Occam's Razor

MARCH 12, 2012

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

Big Data Predictive Analytics Unstructured Data Analytics 127

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

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.

Advertising 165

Advertising Metrics ROI Key Performance Indicator 165

Occam's Razor

DECEMBER 3, 2012

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

Marketing Advertising Strategy B2B 147

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

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

Marketing Data mining Measurement Advertising 144

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Data Science

Occam's Razor

APRIL 23, 2012

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).

Key Performance Indicator 152

Key Performance Indicator Measurement Metrics KPI 152

Occam's Razor

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

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

Analytics Visualization Metrics Dashboards 142

Occam's Razor

OCTOBER 15, 2012

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

Marketing Advertising Insurance Strategy 136

Occam's Razor

JANUARY 30, 2012

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.

Key Performance Indicator 145

Key Performance Indicator Analytics Marketing Metrics 145

Occam's Razor

JANUARY 9, 2012

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

Marketing B2B Measurement Experimentation 140

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 20, 2012

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.

Measurement 138

Measurement IT Metrics Marketing 138

Occam's Razor

JUNE 25, 2012

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.

Data Collection 130

Data Collection Advertising Metrics Marketing 130

Occam's Razor

MAY 14, 2012

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!

Measurement 128

Measurement Analytics Metrics Advertising 128

Occam's Razor

JULY 23, 2012

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.

Consulting 126

Consulting Analytics Measurement Marketing 126

Occam's Razor

JUNE 4, 2012

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

Reporting Analytics Advertising Scorecard 127

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 13, 2012

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

Modeling Marketing Advertising ROI 124

Howard Dresner

AUGUST 28, 2012

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.

Publishing 45

Publishing Marketing Data Collection IT 45

Howard Dresner

JANUARY 9, 2012

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.

Business Objectives 40

Business Objectives Marketing Reporting Business Intelligence 40

Edwin Chen

JULY 30, 2012

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

Metrics Testing Modeling Machine Learning 81

Edwin Chen

JULY 5, 2012

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 ?

Interactive 81

Interactive Measurement Visualization Technology 81

Edwin Chen

MARCH 19, 2012

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.

Modeling 81

Modeling Statistics IT 81

Edwin Chen

FEBRUARY 8, 2012

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.

Measurement 77

Measurement Big Data IT 77

Edwin Chen

JANUARY 2, 2012

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?

Snapshot 75

Snapshot Modeling Optimization Measurement 75

Edwin Chen

JANUARY 16, 2012

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

Testing Interactive Visualization IT 74

Howard Dresner

FEBRUARY 20, 2012

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

Business Intelligence 56

Business Intelligence Data Collection Marketing 56

Paul DeBeasi

NOVEMBER 19, 2012

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

Sales Management Enterprise Modeling 40

Paul DeBeasi

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

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.

Advertising 40

Advertising Software Sales Enterprise 40

Paul DeBeasi

AUGUST 16, 2012

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.

Enterprise 40

Enterprise Reporting IT Technology 40

Paul DeBeasi

AUGUST 13, 2012

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.

Experimentation 40

Experimentation Enterprise Risk Management 40

Edwin Chen

MARCH 4, 2012

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.

Interactive 52

Interactive Visualization IT 52

Howard Dresner

JANUARY 6, 2012

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.

Business Intelligence 40

Business Intelligence Data Collection Marketing 40

Bruno Aziza

DECEMBER 21, 2012

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

Software 40

Software Technology 40

Howard Dresner

MARCH 12, 2012

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%.

Business Intelligence 40

Business Intelligence Data Collection Marketing IT 40

Howard Dresner

JUNE 14, 2012

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

Finance Sales Publishing Reporting 40

Howard Dresner

MAY 1, 2012

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.

Business Intelligence 40

Business Intelligence Marketing Publishing Enterprise 40

Howard Dresner

FEBRUARY 13, 2012

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.

Business Intelligence 40

Business Intelligence Measurement Marketing Software 40

Nutanix

DECEMBER 18, 2012

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

Technology 20

Technology 20

Nutanix

DECEMBER 3, 2012

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

Optimization 20

Optimization Enterprise Marketing 20

Nutanix

NOVEMBER 30, 2012

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

Marketing 20

Marketing 20

Nutanix

NOVEMBER 22, 2012

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

Consulting 20

Consulting Optimization IT 20

Nutanix

NOVEMBER 17, 2012

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

Marketing 20

Marketing IT 20

Nutanix

OCTOBER 11, 2012

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

Marketing 20

Marketing Technology IT 20

Nutanix

OCTOBER 11, 2012

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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