What I have been wondering about …

Was thinking, and working intensely the last couple of weeks, both in London and back here, about what is possible in Analytics, and what my role is, or even, what “the offering” which I’d deliver, or my team (when it’s assembled) would have.   A lot of the work has involved deep introspection, perhaps a bit of restating the obvious, and refining what is of value in it, to others.  It’s seems incredibly hard to define your point of difference, in such a way as you can describe it in a couple of points (nuff said for now – but I’m/we’re on it).

Having said that, it’s often true that what other say about their own platforms, translates or fails to translate with the audiences (and what my role is there, as an Analytics Evangelist for brands and platforms I like and believe in, is).  For example, I’ve noticed that when I hear the founders of companies and platforms explain theirs, it usually fires me up with enthusiasm, sometimes seeing or noticing possibilities that weren’t apparent to me when I just was playing around or using the platform on my own.

I’ve been wondering about that.  Deeply.

What is it, that takes a technology stack (another word for a platform) and turns it into something “magical”?   Is it the platform?

I don’t think so.

Could it be the Analyst / Evangelist?

I think so.

What I’ve been detecting, and what others have approached me on for several months, years, in fact, is that independent voice that validates and makes special what they do – that translates the “ultraviolet value” into visual clarity, for whomever needs it to use it.

The interesting thing is that ……

…. often, the platform creators are unable to make the case for themselves (for a variety of reasons).  Sometimes, the clients are so successful, they don’t want to talk about it, either – and we’ve been seeing this more and more.  Social Platforms are successful, they are producing ROI, they are moving businesses forward, but the businesses, themselves, would rather not talk about (so they don’t share their good fortune with their competition).   It sorta suggests that business has adopted Social, to the point they have treated it as an owned asset, let’s not talk too much about our real successes, since we might embolden our competitors to copy us.

So it may very well be that someone the right vision, yet independent, can take the enthusiasm and vision of a platform’s founder and translate it to the user base, or the potential user base, and demonstrate why people need this service or not.

….. and I think that’s something I’ve been doing, and will be doing a bit more of as time goes on (both here and abroad).

What I learned here and in London …

There are some lessons lately, without getting specific, that I’d like to share.   For one thing, most clients eventually need to see a road map of where you, as a technology/services provider will take them.  But you know what?   Not everyone is ready for the road map, or even the conversation that leads to the road map.

…..Not everyone is ready.   Take that as you will.

Analytics, and good tracking are probably something that has to be built up, and it may well be that it begins with gaining trust – gaining trust of your stakeholders.  They may not be ready to see what they need to do, they may not even know what they need (often they don’t).  No use telling them ….. they won’t listen anyway – not till they are ready to.  It’s possible that could take several months, maybe even years, if it happens at all.   I know that trying to come in with a road map, even a well informed one, won’t work for some clients – they’re just not ready yet, they don’t know yet what they want, or how far they really want to go with an Analytics or Business Implementation.  They just don’t know.

… It may be a while till they are ready to have that conversation.   It may not ever happen at all.   Probably, the best job we (I) can learn to do is listen, ask the right questions, and draw out the answers, while gaining trust.  Trust, that will enable us, at some point, when the client is ready, to have the right conversations that lead to tactical results.

London – ……

The book signing I did with Synthesio went really well, and I’m really glad, honored to have been invited back to London to have given it last week (it’s posted on my blog, a few days ago). Also the training that I did with OurSocialTimes.com at  Monitoring-Bootcamp.com taking place at Innovation Warehouse went well, though I noted there are several learnings and refinements needed in the first training of it’s kind that I gave.   For one thing…

• Not everyone is at the same level
• Not everyone was looking for the same thing
• Having people at many different levels and with different goals made it difficult to address them all equally.
• Some of my material was too advanced for the audience
• There were times when I answered a slightly different question than the one being asked

I’m learning the lesson.  People have thought that Social Media Analytics is too “narrow”, some wanted some PR/Social type training – that’s not really what I do – but for those, there needed to be a basic type course (and it would seem there are enough of those around that mine would not be needed).  On the other hand, for those who needed to choose the right platform, the basics would have been not addressing their needs.    For those of us who are Analysts, that is what my training really was for – but even there -for the most part, there were no Analysts in the audience, except those that were vendors, themselves.

So the lesson for me, is to know more about what the audience wants and then craft a training around that – or select the audience (when that’s possible) and segment them in the right section of the course – and hopefully, find out from them beforehand, what they need.

When you don’t know – ask.  But there’s an art in Asking the right questions.  It was also part of my goal setting exercise in Section 2 of the course.

Web Journal – What I read / and thought about ..

• NetPromoter – SatMetrix SparkScore -  This new development, announced last week, sounds pretty interesting and promising – I’m still wondering if it will really be what they say it will be.  In other words, right now, it sounds pretty hyped up.   I know the challenges of Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis are, hell, I’ve been writing about them for next to 7 years.  I also know many of the founders and vendors in the space, both personally, and via conferences.   I’ve yet to see anything that close to knocking my socks off.  I looked at the product literature (PDF files)  and they also sounded somewhat “sales oriented”.   To be honest with you – till I see it for myself, take it apart, I doubt I’d give this a thumbs up.  It does appear, however, that doing a “Social NetPromoter” score was inevitable.

• Either SatMetrix would build it, or someone else (probably a fly by night PR firm would of taken a crack at it – they are legion – nuff said).    Does having the founders and some leaders in text analytics make this “Net Promoter” offering better likely to succeed?  Probably not.   But let’s wait and see what they actually deliver.    Maybe it’ll be what they say it is going to be.   I’ll give them some of the benefit of the doubt.  However, notice there wasn’t a working demo yet.  Ha!

• I read with satisfaction that .. Facebook IPO Will Make Graffiti Artist a Millionaire, A Street Artist painted murals for Facebook’s first headquarters and got paid in stock – the stock will be worth $200 million bucks now.  Yeah, that sounds like a good deal to me.  Murals anyone … I’m game (it’s been a while since I painted a mural – ha!)   Life is like that – sometimes just going with your gut, is what ultimately will lead to success.

• Interesting, but what http://www.socialdealer.com/ (Social Dealer) does for Automotive, is probably most industry verticals need – customized platforms with workflows that are made just for them and their use case.  We saw it in Hotels with Revinate and certainly Restaurants needed it as well.  I bet every business would want this kind of customization.  It’s something I have written about for a while, by the way.  The general, all purpose, monitoring systems may not hit the spot where they need to – better to offer different shells to them, adapted to each industry use case.  I predict we’ll see more of this in 2012.

• ThinkUp Sounds Interesting - which reminds me, I need to get cracking on my next set of AllAnalytics.com articles – ha!

Finally, I wanted to share a little bit of that “Analytics Evangelist” with PeekAnalytics (I’m on PeekYou’s Advisory Board, btw).

I was looking at the Peekanalytics report on my own Twitter account – WebMetricsGuru, and found that, most of the accounts PeekYou could verify (they are real people, in other words)

People often want to know how to use these tools – and PeekAnalytics is about to improve massively, shows great promise – the specifics will be announced soon.

Also, how well connected is the audience? (that is something an “evangelist” can often say in a way that spreads the enthusiasm) – turns out it takes a good story to take numbers and turn them into insight – a way of describing what they mean or could mean.  That’s often missing – and it takes work to figure out what that is for the persons who need to see the information.

And 40% of my followers are using Geo-Location (checkins) which may be important to me – esp if I want to let them know where I am (or I, know where they are or have been lately).

See how the context and story help – perhaps hearing it from PeekYou’s founders helps me to see it for myself – and perhaps say it in a way that is most meaningful to me, and to people who read my blog or other writings.

No surprise that 10% of my followers are in NYC, but I see 2% are in Atlanta (and higher than average), and I’ve never been there (maybe I ought to go).  Also London is strong – but I visit there, often.

And I suppose it helps to know that many people who follow me (and hopefully, read my blog) also have a decent amount of disposable income. Ha!  Of course, what one considers “extra cash” is subject to each person’s circumstances – but you can see how this information could inform your marketing and customer acquisition strategies.   Again, I feel here is a role I was made for – to help make the case for these emerging platforms in a way that is often, hopefully, convincing.

And PeekAnalytics is getting pretty sophisticated with their segmentation – later this year subscribers will be able to drill down, deep into each category, and get the account information connected with each segmentation. Very nice.

So, that’s it for today – and I think I got to finally sit down and write a long post – the way I like to – by letting my thoughts flow.

But one more thing – check out THIS SITE - a friend of mine, a engineer and visionary created a series of applications, including a DREAM Application that works with Any Dream.  I’ve been using it and I like it, alot.

More about that in a later post.

Have a good weekend and a good SuperBowl (if you follow that – I don’t, but I know many people do – and it’s impossible not to hear all about that on Sunday and Monday).

Cheers!