Analytics are People, and other lessons from my internship at [meta]marketer

By Jameson Elder | Published March 8, 2012

I came on as an intern with [meta]marketer about 9 months ago, about to graduate college and ready to make my attempt to conquer the world. Like many college grads, I was fairly clueless about “the real world”, especially when it came to marketing analytics. My concept of marketing analytics was solely constructed around the insights section of my Facebook music page and figuring out that more people follow me on Twitter if I post something other than what I ate for breakfast or my daily Nashville celebrity sightings. So I jumped in to try to learn something.

Before I dig in too far, there’s something you should know about me, I naturally lean more towards the creative side. Which means graphs look like pictures and a spreadsheet of numbers looks a lot like the code from the Matrix. I’m also a big picture and big idea guy, so the thought of addressing the tiniest of details is little intimidating for me. But I like the idea of stretching myself, and I felt like the best way to get more people to visit my Youtube page is to be able to understand what the metrics tell me.

So I ended up here.

I think that the reason analytics can be challenging for people like me is the illusion that numbers are nothing more than cold facts. This is not always true.

Back in the fall, the entire [meta]marketer staff (as well as a few other “outsiders”) gathered in the little conference room to brainstorm and further construct the vision of [meta]marketer. We talked for a couple hours and at the end the phrase that we all walked away with from that meeting is that “analytics are people”. As much as this seems like common sense, it really brought a new understanding to me of what working with metrics can be like.

The temptation with numbers-driven data is that it is very easy to boil everything down to formulas. Yet people aren’t formulaic. Yes, we repeat are patterns and are fairly predictable, but not formulaic. Motivations change and are different for every person. Thinking about the motivations behind the numbers is what I find fascinating.

When I was in high school I remember the most dreaded question that teachers always ask… “why?”. I hated that question mostly because I felt like I was being cheated out of my right answer. I thought my correct answer alone was enough. My high school economics teacher told me I was the most concise student he’d ever had because I just simply wrote the answer in as few words as possible (usually just 1). But embracing the why behind something opens up so many more possibilities.

Several times I’ve come in to the office when Josh is breaking down potential audiences for a client and I get to sit in and throw in my 2 cents. We brainstorm potential consumers for various products and services and attempt to describe how they might operate on a site. In order to do this, we really have to step into people’s shoes (which can be a bit of a challenge when you’re talking about a sports or cars or other things I know very little about). The degree to which we are able to imagine and understand those motivations we can better predict an outcome and can better meet their needs as consumers.

I’m probably not saying anything new, it’s really just what has helped all of this make sense. I’m still learning, and apparently I’m still concise (since I took a 2 hour conversation and boiled it down into 6 sentences). There are lots of things about metrics that I don’t get yet, but they bought an “intern desk” so I hopefully I’ll have a few more things figured out soon.

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Klout and the business of vanity analytics

By Kate O'Neill | Published December 19, 2011

The Tennessean newspaper ran a front-page piece this weekend called Klout measures online influence. It examines the role of Klout, an online influence measurement service, in social media usage and cites a number of Nashville-area social media heavy users (including myself and my good friends Dave Delaney, Rex Hammock, Courtenay Rogers, and Steve Chandler) and their relatively high Klout scores.

Whenever the subject of Klout comes up, some folks get a wee bit snarky, feeling that to measure anything about social media is tantamount to a popularity contest. (And hey, I’ve tweeted my share of Klout jokes. It’s easy material: at one point, the topics about which Klout claimed I had influence were cowboys, babies, and Shark Week.) So as you might imagine, right away, there was backlash. The very first comment on the story called Klout the most meaningless metric in online marketing. Blog posts linking to the story took issue with treating the topic as front-page-worthy news.

For the record, I don’t think either criticism is wrong, per se. But they both fall a little short of a full look at the situation.

It happens to be my business to traffic in meaningful metrics. But the funny thing about what’s “meaningful” is that it’s both subjective and relative to the quality and type of data available. Data about influence in social media is soft and subjective. It’s squishy. You can’t measure a person’s influence directly, but you can develop hypotheses about what types of activities might correlate with people who are highly influential. For example, someone who has a great deal of influence on Twitter probably has a greater chance of having his or her tweets retweeted than does someone without much influence. When you measure those activities, you create a sort of leading indicator of influence. Klout has attempted to do that. Is it a vanity metric? Sure. Any publicly-visible metric can be a vanity metric. Especially if you check it compulsively. But even that doesn’t necessarily make it meaningless.

One of the other vanity metrics we encounter when working with clients on marketing measurement strategy is Alexa ranking. Alexa does a pretty decent job of gauging relative volume of website traffic using a method that could be compared with Nielsen ratings for TV shows. (The Nielsen ratings are vanity metrics too, but they’re a data point that TV industry folks use as directional data.) Should you base your marketing strategy on monitoring your Alexa ranking? Of course not, but if you’re looking for a top-level measure of your website’s traffic relative to others’, you can certainly include the rank’s variance as a gauge on your dashboard, and you can feel good when it’s holding steady or showing gains. If it shows a big drop and you have no idea why, even if your own website’s traffic didn’t really change, it’s possible that something is going on in your competitive landscape that you need to know about.

Klout isn’t really any different. Although it’s still in the benchmarking stage of developing integrity as a metric, it may ultimately be useful as a directional indicator of social media engagement and effectiveness. That doesn’t mean you need to babysit your score or contrive to inflate it artificially, but it does mean that if your score falls, it may be an indicator that you’re not connecting with your audience. And there isn’t a much more meaningful pursuit in marketing than connecting with an audience: it’s what has to happen before you can make money. So if you’re concerned about ROI in social media and you’re not thinking about measuring earlier-stage metrics like engagement and influence? You’re missing the point, my friend.

Klout’s efforts to quantify influence may seem frivolous, but it isn’t unusual for forward-looking work in analysis to seem frivolous. Being ahead of the curve inherently means that most people don’t get what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.

And this is where the newsworthiness comes into play. Whether you think Klout as a company and a concept is ahead of the curve or not, most of the people blogging about social media in 2011 have spent a good amount of time discussing the idea of “influence,” and that concept isn’t going away in 2012. Rather than dismiss it, it might be worth spending a little time as 2011 winds down planning how you will develop your influence and cultivate your online audience for a more profitable 2012. I’ll be right here cheering you on and retweeting you, as long as it doesn’t involve cowboys, babies, or Shark Week. I can’t go screwing up my Klout.

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Beautiful one-second videos show us creative marketing possibility

By Kate O'Neill | Published December 9, 2011

Montblanc held a contest seeking submissions for “one-second videos” and the compiled results are stunning:

Seconds Of Beauty – 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

Perhaps you think of Montblanc as a pen company first and foremost, but this is a promotion for the chronograph. And it is yet another example of how a company can extend how its brand interacts with customers, and how customers experience the essential value of what the brand represents. Pretty clever, and beautifully effective.

Plus, they engaged Wim Wenders, one of my personal favorite filmmakers, to intro and “present” the concept: see his video intro here.

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How does your company capture institutional knowledge?

By Kate O'Neill | Published December 2, 2011

Here at [meta]marketer, we’ve begun using an Evernote notebook called “[m]m smartzz” to flesh out some thinking around concepts that surface repeatedly in client interactions, so we have a shared understanding of these areas. The one I was just adding today is about taxonomies. It begins:

A taxonomy organizes concepts and presents a representation of categories and concept hierarchy as a thought framework, shared vocabulary, and institutional knowledge.

For example, one of my favorite book titles is by the linguist George Lakoff, called “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.” It’s a humorous illustration, but a vivid one: the groupings we agree upon say as much about us as they do about the things we’re grouping.

In attempting to produce a meaningful taxonomy for website content management, it is useful to attack the problem from a few different angles:

  • What is the consumer vocabulary? What terminology does the consumer use to describe the concepts, and what groupings make intuitive sense to the consumer?
  • What is our aspirational vocabulary? What terminology would we ideally like to train the marketplace to adopt? What groupings would demonstrate our conceptual framework and biases for the sake of influencing consumer perception of our subject matter?
  • What are the areas of greatest content density? Topics within our subject area about which we have a great deal to say are going to need finer resolution and sharper distinctions than those about which we have very little to say. For example, if we create a taxonomy of [meta]marketer terminology, it will be insufficient to talk about marketing: we will need greater specificity for what aspect of marketing we’re talking about, such as marketing analytics, online marketing, search marketing, etc. But for something that isn’t our core subject, we will not need to be so specific. We may occasionally create content about Nashville, for example, but we probably won’t need to describe whether the content is about Nashville businesses, Nashville lifestyles, Nashville music, or anything more granular than Nashville… whereas clearly other websites and businesses that do focus on Nashville would find it meaningful to drill into those additional levels of detail.

And so on. Truthfully, it hasn’t saved us time or money yet, but it may someday, and for now it seems like good discipline. But I wonder, how are other companies tackling this? Do you have a “smartzz” notebook or folder somewhere, or a wiki? How do you make sure that good explanations of difficult concepts don’t have to be re-created every time?

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Connecting with your audience

By Kate O'Neill | Published November 30, 2011

While we’re not an advertising agency, part of the work we do with our clients deals with knowing your audience well enough to know how to reach them and what will be an effective message when you do.

coffee sleeve

This coffee sleeve, which I picked up at Drinkhaus, my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, promotes a fun seasonal event that patrons of independent coffee shops are probably going to want to know about. The event’s organizers printed these and distributed them, I’m told, all around town to locally-owned coffee shops. For the price of design and printing, they have a memorable vehicle for communicating with an audience that’s already, by their presence in an independent coffee shop, demonstrated an interest in supporting local, independent goods.

It’s a good reminder to think about the unconventional ways we can reach our audiences.

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