast majority of respondents of all ages reported wanting to work for digitally enabled organizations.
4. Is the web fundamentally about connecting knowledge, people, and cats; or fixing the world with software — or something else entirely? Read this presentation on the first 100 years of the web, which raises questions about the internet’s purpose and continued rate of change.
5. Curious about content marketing? This article reveals results of an experiment conducted on the Hubspot marketing blog. The idea for the experiment started with a Twitter conversation, and resulted in months of testing post frequency and type (tactical, top of the funnel, promotional for gated content, etc.). Their findings conclude with a practical summary of ways to conduct a similar test, and how to think about altering your publishing approach.
Weekend fun: If you typically wind down by reading in the evening, see Product Hunt’s new foray into books for suggestions that skew geeky. It’s way better than the social media scrolling alternative.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
July 24, 2015
Friday 5 — 7.10.2015
1. We all see (and rely on) many more visual representations of data these days — charts are everywhere in your social streams. Needless to say, how you set up your chart to reflect the numbers matters. Here’s a handy guide to spotting charts that lie. (Yes, Yankees fans, that chart is deceiving.)
2. Facebook is already a dominant platform for video reach — and they are getting more serious about how to measure your preferences and behaviors. Facebook will factor in engagement metrics beyond likes and shares, including whether a user chooses to take a video full screen or turn down the audio.
3. People throw around the term “uniques” as if we’re all certain we’re counting the same thing — but we’re not. The quantitatively-inclined folks over at FiveThirtyEight define “the cookie conundrum,” the impact of mobile, and the perils of relying of different companies’ proprietary models to explain why it’s so hard to measure web traffic in 2015.
4. What’s a common misstep for today’s data-driven marketer? On chiefmartec.com this week, Cesar Brea posits that it’s easy to get lost in the quest for the perfect KPI and squeaky clean data. Instead, marketers should focus their analytics efforts on getting to good-enough, and then continuously working to improve the results of the business.
5. Does it ever seem like every single person in your social network is doing the same thing? New research highlights how the majority illusion can skew perception in social networks. If the most popular nodes engage in a behavior, others overestimate how many engage in that behavior — perhaps contributing to the rise of FOMO. The challenge for marketers looking to spread behaviors is to reach those most popular nodes, the “influencerati.”
Weekend fun: Don’t miss @stephenathome’s view from the bunker on this week’s Apocalypse Dow. If you have 99 cents left after the collapse, you might just spend it on an app to troll your friends with Game of Thrones quotes.

Friday 5 is taking a break next week to enjoy the summer with family and friends, and do a little reading beyond 140 characters. (Here are some ideas for bringing books back to your daily routine.) See you back here on July 24 — in the meantime, email me the analytics approaches and text-trolling techniques I missed.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
July 10, 2015
Friday 5 — 6.26.2015
1. News stories are often well told visually, particularly in an era where more data than ever is available. Business and tech news site Quartz launched Atlas, a slickly-designed command center for all its charts, where you can download, embed, or grab the data. And it’s an open source product, so you can create your own version.
2. McKinsey looks at ways that large organizations are raising their digital quotient: strategy, scale, culture, and talent. Their connectivity point focuses on brands and their customers, but these behaviors will also have a large impact on operations within the enterprise.
3. Does your organization have a reverse-mentorship program around digital? Millennials are helping older professionals with tech in the workplace.
4. LinkedIn has over 360M members worldwide, and is making some savvy changes to continue that growth. Recent shifts include moving toward a ‘follow’ rather than a reciprocal ‘friending’ model, and becoming a viral platform for content publishing.
5. In the last 90 days on U.S. government websites, mobile and tablet account for about 32% of traffic. Learn more about user behavior and popular content on government websites at the new analytics portal, analytics.usa.gov.
Weekend fun: Who among us has not sent an email we regret? Gmail undo to the rescue. But when that inappropriate pixel-blurt comes out as a sexist tweet, you may find yourself at the mercy of Amy Poehler.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
June 26, 2015
Friday 5 — 5.29.2015
1. It’s worth reading every one of Mary Meeker’s internet trends slides. I’m struck by the relative rapidity and impact of the trends in the American work environment, including what motivates the millennial workforce (hint: not money), the ways connectivity has changed the nature of work, and the rise of online platforms, marketplaces and their impact. The slide above continues her observations on reimagining business communications — with Slack as a well chosen example of a transformative technology.
2. The new Netflix redesign is visually pleasing, but more importantly, it’s based on a rigorous, data-driven approach. With more unbundled competition for video viewing, it makes sense for Netflix to invest heavily in gathering and driving decisions from their user data.
3. Journalist/social media editor Sarah Marshall compiled a list of 19 useful tips and tools for social sharing and searching, I particularly liked her ideas for attribution and correction, and a few new tools to check out.
4. For marketing analytics geeks, check out these 5 deadly myths, debunked. Some fall into the category of taking meaningful data and analytic advances to an illogical extreme, but many will ring familiar with those working at the intersection of marketing and tech in the enterprise.
5. Expect to see more about virtual reality implementation as competition increases and technology goes mainstream. This week, Oculus announced that a VR-ready PC and headset should run you about $1,500 when it launches in 2016. Based on the wide adoption of GoPro plus drone videos (fun Harvard example), GoPro announced it was working on a VR camera + quadcopter drone combination to launch later next year.
Weekend fun: Ever since I read the reviews for the Bic pen for women, I’ve wanted to find the female version of everyday products. Thank goodness for feminizeit! In other news, you can gauge how strong your 404 game is, or improve your web viewing with a Chrome extension that transforms references to millennials into “snake people“.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
May 29, 2015
Friday 5 — 4.17.2015
1. Apps without an interface provide services to users through native mobile capabilities. For example, Magic lets you text a number to order whatever you like without hassle, while Digit monitors your bank account activity and automates your savings.
2. Looking for all the narcissism potential of Facebook with the quick-hit guilty pleasure of Giphy? Try Kong, a social network consisting solely of animated GIF selfies. Bring your best ridiculous expressions.
3. The Dao of Web Design captured tensions between print and web design, and presaged similar battles over control and process that have typified digital creation since. Web design leaders share their perspectives on the seminal essay 15 years later.
4. Here’s a good collection and detailed explanation of hidden gems in Google Analytics. My favorites? A shortcut to let you save preferred views, and custom alerts you can set up to email or text you.
5. 97% of us worry about how governments and corporations are using data about us as individuals and consumers. This article looks at three kinds of customer data: self-reported, data exhaust (browsing history, etc.), and profiling data created about us, and makes the case for developing enlightened data principles to build customer trust.
Weekend fun: Attention Star Wars fans out there — once you are finished watching the trailer and reading this shot-by-shot reaction post, you can add Star Wars emojis to your tweets. I’m definitely finding a way to work Monday morning stormtroopers into the tweet rotation.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
April 17, 2015
Friday 5 — 2.27.2015
Weekend fun: Tinder for pets? Now there’s an app for that, called “Cute Or Not” — and it’s a shrewd move by Buzzfeed.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
February 27, 2015
What Google knows to show you

Google has come a long way from the user experience of “ten blue links.” Today, Google pulls in a vast amount of the information it searches, has a keener understanding of what you are looking for — and serves it up to you directly.

Google’s organization of the world’s data, called ‘The Knowledge Graph,’ affects about 25% of all search queries. Google serves more and more rich data to minimize the need for users to click a second time. Search for the term “weather” or the title of a movie, and Google will serve up relevant, local data above any linked results.

When I recently searched for the correct spelling of the name of a director at Harvard, Google surprised me with a Wikipedia entry above a link to the site.

What does this mean for web content publishers?

This scraping and delivery of content is convenient for users eager to save a click. It also has practical ramifications for the originating content publishers. Today, a search engine optimization (SEO) must go far beyond meta tags and content keywords. Publishers need to closely watch and respond to web traffic analytics (for example, understanding dark social and developing a robust Wikipedia strategy) as well as technical features offered by search engines (for example, rich snippets and structured data).

February 9, 2015
Friday 5 — 12.12.2014
1. Facebook is surging ahead on mobile revenue as well as mobile market share. Facebook now accounts for about one-fifth of all data used on mobile phones, and owns four out of the top ten apps in the Apple iOS store and Google Play. More over at Quartz.
2. Dark social is a term introduced by Alexis Madrigal two years ago to define the kinds of social sharing (email, instant messaging, texting, etc.) that were not clearly attributed in analytics. Here he updates his hypothesis of dark social with the discovery that a good deal of this traffic is now trackable and attributable to Facebook sharing on mobile devices — which may be so prevalent now that it is eroding other ways of sharing.
3. Does the internet help you learn new things? 87% of Americans believe that it does. Also interesting: 72% say that the internet allows them to share their ideas and creations with others, a significant rise since 2006. This increase aligns with the mass adoption of social networking tools, and the ease of instantaneous publishing of text, images, and video through these platforms.
4. Whether you are paralyzed by choice in music discovery, or merely lazy enough to outsource all your listening habits to cooler friends, Spotify has got you covered. Try out “Top Tracks in Your Network” for a personalized, updated playlist based on what friends you follow are listening to.
5. Machine intelligence, defined here as what becomes possible as computers develop and scale abilities previously limited to humans, is poised to transform industries and create entirely new ones. Here’s a great chart of the landscape, and enumeration of relevant trends and opportunities.
Weekend fun: Deadspin may call my favorite team a “Godless Abomination,” but all basketball fans will enjoy Buckets, a quantitative approach to viewing shooting across all NBA teams and players.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
December 12, 2014
Friday 5 — 11.14.2014
1. Beyond audience analytics and editorial review, what are some other ways to suss out how well your website content is performing? Here are seven website graders you can try today.
2. We’re all hoping for a silver bullet for email management, but Google Inbox isn’t it. While the Material Design approach makes the app look slick, the default bundling of conversations and multiple message management options are confusing.
3. With 14 newsletters, and merely one on the topic of cats, Buzzfeed has increased its website traffic from email by 700% year over year. Read how Buzzfeed overhauled its email strategy to become among the top traffic drivers to their site.
4. Quartz reports that while 80% of the web remains dominated by just 10 languages, another 6,990 are out there. Read how web platforms are gearing up for a truly multilingual web.
5. The early web was all about community — and then swiftly yielded to a mountain of Flash animations and brochureware. Now community management is emerging as a discipline and, increasingly, a job title.
Weekend fun: The Thanksgiving season is upon us, and Facebook has made it easier to say thanks by auto-generating videos to construct a narrative of your friendships. Creepy or clever? You be the judge.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
November 14, 2014
Friday 5 — 10.24.2014
1. Analytics firm Chartbeat has opened up its measurement methodology, limitations and all. By exposing their thinking and technology, they give the service’s users better insight into their reports — and simultaneously ramp up the pressure on the competition to go transparent.
2. Now that we’ve all given up on comments, annotation is on the rise. The Genius platform continues its quest to annotate everything through social reading. Spend a little time with Tech Genius to see how people dissect and discuss noteworthy texts.
3. Pew released a sobering report on the state of online harassment. Younger adults are more likely to have experienced some kind of harassment, from name calling to physically threats. Young women experience particular, severe forms of harassment, with a full 26% reporting that they have been stalked online. See also: #GamerGate.
4. Before you respond to that email, pause. This HBR post explains how to improve your communications by being a little less quick on the draw with the send button.
5. It’s the end of apps as we know them. The mobile experience will be less about sifting through app icons spanning multiple screens, and more about apps sitting in the background, serving up relevant content as needed.
Weekend fun: How many times has your heart beat? How has the planet changed around you during your lifetime, from animal extinctions to solar eclipses? Check out this clever, interactive visualization from the BBC.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 24, 2014