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A Big Data Imperative: Driving Big Action

Occam's Razor

Avoiding big disappointment and the hows were on my mind as I prepared my keynote for Strata 2012 Big Data conference. Advanced Analytics Big Data Digital Analytics Leadership Marketing Tips Web Analytics big data digital analytics Predictive Analytics rules for revolutionaries strata 2012Is there anything in the analytics space that is so full of promise and hype and sexiness and possible awesomeness than "big data?" " I don't think so.

Big Data 127
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Facebook Advertising / Marketing: Best Metrics, ROI, Business Value

Occam's Razor

Facebook has an incredible audience, 950 million strong and counting. This audience is immensely attractive to Brands and Marketers around the world. We've seen explosive growth in brand pages, types of advertising and other fun ways to monetize this audience. Increased investment in Facebook as an engagement/acquisition channel has translated into requests from CEOs, CMOs and other CxOs about the return on that investment.

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Is Your Brand Magnificent At Digital Marketing? A Diagnostic Framework.

Occam's Razor

Do you have a 2009, 2012, 2015 mobile strategy? In a recent engagement I defined three stages of a successful mobile strategy: 2009, 2012 and 2015. Your mobile strategy is ready for 2012. Mobile: 2009 or 2012 or 2015.

Marketing 147
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Mobile Marketing 2015: Rethink Customer Acquisition, Intent Targeting

Occam's Razor

I see a link to Cheap Flights under their search results, I click on it, the page loads, and I start crying… How it is possible that in 2012 an organization as successful, as profitable, and as full of intelligent people as Travelocity has still not figured out how to configure their CMS to detect a mobile browser user agent id and serve me a mobile-friendly webpage? I'm immensely excited about how completely mobile platforms impact our lives.

Marketing 144
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5 Things a Data Scientist Can Do to Stay Current

DataRobot together with Snowflake – a leading cloud data platform provider — is helping data scientists stay current with the latest technology and data science best practices so that they can excel in an increasingly AI-driven workplace. Five Things a Data Scientist Can Do to Stay Current offers data scientists guidance for thriving in AI-driven enterprises.

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You Are What You Measure, So Choose Your KPIs (Incentives) Wisely!

Occam's Razor

Yes, data is important. Helps make marketing better. Makes for smart organizations. Blah, blah, blah. You know the drill: Measure. Find insights. Take action. (Or Or die trying.) Ascend to corporate heaven. While there is a great deal of appreciation for the power of metrics/data, I've come to realize that Sr. Leaders don't quite appreciate the deep, and often corrosive, consequences of choosing metric x over metric y as a key performance indicator (KPI).

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Excellent Analytics Tip #21: Convert Complex Data Into Simple Logical Stories

Occam's Razor

I love this quote from Richard Branson: Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple. Is there any place Mr. Branson's words are more relevant than our big data world ? I'm convinced that an important minor contributor to the business world being less data driven is the fact that we are not as awesome as we need to be when it comes to communicating clearly, logically and simply when it comes to presenting data.

Analytics 142
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Global Multichannel Consumer Behaviour (Research/Purchase) Analysis

Occam's Razor

The data was collected in the first part of 2012, between January and May for the Barometer and between January and February for the Enumeration. What you see is for 2012.

Marketing 136
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Google Analytics Tutorial: 8 Valuable Tips To Hustle With Data!

Occam's Razor

It is painfully heartbreaking to realize that a very small tiny number of people who have access to web analytics tools actually use them. I mean really use the tools. Ravage all the features. Exploit every possible button. Produce built-in visualization magic. Poke into the hidden crevices and discover exotic delights. Nourish yourself with the "info snacks" the tool's engineers and product managers cooked up. This post is all about that.

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The 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book. Change or Perish.

Occam's Razor

It is the season to be predicting the future, but that is almost always a career-limiting move. So I'm not going to do that. It is a lot easier to predict the present. So I'm not going to do that either. Rather, I'm going to share a clump of realities/rules garnered from the present to help ready you for the predictable near future.

Marketing 140
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The Biggest Mistake Web Analysts Make… And How To Avoid It!

Occam's Razor

The single biggest mistake web analysts make is working without purpose. We work very hard. We torture SiteCatalyst. We send out a lot of data. Then we resend it again and again. And yet our work results in very little impact on the business in terms of action taken by company leaders. Why this sad state? Almost always we dive into the ocean of data first. Sadder still, we don't ask questions later. We never ask questions. No questions. No tie to what's important.

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EU Cookie / Privacy Laws: Implications On Data Collection And Analysis

Occam's Razor

Privacy is a very important issue when it comes to digital. The way data is collected online and what happens to it is a much-scrutinized issue (and rightly so). Digital data collection is also exceedingly complex, perhaps a reflection of the organic nature, and subsequent explosion, of the internet. Hence even sophisticated users find it difficult to know everything, one can hardly expect normal digital users to know what's really happening.

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Excellent Analytics Tips #20: Measuring Digital "Brand Strength"

Occam's Razor

It used to fall behind lag the other two in brand queries, but you can see how starting late 2009 (bad year for Target in this context) Amazon overtook Target and now (2011, 2012) is casting a big shadow over Target. A lot of digital analytics focuses on direct response (conversions, leads, etc.). But there is an additional valuable, and sexy, focus of our marketing we don't give enough analytical love: Branding!

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Web Analytics Consulting: A Simple Framework For Smarter Decisions

Occam's Razor

As I've gotten older I've come to appreciate the value of frameworks a lot more. When we are young, the answers to everything are simpler because, of course, we know everything. What metrics should I use? Use BR & CV. What digital marketing works? Definitely Y, do that. How can I improve my business? Simple, do A then B and you're done. So on and so forth. One upside (or is it a downside?) of age is the wisdom of realizing how much you don't know.

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Google Analytics Custom Reports: Paid Search Campaigns Analysis

Occam's Razor

Every Analysis Ninja knows that standard reports are lame. The lameness stems from the fact that they are created for everyone, stuffed with as much "stuff" as anyone might want and hence in the end satiate no one. Custom reports on the other hand are, well, hand crafted by you for a specific purpose with a set of guiding principles (" Acquisition, Behavior, Outcomes! ") ") that ensure that they don't so much deliver data as much as deliver insights.

Reporting 127
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Dear Avinash: Attribution Modeling, Org Culture, Deeper Analysis

Occam's Razor

A couple weeks back I'd requested the nice folks following me on Google+ and Facebook to submit their most important digital marketing and analytics questions. The questions reveal a bunch of things we used to worry about, and continue to, like data quality and creating data driven cultures. They also reveal things that starting to become scary (Privacy! EU Cookies!) and others that are already delivering nightmares (a multi device world!).

Modeling 124
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Dresner Advisory Services Newsletter - September 2012

Howard Dresner

Based on user responses from last year's Wisdom of Crowds TM Business Intelligence Market Study ®, we expanded our research agenda for 2012 to include the emerging areas of Collaborative BI and Cloud BI. Dear Friends , It's been a busy few months at Dresner Advisory Services and I wanted to bring you all up to date regarding our activities and achievements.

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Listed Vendors for 2012 Wisdom of Crowds BI Market Study ®

Howard Dresner

Hello All! Respondents to our Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® are able to report on any BI vendor they like. However, we provide a list of vendors that they can select from, as well as an "other" option.

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Edge Prediction in a Social Graph: My Solution to Facebook's User Recommendation Contest on Kaggle

Edwin Chen

A couple weeks ago, Facebook launched a link prediction contest on Kaggle, with the goal of recommending missing edges in a social graph. I love investigating social networks , so I dug around a little, and since I did well enough to score one of the coveted prizes, I’ll share my approach here.

Metrics 81
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Soda vs. Pop with Twitter

Edwin Chen

One of the great things about Twitter is that it’s a global conversation anyone can join anytime. Eavesdropping on the world, what what! Of course, it gets even better when you can mine all this chatter to study the way humans live and interact. For example, how do people in New York City differ from those in Silicon Valley? We tend to think they’re more financially driven and restless with the world – is this true, and if so, how much more ?

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Infinite Mixture Models with Nonparametric Bayes and the Dirichlet Process

Edwin Chen

Imagine you’re a budding chef. A data-curious one, of course, so you start by taking a set of foods (pizza, salad, spaghetti, etc.) and ask 10 friends how much of each they ate in the past day. Your goal: to find natural groups of foodies, so that you can better cater to each cluster’s tastes. For example, your fratboy friends might love wings and beer , your anime friends might love soba and sushi, your hipster friends probably dig tofu, and so on.

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Movie Recommendations and More via MapReduce and Scalding

Edwin Chen

iSg92N #iTunes — gggf (@GalMusic92) February 8, 2012. New York) 4sq.com/zZ5xGd — Simon Ackerman (@SimonAckerman) February 8, 2012. xtw3d3 — Benjamin West (@BenTheWest) February 21, 2012. Scalding is an in-house MapReduce framework that Twitter recently open-sourced. Like Pig , it provides an abstraction on top of MapReduce that makes it easy to write big data jobs in a syntax that’s simple and concise.

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Introduction to Conditional Random Fields

Edwin Chen

Suppose you want to mine Twitter for the types of presents people received for Christmas: What people on Twitter wanted for Christmas, and what they got: twitter.com/edchedch/statu… — Edwin Chen (@echen) January 2, 2012. Imagine you have a sequence of snapshots from a day in Justin Bieber’s life, and you want to label each image with the activity it represents (eating, sleeping, driving, etc.). How can you do this?

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Quick Introduction to ggplot2

Edwin Chen

This is a bare-bones introduction to ggplot2 , a visualization package in R. It assumes no knowledge of R. For a better-looking version of this post, see this Github repository , which also contains some of the example datasets I use and a literate programming version of this tutorial. Preview. Let’s start with a preview of what ggplot2 can do. Given Fisher’s iris data set and one simple command… 1. qplot ( Sepal.Length , Petal.Length , data = iris , color = Species ).

Testing 74
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Early Insight from Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ®

Howard Dresner

Data collection continues until April 2, 2012. >>> As we enter our second week of data collection for the third annual Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® - I thought I might share an early insight from data collected this far. >>> Please click here to take the survey >> Please click here to take the survey <<< Thanks!! Best, Howard. Business Intelligence Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study

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Cisco buys Meraki

Paul DeBeasi

Cisco has announced their intent to buy Meraki. Meraki provides wired/wireless LAN and security products all managed via the cloud. What does “managed via the cloud” mean? It means that the management server is in the cloud, rather than in the enterprise data center (see figure). The benefit of such an approach is ease of installation and management.

Sales 40
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Cisco Connected Mobile Launch

Paul DeBeasi

Cisco launched their Connected Mobile solution today. What is it? In short, it is a method by which hotspot providers can advertise and deploy services to mobile devices before the device authenticates with the network and with little or no user action. Why should anyone care? Well, think about what you have to do to login to WiFi at a retailer, hotel, or airport.

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Mobile Architecture – Now live on Gartner.com

Paul DeBeasi

As I mentioned on Monday , Gartner has launched the first and only Mobile Reference Architecture for enterprise IT organizations. The Mobile Reference Architecture is an integrated set of research that helps IT organizations make technology, infrastructure and policy decisions that support their mobile initiatives. The Mobile Solution Path provides a summary of the mobile reference architecture.

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The New Gartner Mobile Reference Architecture

Paul DeBeasi

Summary: Gartner has introduced the first and only Mobile Reference Architecture for enterprise IT organizations. The Mobile Reference Architecture is an integrated set of research that helps IT organizations make technology, infrastructure and policy decisions that support their mobile initiatives. The Mobile Reference Architecture will help IT organizations: Accelerate mobile solution deployment. Satisfy a broad set of mobile requirements. Facilitate iterative decision making.

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Instant Interactive Visualization with d3 + ggplot2

Edwin Chen

It’s often easier to understand a chart than a table. So why is it still so hard to make a simple data graphic, and why am I still bombarded by mind-numbing reams of raw numbers ? Yeah, I love ggplot2 to death. But sometimes I want a little more interaction, and sometimes all I want is to drag-and-drop and be done.). So I’ve been experimenting with a small, ggplot2-inspired d3 app. Simply drop a file, and bam! Instant scatterplot: But wait – that’s only 2 dimensions.

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Third Annual Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ®

Howard Dresner

All the best for a successful 2012! Hello Folks and Happy New Year! A new year promises fresh beginnings and signals the advent of the next Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® cycle! Having started in earnest in 2010, this will be our third comprehensive study of the BI marketplace - and our most ambitious to date! We're in the process of developing and finalizing the survey instrument now and expect to start data collection within weeks.

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Are Cloud Providers Absentee Landlords On Cybersecurity?

Bruno Aziza

Guest post written by Marc Maiffret Marc Maiffret is chief technology officer of BeyondTrust, which sells security and compliance software. Marc Maiffret Would you trust your sensitive corporate data in the hands of a stranger? Recent Amazon and Apple iCloud experiences tells us that cloud security across the board, needs to be enhanced, [.]. Security /security Innovation /innovation Decision Maker Content decisionmaker cionetwork technology

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Wisdom of Crowds TM Business Intelligence Market Study Update

Howard Dresner

Data collection will end on April 2, 2012 at 5PM ET. Hello Folks! We're only three weeks away from the end of data collection for the 3rd annual Wisdom of Crowds TM Business Intelligence Market Study. So, if you have not yet completed a survey, please click on this link now! Here are some of the study demographics to date: Geographies : To date, the study has the largest contribution from North America with 56% and EMEA contributing 26%.

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Howard Dresner - Untitled Article

Howard Dresner

The Third Annual Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® is Now Out! Hello Folks! As many of you know, the third edition of the Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® is the culmination of five months of effort. The result is 94 pages of in-depth analysis and commentary - including over 70 charts and tables - providing a picture of the Business Intelligence market and how it's changing.

Finance 40
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Howard Dresner - Untitled Article

Howard Dresner

Deep into Data Analysis Hello Friends. Since our last posting, we've been busy sorting through data and have now begun the analysis and documentation phase for the 3rd annual Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® ! We expect to begin releasing the findings to enterprise licensees mid May and will distribute to qualified study participants during the month of June.

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Third Annual Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® Now Open for Input!

Howard Dresner

Hello Folks! I am pleased to announce that the survey process for the 3rd annual Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study ® is now officially open for input! Like last year, you'll have an opportunity to evaluate your Business Intelligence software vendors on 32 essential criteria, plus a new "Integrity" measure. And, this year we've expanded the study to cover a wide range of important Business Intelligence issues, including Collaborative BI and Cloud BI.

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Lessons from the Road

Nutanix

I’d like to start my first blog post with a small introduction. I come from a family of pilots and teachers. We enjoy technology and travel, and are naturally comfortable speaking to an audience

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Walking Into the Nutanix Innovation Storm

Nutanix

After a terrific 3.5 year run at the highly disruptive and successful network security company Palo Alto Networks, I joined Nutanix as VP of Marketing exactly one month ago with great excitement and optimism about the opportunity we have to help enterprises reinvent their datacenters

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Crawl, Walk, Jog—and Then Sprint

Nutanix

With the lessons learned in the field we are now well capitalized and poised for much more accelerated growth and give our best shot to own the market for hyperconverged appliances

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Optimizing VMware View Performance on Nutanix

Nutanix

Coming from a large IT consulting firm I’ve gone through a great deal of datacenter build outs, green field IT deployments and cutovers. Now from all of those deployments, what was always the biggest issue and caused the most headaches

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Perhaps the Sexiest Demo the Tech Field Day Delegates Have Ever Seen?

Nutanix

With an introduction from the VP of marketing Howard Ting, former Palo Alto Networks dynamo, CEO Dheeraj Pandey kicked the day off with high level overview of the company and its vision for the future of the datacenter

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Small is Beautiful

Nutanix

When you are selling for an emerging technology company, a lot of things go against you, such as brand recognition, marketing budget, size of installed base and lack of executive sponsorship in most accounts. But, at least when it comes to Nutanix, customer support is not one of them

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The Emperor Has No Clothes!

Nutanix

If you are one of those early customers who made NetApp, we want you. If you are one of those business partners who made NetApp in your region and enjoyed healthy margins on every deal but are now seeing those margins slipping, we want you

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