Thoughts, musings, and, hopefully, not too many redundancies on the world of business data. If you missed the irony in the previous sentence, you may struggle with my writing style.
In my last post, one of the challenges I described was that it was impossible to get a good read on the number of impressions a brand was garnering from their fan page status updates — a status update on a fan page appears in the live feeds of the page’s fan…assuming the fan hasn’t [...]
If you are a marketer, Facebook is important — the number of active users of the site exceeds the population of the United States, and it’s growth is going to do nothing but increase. Check out the Facebook statistics page for a slew of numbers that are all…big. Because of the growth of Facebook as [...]
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on dashboards — different dashboards for different purposes for different clients, with a heavy emphasis on making dashboards that can be efficiently updated. I’m finding that I keep coming back to two key principles:
A dashboard, by definition, fits on a single page — this is straight [...]
I’m finding myself in a lot of conversations where I’m explaining the difference between “outputs” and “outcomes.” It’s a distinction that can go a long way when it comes to laying out a measurement strategy. It’s also a distinction that can seem incredibly academic and incredibly boring. To the unenlightened!
Outputs are simply things that happened [...]
Put this down as one of my more tactical posts, brought on by a fit of lingering annoyance with the use (and by “use” I mean “grotesque misuse”) of trend indicators on reports and dashboards. The trouble is that trends are a trickier business than they seem at first blush, and, at the same time, [...]
Judah Phillips wrote a post last week laying out why the answer to the question, “Is web analytics hard or easy?” is a resounding “it depends.” It depends, he wrote, on what tools are being used, on how the site being analyzed is built, on the company’s requirements/expectations for analytics, on the skillset of the [...]
My posts have gotten pretty sporadic (…again, sadly), and I’ll once again play the “lotta’ stuff goin’ on” card. Fortunately, it’s mostly fun stuff, but it does mean I’ve got a couple of posts written in my head that haven’t yet gotten digitized and up on the interweb. This post is one of them.
As I [...]
I’ve had this post half-written for a few days, but it became more timely last night when Mark Buehrle pitched a perfect game for the Chicago White Sox, so it just became a “finish it up over lunch” priority. I’ve got my own little baseball-related accomplishment that I added to my site earlier this week — [...]
I stumbled across a post by Don Campbell (CTO of BI and Performance Management at IBM — he was at Cognos when they got acquired) today that really got my gears turning. His 10 Red Hot BI Trends provide a lot of food for thought for a single post (for one thing, the post only lists [...]
Stephen Few had a recent post, Can Computers Analyze Data?, that started: “Since ‘business analytics’ has come into vogue, like all newly popular technologies, everyone is talking about it but few are defining what it is.” Few’s post was largely a riff off of an article by Merv Adrian on the BeyeNETWORK: Today’s ‘Analytic Applications’ — [...]
Three things I know: 1) My wife got the raw end of the deal when she married me, 2) I blog because it keeps my e-mails shorter, and 3) If you have the urge to talk about data usage in business, I'll do so until long after that desire has passed (for you). If you want to know more, check out my About Gilligan on Data page.