Are You an Average Data Analyst?

A Quote from the KDnuggets Newsletter:

Einstein was an "average" data analyst, with tendency to make trivial arithmetic mistakes and some clumsiness in data recording.

From Iglewicz, B., (2007) "Einstein’s First Published Paper," The American Statistician, Vol. 61, No. 4, 339-342. - thanks to Bruce Ratner

Something is wrong here.....

So I've read on Techcrunch that Yonja raised $12.5 M in funding. I used to be a member to this "Turkish" social networking site - haven't used it over a year. Judging from alexa; I wasn't the only one.

Based on this alexa chart Yonja's traffic reached it's peak in the first half of 2006. The decline accelerated in the second half of 2007 - and I bet that's when Turkish surfers realized facebook is accepting registrations from everyone.

I never understood what Yonja's competitive advantage was. It was mainly a social networking site for Turkish people, albeit designed in English - a Turkish version was created later. They had a paid subscription model where people could have their profiles posted on the homepage therefore could get more traffic - which is usually popular for matchmaking sites but not social networking sites.

It doesn't take a lot of sophisticated time series modeling to predict what's going to happen to Yonja. It brings memories from my old Lycos days - which ended in 2003... My prediction is Yonja will disappear from the social networking scene by the end of 2008. Then again, my prediction may be totally off... I will follow up on this post.

CRM for BlackBerry... Now We're Talking....

Recent articles published on IDM and WaMN there's a new CRM software available with a twist. Alltel has a new CRM application targeting Small and Medium Businesses with BlackBerry devices in need of contact, activity and deal management.

The new software is called SalesNOW, and it helps Blackberry users to manage their sales data, contacts, deals, activities and emails on the move. Users can also access and share information with their teams.

SalesNOW has three different versions:

• Solo Edition
• Web Edition
• Enterprise Edition

There's a 30 day Free Trial - and I will definetly try this one out - however plans seem a bit pricy...

Netflix Marketing Metrics

In his data mining blog Kevin Hillstrom provides projections for Netflix up to year 2012. This is a hot topic for a lot of people since we all know Netflix has a reputation for being a very analytically driven company. (I have been ignoring the Netflix Data Mining Challenge for too long - I shall post about it in the near future - the leader board is still showing 8.x % improvement; here's Steve Krause's blog post about the challenge).

I charted Acquisition Cost per Subscriber over Annual Pre-Tax Income... Is this a good picture? You decide...

Another Comment on "Advanced Marketing Analytics"

I came across this article on crm2day.com, written by the CEO of Pluris -I have never heard of them before, although I lived in MA (where they have their headquarters) for 7 years and worked in Marketing Analytics for 5- a CRM agency / consultancy.

Probably the boldest statement in the article is:

Analytics is no longer a “nice to have” tool but a “need to have,” integrated component of a marketer’s overall execution platform.

However the article only lists the traditional direct marketing models that have been deployed since the 1960s

• Knowledge about a customer’s likeliness to purchase each and every product.
• Knowledge about a customer’s likeliness to upgrade from a current product/service to a new package/service.
• Knowledge about a customer’s expected churn rate and timeframe.
• Knowledge about a customer’s expected lifetime value.

Another point that's being made -again not a surprising point; actually a pretty well known issue- is:
...the analytical capability and integration must be truly automated, saving the modeler over 80% of the his/her time dealing with data integration and scoring issues and letting the advanced analytic resource focus on providing value.

Rest of the article is about optimization of marketing activities as well as inbound channels. It's worth a read...

The Missing Link: Marketing Analytics

D. Santaro's article on DM Review is a bit dated but has a lot of important information in it. His main observation (which I strongly) agree is "most CRM spending focused on information-centric technology components such as data warehousing, data aggregation, content management and reporting; or operational customer touchpoint elements such as contact center management, sales force automation, personalization or marketing automation".

Nowadays; Analytics, which has been the "secondary subject" up to now is moving fast ahead to become the #1 priority for many organizations. The article contains a neat chart for different vendors:



The article also has a very straight forward definition for predictive analytics: "organizations reach these goals by applying basic math and understanding that any consumer behavior (Stats 101: Dependent Variable) can be predicted with statistical precision using historical observations of actual behaviors and interactions (Stats 101: Independent Variables)". Here's the chart that goes with it:

IBM alphaWorks Services

Try IBM alphaWorks - you will like it...

Web Analytics: Webtrends Leads

According to the Forrester Wave of Web Analytics -requires registration for download- Webtrends is leading the web analytics category. (Please keep in ming that this report is available from Webtrends and always check Wikipedia for a list of cognitive biases)

Other Web Analytics software players evaluated include:
Visual Science
Omniture
Core Metrics
Web Side Story
Sane Solutions
IBM Surf Aid
SPSS NetGenesis
NetRatings

According to Forrester Webtrens lead the industry in Strategy (product direction, commitment, reference client strength, pricing and licencing) and Market Presence (company financials, installed base, international presence). However Omniture has a slightly favorable score in terms of current offerings (capabilities, service and support).