As I write this, I am making the great swoop over the upper reaches of the North as I fly home to San Francisco from Berlin. X Change Berlin is over – X Change Los Angeles lies ahead. It was a great pleasure, as always, to be there and we’ve come a long way in a single year. This year’s X Change was, I think, better in nearly every respect. We had a larger group. We had more practitioners. We had more and better conversations. We had a better hotel. We even, though I cannot suppose this will continue to... Continue reading

This weekend I fly to Berlin for our second X Change EU. We’re all sold out (as usual) – and I’m looking forward to a tremendous event. Special thanks this year to both Matthias Bettag and Michael Feiner who kept the momentum going while I was buried in E&Y transition stuff. I have to think about my Huddle schedule! It’s a good idea to register early since some Huddles fill up (whether in LA or Berlin) – and it’s a first come, first serve system. But there has to be some perk to running the event, right! I’m thinking of... Continue reading

Enterprise Voice of Customer (VoC) programs are surprisingly broken. Individual channels are often static, badly sampled, too operational and over-focused on top-line metrics. There is little coordination of research between channels and almost no ability to create a cross-channel understanding of customer. The technologies we use lack critical text classification capabilities. And, to top it all off, there is virtually no ability to use dashboarding and reporting to distribute customer attitudes out to real decision-makers. The solution? A revolution in VoC - the Customer Intelligence System. Continue reading

It’s conference season, so my presentations are starting to overlap in strange, circular patterns around my blogging. A month or so ago, I interrupted an extended critique of enterprise VoC and Customer Experience efforts to dive down into a discussion of Social Media and simulation based on my eMetrics presentation. That, in turn, got interrupted by two posts on big data that came out of a session I facilitated (rather like an X Change Huddle) on big data for regulated industries and a client internal webinar on building a digital big data system. This week I was out at VoC... Continue reading

In last week's post, I took another crack at defining what makes "big data" real and not just more of the same with an extra helping of hype. Creating a sound definition of big data may not have a huge amount of practical significance - but it isn't without importance. Knowing what you're dealing with and why/whether it's really different from what you've done before has a host of implications for questions around resourcing, process and technology. But finding a good definition of big data isn’t what I thought most compelling or important in the discussions that triggered these posts.... Continue reading

The emerging definition of "big data" around the Four V's: Volume, Velocity, Veracity and Variety leaves the whole concept vulnerable to skeptics who argue that it's just "more" of the same. While it's usually safe to take a contrarian position when it comes to anything on the Hype Curve, in this case the skeptics are in the wrong. Big data is different and there's a better definition of the problem than the Four V's that shows why. Continue reading

The vast majority of enterprise reporting and dashboarding is confined to “showing the current state”. We spend a huge amount of time showing people what happened – virtually none showing what’s likely to happen or what’s driving those numbers. We’re like weathermen who only report the temperature – never the forecast or the factors explaining that forecast. It just isn’t that useful. By embedding models into reporting, we have the opportunity to fundamentally transform them: from static snapshots that serve as little more than “Warning” signs to real business tools that help users understand what levers they have to drive... Continue reading

You might be tempted to think that my title refers to “big picture” trends taken from this past week’s eMetrics. That could be true, but in fact it’s pretty much the Table of Contents from my presentation in the Social Media Track this past Wednesday. If that seems like too much, and too disparate, ground to cover in any forty minute presentation, you’d be right. But in my defense, I was really addressing a single topic – building good enterprise dashboards – that just happens to integrate all four of these things into a single, unified approach. Reporting often seems... Continue reading

With all the activity and inevitable disruption surrounding our acquisition, I haven’t had as much chance as usual to talk about and work on X Change. We‘re a couple of months out from the Berlin event, however, and I wanted to spend a little bit of time covering some of the highlights of this year’s event – starting with the Keynote. Several years back at the X Change U.S. we did a Four Founders Keynote that was, and has remained, my all time favorite X Change opening. That session featured four pioneers in the industry all of whom had started... Continue reading

Early last summer, the Semphonic offices were briefly torn apart, thoroughly disrupted for a day, and then (rather like Thing 1 & Thing 2's work in the The Cat in the Hat) carefully restored to normalcy by a Fox News Documentary crew. Many months later, we finally got to see the fruits of that labor when Fox News aired the documentary "Your Secret's Out" this Sunday evening. It's a hoot. Check out the old Semphonic offices, a bunch of Semphonic folks busily analyzing data, and yours truly on what "everyone should know about data analysis." Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzJrevDHuGg Given... Continue reading

I certainly intend to write more about our new home at E&Y and our strategy going forward. However, with all the transition and onboarding and setup I've been dealing with (not to mention things like Income Taxes) I have an irresistible impulse to talk about real work! I’ve been working through a series on the creation of a Customer Intelligence System to track and report on customer attitudes. It’s a sprawling subject that touches on quite a range of topics – from online survey research to unstructured data to social media – each of which could consume a book-length treatment.... Continue reading

It’s been so nice hearing from people throughout the community with kind words and congratulations regarding the acquisition. Makes for a very nice weekend (if only Duke – my alma mater – had won in the 2As)! In my last post, I laid out some of the background to the acquisition, why we went in this direction, and why I think it’s important not just for us but for the entire industry. In this post, I just wanted to lay out some of the immediate implications – especially for folks I think of as “Friends of Semphonic”. So here, in... Continue reading

Normally I work my way around any topic to deliver (after at least 3 pages) the punchline. But not this time. The news is just too big to put anywhere in the headline. I am so excited about this – it’s been quite a while in planning and quite a while in executing. But now that it’s here it feels as sudden as an earthquake. Here’s the Press Release announcing the acquisition. And here’s a bit of background. It’s certainly no secret that my goal for Semphonic has been to build the leading digital analytics consultancy in the U.S. It’s... Continue reading

In my last couple of posts, I’ve hammered away on what I think are some pretty big issues with the way most companies are using online surveys. I don’t want to leave the impression that online surveys are all there is to building a Customer Intelligence System (CIS). I love online surveys because they are so flexible. You can create an online survey for many, many different types of research and almost any type of question or situation. But "many, many" different types isn’t quite the same thing as all types; and there are some important problems for which online... Continue reading

In this first part of a series on doing measurement that matters, I’ve been focusing on one of my main themes this year to Semphonic’s clients – that it’s time to fundamentally re-think Voice of Customer and customer research programs. I started the series with a look at how the 2012 Obama campaign broke from traditional survey research to create a massive customer feedback cycle that not only allowed them to better predict battleground states but let them rapidly test and experiment with campaign messaging targeted toward key states. The use of massive survey collection to supplement behavioral modeling and... Continue reading

In this recent series of posts, I’ve been mapping out a complete re-formulation of the use of Voice of Customer (VoC) and traditional customer opinion research in the organization. It’s a part of the analytics puzzle that is shamefully under-utilized in most enterprises – especially given how inexpensive it is to put the people and technology in place to do a much better job. There are parts of this that I’ve been thinking and writing about for quite some time. Other parts are inspired by recent real-world examples – especially the use the Obama campaign made of customer attitudinal research... Continue reading

In my last post, I described how in the 2012 presidential campaign the data science team for President Obama fundamentally re-engineered their use of survey and customer attitudes research to gain a significant competitive advantage. Two pieces of what they did really stand out as significant. First, they broke decisively from the traditional opinion research paradigm focused on broad-brush random samples to predict the election outcome. By collecting massive amounts of research and tying it to individual voter behavioral scores, they were able to use survey research to fine-tune predictive models of turnout and choice. This system created a remarkably... Continue reading

I dislike politics; probably not least because I worked in political direct mail for a half-dozen years after graduating from college. Some people take to it and some don’t. I was a don’t. But whatever your political opinions or however sanguinary or pessimistic your view of American politics, there’s no doubt that Presidential elections represent fascinating case-studies in persuasion, media-buying, PR, and, these days, analysis. The recent election was particularly interesting because the two camps (and numerous media outlets) were unusually varied in their predictions of the outcome leading up to the election. What’s more, those predictions appeared to have... Continue reading

I’ve got several weeks of travel coming up – on a plane as I write this - including a somewhat abbreviated stay at the Adobe Summit. If you’re going to be at the Summit and would like to setup a meeting, just drop me a line. On a totally non-business note, I took a rare three day weekend last week over President’s Day. We took the girls down to Monterey, which they love, and had a chance to re-visit the Aquarium. It reminded me of my all-time favorite X Change event –held there several years back. I still remember that... Continue reading

I started off this year with Luther-like epistle on “Measurement that Matters.” It was a small (much smaller than Luther’s) set of theses about how enterprise measurement can be made to matter. The projects I described were chosen because they force or are strongly tied to driving actual use of data in the business. Why? Because far too often measurement is something that the enterprise DOES but doesn’t USE. In upcoming posts, I’m going to tackle those projects in more detail and show why I think they are powerful, how they can be done, and why, when put together, they... Continue reading

I was down at Splunk this Friday and they reminded me that a few weeks back Svetlana Sicular of Gartner wrote an excellent piece about the state of ‘big data’ (with, as it happens, a glowing mention of Splunk). At its center was Gartner’s truly wonderful concept of the hype cycle. Instantly recognizable to all of us, the hype cycle looks like this: Svetlana argues that big data may be passing the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and entering the “Trough of Disillusionment.” If this sounds like a digital analtyics version of the tots game, Candyland, that just makes it all... Continue reading

I did quite a bit of writing in 2012 – which is a good thing since it’s one of the favorite parts of my job. Oddly enough, it often goes hand-in-hand with my least favorite part of the job – travel. Most of my white papers last year were written on the airplane – undistracted by phone or meetings or internet. As long as I’m not sitting in a middle seat between two behemoths and that dreaded airline villain ‘The Full Recliner’, I find travel quite productive. Since I have some heavy travel weeks coming up, I’m hoping to knock... Continue reading

It’s the battle of the Tag Management…Conferences these days. I was down in San Diego for Tealium’s Digital Velocity this past week and I'm looking forward to Ensighten’s Agility Conference this week. Even the names are kind of the same! I don’t generally favor scheduling competing Conferences so close together (Jim Sterne and I, for example, work to keep a nice separation between X Change and eMetrics events), but that’s kind of the way things are in the Tag Management world these days. It’s growing, it’s crowded, it’s competitive and it’s not all lovey-dovey. That’s a shame really, because I... Continue reading

How is it possible that with 2013 only 3 weeks old I’m already behind schedule? I’d hoped to open 2013 with my resolutions blog (check), finishing up the strategy series (check), and then doing a recap of all of 2012 writings to highlight favorite pieces and revisit some of the thinking (un-check). Perhaps I should have tackled that in December, but somehow the holidays just got in the way. I still hope to do that big recap, but before I go there, I wanted to highlight this past week’s release of our first whitepaper for 2013: Measuring and Evaluating your... Continue reading

In a series of posts at the end of last year, I outlined the steps to create a comprehensive digital measurement strategy. Building a strategy begins with a careful, objective assessment of the existing digital measurement program. In the next step, a high-level model of the digital business is constructed. The model is designed to focus attention on what needs to be captured to understand and optimize the digital channel. Using that Model, a Data Science Roadmap is created. The Roadmap describes the real-world analytics projects that need to be tackled. These projects are used to drive the technology stack... Continue reading