blog.cankoklu

Challenge 1. From reporting to actionable insights

Challenge 2. Selection of multiple web analytics systems

Challenge 3. Evaluating social media 

Challenge 4. Improving search engine marketing

Challenge 5. Attribution of sale to individual digital channel and multichannel attribution

Other challenges

So what wasn’t covered that we expected to be? Well there was surprisingly little discussion on AB and multivariate testing, probably because there was an adjacent table hosted by Craig Sullivan covering this, although it was mentioned by several participants as a worthwhile activity.

If you’re completing a vendor selection I have just been alerted by @JimSterne of this new specialist AB or MVT tool comparison site.

One of the areas of analytics that excites me most is tools that elicit feedback from customers. These systems close the loop from most web analytics systems which show what customers, but not why. For example on my site and at Econsultancy we use Kampyle to gain feedback and this gives great granular feedback, for example, feedback on individual reports or problems with the site and this is integrated with Google Analytics. I notice that Kampyle now has a two-way integration with Omniture which enables marketers to be automatically alerted about on-site issues affecting customer service and conversion.

I'm also seeing more companies replicating the idea from Dell Ideastorm by creating open or closed customer communities where they give feedback which feeds through into new product ideas. Ideascale offers an increasingly popular solution for this.

If you’ve found some effective solutions to some of these challenges or have other challenges to discuss, do let us know.

Facebook will be rolling out its location features to an enormous user base — there are now more than 400 million users of the social network in total, 100 million of which access the site via mobile regularly. The company also has its own native apps for all of the major mobile platforms. All of this gives Facebook’s location features an enormous edge over the competition.

file under "g" for "game changer".

Today at the Google’s Campfire One event at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View the Internet search giant is launching its new app store for business, known as the Google Apps Marketplace.

Last week, we broke the story that Google Apps Marketplace would launch today, reporting that it would be an app store integrated within Google Apps that would allow third-party developers to sell software directly to Google’s business consumers.

Now, with developers gathered at the Googleplex, we’re about to learn how Google Apps Marketplace works and, more importantly, which apps are going to be available at launch.

Kurzweil: The trend so far is that communications technology is moving closer to us rather than forcing humans to become more like the classical notion of a machine. When I was a student at MIT, you did have to be an engineer to use the computer, and I had to use my bicycle to get to the one computer on campus. Today, I have a computer on my belt, and I am able to access virtually all human knowledge with a few keystrokes. And, already, 5 billion people have these mobile devices in their pockets. The technologies that succeed in the marketplace are the ones that meet our basic human needs to communicate and socialize. 

Within 20 years, computers will match human intelligence and pass the "Turing test," in which they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. But this will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to compete with us and displace us. We will use these machines as we have always used our tools -- to extend our own reach.

I have to say I didn't find anything "shocking".. But I'm guessing they just had to put something sensationalist in the article title. Because, you know.. He's Ray fcking Kurzweil..

What a news sources tell you may be just as important as what they don't tell you. 'Tell me more' is a system that, given a seed news story, looks for similar ones in other news sources and automatically detects meaningful differences with respect to the seed story. The system presents snippets of text that make these differences visible.

Sounds very promising..

AdMob, the mobile advertising network currently being acquired by Google, this morning featured the latest results of its monthly analysis of consumer usage and attitudes across the Android, iPhone and webOS application platforms in its January 2010 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report.

Among the most interesting things the survey found is the conclusion that 91 percent of iPhone users would recommend their device, compared to 84 percent of Android users and only 69 percent of webOS users.

That 22% difference has got to hurt for Palm.

This explains the unparalleled success of the iPhone.. Regardless of the functions or capabilities the device provides; the emotional attachment and the WOM created by the ease of use of the device causes a truly viral adoption among consumers.

It also fits in perfectly with the Harvard Business Review Article, "The One Number You Need To Grow". Which you can -and should- read, right here: http://hbr.org/2003/12/the-one-number-you-need-to-grow/ar/1

Gooogle is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search
Photo: Mauricio Alejo

The story of Google's algorithm begins with PageRank, the system invented in 1997 by cofounder Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. Page's now legendary insight was to rate pages based on the number and importance of links that pointed to them - to use the collective intelligence of the Web itself to determine which sites were most relevant. It was a simple and powerful concept, and - as Google quickly became the most successful search engine on the Web - Page and cofounder Sergey Brin credited PageRank as their company's fundamental innovation.

But that wasn't the whole story. "People hold on to PageRank because it's recognizable," Manber says. "But there were many other things that improved the relevancy." These involve the exploitation of certain signals, contextual clues that help the search engine rank the millions of possible results to any query, ensuring that the most useful ones float to the top.

Web search is a multipart process. First, Google crawls the Web to collect the contents of every accessible site. This data is broken down into an index (organized by word, just like the index of a textbook), a way of finding any page based on its content. Every time a user types a query, the index is combed for relevant pages, returning a list that commonly numbers in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. The trickiest part, though, is the ranking process - determining which of those pages belong at the top of the list.

Read the rest of the article to understand the awesomeness of Google.

We believe that the Browser Choice screen is an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives — and we hope for the conversation to become broader and deeper. We’ve set up opentochoice.org as one place for you to discuss what this choice means to you — and we hope that you’ll add your own voice to this conversation and those to come.

Whether or not you decide to keep your current Web browser, we encourage you to learn more about your browser and the impacts it has on the way you see the world, and to make your own choice.

Firefox's browser choice site..

Kasparov himself reminded me of the match in an article he published in the February 11 issue of the New York Review of Books . It's ostensibly a review of the book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind , by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, but much more interesting for me were Kasparov's insights on the interplay between people and computers around the game of chess. He's a formidably intelligent person (duh) who has thought deeply about the implications of the computerization of his profession. He's also a fine writer, so the piece is a delight to read. And it contains lessons for playing the game of business better.

Here's what the article boils down to:

I didn't think that smart process design - in this case, a process for determining the "best" chess move - could overcome both cognitive and computational deficits. But it did, even in this domain where brains and calculations would appear to be the only things that matter. As Kasparov writes of this amazing result, "Weak human machine better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human machine inferior process." I think that's my new motto.

Also mentioned in the article, and definitely worth learning about, is the Moravec's paradox .