Try it! It's Easy! A Big Data Tool for Your Facebook Account

Hello fellow WRMs.  This post will point you to a cool tool from Wolfram Alpha that will let you gain "big data" insight on you and your Facebook network.  It's easy to use and will also give you some insight to the power of even a simple big data tool at work. 

Wolfram Alpha is a "computational knowledge engine" designed to help users get answers in a different way than traditional search engines.  It's focus is not on searching the web, but on doing computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.  Rather than "find" an answer, it aims to "compute" the answer to any factual question.

The data sets and computational tools are useful for things that have factual answers like:

• find the DNA sequence at a given position on a chromosome
• get historical NFL player statistics
• play a 440Hz sine wave
• specify a point from which an eclipse should be visible
• generate maps of ancient continent configurations

It's a very powerful left brain tool but I suspect that most people don't know about it and/or are intimidated by it.  

So Wolfram Alpha has done something out-of-character to attract a wider audience. They've developed something interesting and fun for the common person, a tool which does an analysis of your Facebook account.

Simply click on the box above, allow Wolfram Alpha to access your Facebook data and you'll have a report in less than a minute.  You'll have to create a free Wolfram Alpha account too but it's worth it.

Then you'll receive a multi-page graphical report which you can update at anytime and compare over time.

You can see aggregate data of your social network for things like:

• Friends' relationship statuses
• Friends' ages
• Geographical ranges and extremes
• Most common friend names
• Friends with most mutual friends
• Friends with most friends

To me the most interesting graphic is the "friend network" graphic which visually shows the relationships among your friends.  Here's mine:

The naturally occurring clusters are my high school, my college, my town, my work and then the "outliers," those who aren't related to anyone else.  In the "live version" of this graphic you can hover over each dot to see who it is.

I hope you enjoy using Wolfram Alpha for your Facebook Report.  And do explore Wolfram Alpha...you may find it a powerful addition to your marketing toolkit.

Buyer Personas-Your best friend in marketing

I'm a huge fan of using buyer personas to help guide all manner of marketing decisions including pricing, content development, communication strategies, product design, website design and social media strategies.  In fact, I'd say that creating and consistently using a brand's buyer personas is one of the most important disciplines for the WRM.  Keeping focused on buyer personas insures that your product/service and marketing strategies are customer focused, not product or company focused.

A buyer persona is an archetypal example of a buyer that you create which represents a group of similar buyers that you wish to attract with your brand.  You could just make a list of demographics and psychographics of your intended market and segment them but having a well crafted buyer persona helps bring that market and the segments to life.  This helps everyone in your company to more intimately understand  the customer experience and make customer centric decisions.

Here's an example of a business and abbreviated buyer personas:

Let's say that you own a B&B and over time you've noticed three groups of buyers that tend to visit.  One group is of research scientists who stay for several weeks at a time while working at a nearby university.  Another is business people who tend to stay a few nights during the week.  A third is couples who come for romantic getaways on the weekend.  With each of these you can develop very detailed personas which will guide different pricing, packaging and marketing strategies.

Here are some of the attributes you might build into each of these three personas:



Mark has a Ph.D and is a leading DNA researcher.  He is very focused on his work.  He leaves the B&B early in the morning, not typically eating breakfast and comes back late at night.  He is not interested in exploring the area.  All his travel plans and decisions are made by an administrative person at his home university.  He will typically stay for 3-4 weeks once a year. He has no social media presence or interest.



Elizabeth is a software salesperson and comes to town once a quarter for 2 or 3 nights.  Some nights she is out for business dinners while others she enjoys exploring the town or just relaxing.  She makes her own travel reservations and has some leeway in spending.  Sometimes she stays in hotels but prefers B&Bs because of the character and personal nature.  Keeping daily contact with her family is important. Having wireless internet access is important.  She uses Facebook for social interaction with friends and family but doesn't join groups with commercial interest.  She has a Twitter account but doesn't monitor it regularly and doesn't Tweet much.  She also has a LinkedIn account used for business networking.  She prefers getting commercial messaging via email as long as it is relevant to her and not more than once a week.



Rich and Lisa have 2 young children and try to have a romantic getaway for a night or two every month. Lisa tends to do the research balancing price, the ambience of the B&B or hotel, and the local charm and activities.  They have a set of regular places that they return to but also try new places once in a while.  Lisa is a heavy Facebook user for all things social and commercial.  She doesn't use Twitter.  They do look for getaway specials which often influence their decision.

You can imagine how even just these three personas would affect the marketing strategy for the B&B owner. They each have different needs and sensitivities to be addressed through services, pricing, marketing strategies and website design.  Perhaps s/he might even design the B&B website with three different portals on the home page for these personas.

Do you have buyer personas?  Are they intimate, insightful, detailed and alive?  Does your whole company embrace them?  Make them you best friends and they will serve you well.

Do-It-Yourself Well Roundedness in 12 Weeks

One website I've followed, admired, and used as a resource for several years is "The Personal MBA".  I recommend it to any WRM as a great list of carefully selected business books which will increase your well roundedness.

It was created in 2005 by a young entrepreneur, Josh Kaufman, who believed he could learn faster, more efficiently and less expensively by reading the right books rather than going to business school.

Here's Josh:

And here is the Personal MBA Manifesto:

As he surveyed the market of business books he realized that others would benefit by having a website that listed the best of the best.  So each year, he reads hundreds of books about business and related fields like psychology and science and recommends the best ones.  The list evolves from year to year and is designed to give a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive in depth view of business across an expansive list of categories including sales, marketing, communication, negotiation, decision making, opportunity identification, creativity and innovation, finance and accounting and leadership.  Currently there are 99 books in 25 categories.

The website even offers a free 12 week crash course if you have the inclination and time to read all the books.  Otherwise, look at the list of 99 books and find ones that address current issues you are wrestling with or that fill gaps in your knowledge breadth or depth.

Josh also has a book coming out this fall on the Personal MBA approach to business education.  I look forward to reading it and will report on it here.

Finally, if you are not sure where to start, consider "Blue Ocean Strategy".  This inventive look at business strategy will get you thinking creatively and expansively about how you compete. Or appropriately, "10 Days to Faster Reading."

Cloud Computing Version 2

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has been instrumental in establishing cloud computing as an accepted enterprise technology. He isn't known to the general public as well as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates because he lives in the B2B world and doesn't market consumer products.  But he has been a continuous and effective evangelist for cloud computing.  He learned to lead during his early roots at Apple with Guy Kawasaki and Steve Jobs and then with Larry Ellison at Oracle.  He's not only been an evangelist but he has built a significant company, Salesforce.com, from scratch to a billion dollars in revenues in 10 years. You can read about that here:

And this is what Marc looks like: 

I enjoy his provocative way of declaring a vision via a simple question.  For example, he says that in 1999 the thought “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” prompted him to leave Oracle and start Salesforce.com.  His goal was to allow enterprises to run software from a simple website rather than with the traditional model of complex, customized, expensive systems and data centers.

The question he is obsessed with now is "Why isn't all enterprise software like Facebook?".  Not only should software be easy to use in the cloud but it should be inherently collaborative and social.

And he views the launch of the iPad as a catalyst for the shift to an evolved form of cloud computing-a shift so profound he calls it "Cloud 2".  He believes that devices like the iPad, coupled with cloud computing and social application capabilities will enable a new generation of easy-to-use and innovative applications that will change the world.  The applications we use today will be rewritten to integrate a raft of new technologies including touch screens, social media, feeds, video, geolocation, and smart phones.

I don't think there is much to argue with here.  The convergence of hardware capabilities-especially tablets, the ubiquitousness of broadband internet access, the explosion of social media, the explosion of mobile devices and the increasing sophistication of cloud based software creates a potent combination for compelling and wholesale new creation.  It's more a matter of how and when this new generation will unfold.  It will be fun to participate and fun to behold!

                      (read more in the TechCrunch article, "Hello, iPad.  Hello, Cloud 2".)

Social Media Demographics and Technographics 2009 Update

As you've seen in earlier blog posts, I'm a big fan of the smart people at Forrester Research and the frameworks they create to systematically evaluate and understand markets and trends.  About a year ago I wrote about "Social Media Demographics and Technographics" and pointed to Forrester's book "Groundswell" and their initial attempt to meaningfully map social media users and adoption.

As it turns out, their initial framework has stood the test of a chaotic year with one addition which I'll mention later.  But first, I thought it would be fun to see how technographic adoption for my own demographic has shifted during this year of explosive social media adoption.

Here's the data from 2008 for men my age in the U.S. and the ways in which they participate in social media:



Here's the 2009 data for the same group:

Are there any surprises?  Not really.  The biggest leaps are in the "Creators", about a third more men, and in the joiners, about 50%  more.  About a fifth of this segment doesn't participate vs. a quarter a year earlier.

The indexes vs. all adults indicate that these men have actually not grown in social media usage as much as women and younger male demographics, again as we might expect.

You can use this Forrester tool right here to access data for other demographics.  Remember, the rungs are not mutually exclusive segments-most people participate in multiple ways.




Forrester also realized with the advent of Twitter and increased use of social status updates that there was a missing rung on the ladder.  So they've added a rung going forward called "Conversationalists".  Here's their new technographic ladder:

Click on the ladder to go to Forrester and find more great Groundswell information.

Nurture the Geek in You

We all have some latent Geek in us-a part of us that enjoys not just what technology does but that also marvels at the workings and ingenuity of the technology itself.  The WRM fully nurtures their inner Geek, bringing alive all the inherent passion they can for the exploding digital world.  The WRM strives for a hands-on sense of the breadth, the shortcomings and the possibilities of technology, insights into the experience and minds of their customers and a front row view of the imminent shifts in digital marketing.

The last decade was merely the birthing of the Digital Age.  Nascent working models for digital media components-social, mobile, broadband, music, television, advertising, search, Cloud, etc. reached wholesale adoption levels while in many cases reinventing themselves along the way multiple times.  These cycles of invention and reinvention will only continue this next decade and with this pace of change, there is no way to meaningfully predict the landscape even five years out.

Along the way, the media and the marketers have lagged these dramatic digital and cultural changes.  In the next decade those media and marketers who can catch up will be the winners.

The WRM must then become a digital enthusiast.  S/he must awaken the Geek within and learn to engage, immerse and find delight in the digital world unfolding around them.

To this end, I've assembled a list of 12 free applications and websites the WRM may want to explore, use or even adopt as a day-to-day tool.  (One great thing about the digital world is the amount of useful free stuff that is available).

This list is only a start.  The WRM should subscribe to some forward looking content like TechCrunch, Mashable or the technology section of the New York Times, including David Pogue.  Make it a fearless practice to look for new free things to try or join every week.  This is part of your new job.

Here are my suggestions-some are standards and some my whimsy:

This is the standard social media site with 350 million users. You must have a nominal Facebook presence and spend some time with it weekly.  Upload pictures and make some useful or fun posts, find some friends you really care about, join some groups

This is emerging as a standard (at least for now) with about 18 million users. You must have a nominal Twitter presence and spend some time on it weekly.  You can do it on your computer, you don't have to have a mobile account.  At the least, follow people you respect in your industry, news organizations or companies who have good Twitter strategies (e.g. Zappos).  It's OK to have a small following.  Cull the list so that they are people who will benefit from things you are likely to Twitter.  When you attend conferences or webinars, monitor the Twitter hashtag for that event to see how it is used and jump in if you feel compelled.  Remember, no fear!

    

This is a business standard with 55 million users. You should have at least a nominal Linkedin presence and spend time on it weekly.  It's worth completing your profile including recommendations-this is the new way people and resumes are found and shared.  Network with some colleagues from the past.  Join some relevant groups. Have fun answering some business questions in the "Answers" section.

Your browser is perhaps your most used app.  With the advent of Cloud computing, the browser will only become more critical.  I prefer light, uncluttered fast apps which is also Google's mantra.  You deserve to try Chrome, Google's browser-it's fast and uses far fewer resources than Internet Explorer and even Firefox.



You need antivirus protection.  But McAfee and Norton are complex and cumbersome...you can literally feel the drag on your computer, especially if it's older.  Panda Cloud is the first Cloud based antivirus solution.  All the heavy lifting is done on their servers, not your computer.  It's small and light.  Look at how simple the main screen is (above).  It even got a PC Magazine Editor's Choice award.


Skype has over 500 million users who use it for video calls, phone calls and instant messaging.  The application is free but you need a video camera, microphone and speakers to make a free video call.  Find some friends or family across the country or the world who you'd like to spend time with more often and give it a try.  Skype was just sold by Ebay to a group of technology investors who are likely to do some interesting things with it-for example Panasonic and LG just announced integrating Skype into their internet connected HD televisions.


Evernote is a place on the internet to store your life.  They call it "Lifeblogging".  You can store pictures, ideas, audio, notes, web pages, screenshots, PDFs, documents, etc. and access them from anywhere.  You can tag and/or geo-tag the items and organize them yourself or Evernote will index and search it for you.  Their technology includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition)so even handwritten notes will be searched.  You can upload from mobile devices too.  They just passed 2 million users.  The founder's ultimate vision is that we simply video our whole life, tag the events, thoughts and milestones and store it on Evernote.  Imagine that!

"Readability" is a tool that reduces clutter on web pages.  It's easy to use.  Of course it gets rid of advertising which doesn't help us marketers.  But hopefully, it will encourage us to participate in more tasteful and targeted advertising environments so that users won't find a need to use "Readability".

Pandora will stream music to you all day long for free.  You pick the artists that you like and they will play that artist and artists like them so that you can easily discover new music.  They actually use real musicians in a major music analysis project called "The Music Genome Project" to figure out which music is most like other music.  The music business has changed from CDs to downloaded music and will shift again to streaming music from the Cloud.  Pandora is a free way to experience music from the Cloud.  If you are willing to spend $5 a month for unlimited streaming music look at Mog -it's free for an hour with no credit card.

Understand firsthand how easy it is to create a personal or small business website.  Squarespace has a free 14 day trial, no credit card required.  Squarespace is a well reviewed website publishing and hosting company known for design quality and reliability.


As the Cloud expands with light, easy to use applications the large,complex, bloated applications that have to be loaded on your computer (e.g. Microsoft Office) will be relegated to big business.

There are now applications in the Cloud for virtually everything you can think of.  Zoho alone has a couple dozen web based productivity and collaboration apps most of which are free.

Google will be launching their own Chrome operating system this year designed for Netbooks to efficiently use Cloud applications. Netbooks didn't even exist a few years ago and in 2009 sales doubled from 2008 to 30 million units.

So Google docs is one of the current Cloud standards for creating and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets and presentations online.  I find the interface sparse but as with all these applications, the goal is to experience them firsthand.

Ironically, Microsoft Office 2010, due out later this year, will have a free ad supported Cloud version.  You can try the desktop beta for free now.


This is the icon for the "Snipping Tool" that comes with Vista or Windows 7.  I'm throwing it in here because it's so damn useful and no one seems to know they have it.  (Awakening the inner Geek includes exploring the  unused functions of the software you already have.)  The Snipping Tool lets you grab any size piece of anything on your screen to save or put into a document or email.  I've even used it to grab a frame from a video.  Oh, and by the way, if you have Vista, upgrade to Windows 7 pronto.  It's stable and faster.  Don't think of it as an upgrade, just an improved Vista.

C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) - 2a ©

This is an heuristic, a working formula, that indicates the factors that affect conversion rates of web landing pages.  It's a fully educated formula, born of thousands of tests by a very left brained company, Marketing Experiments.  They are a marketing research lab, completely focused on helping marketers optimize marketing communications by testing all reasonable approaches.  They are owned by the MECLABS Group which also owns Marketing Sherpa, another marketing focused company with great research and insights.  Both companies have large followings and offer a large buffet of free content and paid education of great value to the Well Rounded Marketer.

The formula's parameters are as follows:

C = conversion rate
m = motivation of the prospect
v = the value proposition's clarity and power
i = incentive to convert
f = friction in the conversion process (e.g. hard to read)
a = anxiety (e.g. giving out information)
© = copyright :-)

My interpretation of this is that if the multiplier is relatively larger the value it modifies is relatively smaller.  So a given level of anxiety will overcome an equal measure of value proposition.  Value proposition is more powerful than motivation.  Anxiety is equal to the difference of the incentive to convert minus the friction of converting. A given level of anxiety is twice as strong as the same level of motivation.

No matter the weighting, all these contributors and inhibitors to conversion should be addressed in best practice landing page design.  Keep them clean, simple, focused and compelling.  Keep them focused on one desired action.  Give prospects a strong incentive to act promptly. Don't ask for information that is not immediately essential.  (You can always collect more as the nurturing process moves on.) Make sure your privacy policy is easily accessible. Make sure the value proposition is utterly clear.

Here's a simple example where Marketing Experiments tested two versions of a New York Times subscription landing page.  The second had more than 6 times the paid orders than the first just by repositioning the "intro offer" to a "free trial".

Before:

After:

Landing pages performance can be dramatically improved by very simple changes.  Make it a practice to continually experiment with your landing page elements and be sure to track the results.