Just like a startup bubble, the investment hype on big data worries me. As investors and companies race find ways to implement, manage and draw insight from big data, slowly but surely I’ve come to realise something: there’s too much value being placed on the data and not enough on what you can do with it. And, I’m not just talking about business intelligence tools either – they can be part of the problem sometimes too.
To put it simply: data is only as valuable as the actions that one can take as a result of information they receive.
At an operational level, there are a finite number of decisions that we can make on a regular basis to adjust the ebb and flow of our business each day. I’m a firm believer in the old ‘I can remember 7 plus or minus 2 pieces of information at any one time’ concept. I tend to think the same applies to how many metrics we can effectively juggle at any one time, too.
Big data dashboards that show us dozens of leading indicators at a time are only helpful if it is of value to act on these on a regular basis.
Isolating customer segments or daily performance metrics to smaller and smaller chunks is only of value if you have the capacity and know-how to extract enough value that you can pay off your overwhelming technology and analytics costs.
And of course, the more detailed you want to go into isolating, understanding and knowing everything about every customer, past, present and future, the more resources you’ll need to be able to do all of that.
At a strategic level, having oodles of data is nice in theory, but how much of it is really going to form the guidelines for how you’ll operate your business and find a unique market position? Strategy is about doing just enough diagnosis to figure out that there’s something that customers want that no one else is delivering, and realising that you can do so at a reasonable return (or cost, for all the government folk out there who don’t need to make profit). There’s a lot of hard work in achieving good strategy that a data management tool, or decent analytics just won’t solve for you.
So in the end, big data is just data. You can invest heavily in understanding it, getting insight from it, putting technology around it, and generally speaking, overwhelming yourself with data. That situation hasn’t changed since we added the word ‘big’ to the concept of data. No doubt anyone who’s ever looked at a big data tool has had more than a few moments of utter confusion in trying to understand what they’re looking at and what to do with it.
For a digital native, I’m still a bit old school. Make sure you have the ability or resource to find meaningful, actionable insight from your data sources before investing too heavily in bringing more data in house!
Always love a good representation of data.
Now that my feet are firmly planted within Nielsen in Australia, you’ll see a bit more of their public data here on my personal blog. Don’t think that it’s because of any corporate patriotism or anything – it’s just because I have easy access to the info and there’s a lot of interesting content to share!
The two images below come from the Global snapshot of Mobile Consumers. A couple really smart but simple ways to convey device usage across the globe.
In Australia, we remain on par with the world leaders in terms of smartphone penetration, at 65%. Surprisingly, South Korea sits at 67% – surprising to me given that Korea is so far advanced in terms of its technology adoption across mobile commerce and social media.
Global mobile device usage graphic – from Nielsen Research
The second graphic highlights the kinds of applications that people are using when on their smartphone. The US-centric nature of many applications is evidenced in the dark green with American smartphone users leading the way in terms of productivity, navigation, shopping, banking and movie application usage. Australia seems to sit in the middle ground for most types of application usage, but it’s worth noting the high growth potential in use of smartphones for video and movie content.
It’s well documented recently that the price of mobile data in Australia is high and seemingly growing, as Telcos move to reduce the volume of mobile data available to customers, and charging higher rates for excess usage. With only 19% of Australians accessing video content from their mobile devices, the first telco to find a way to minimise the cost of data provision could be on a winner.
Nielsen graphic showing by market, what types applications are regularly used on smartphones
I also recently spoke with someone who spent some time working with one of the major online movie providers. The battleground in that space, I’m told, is specifically in the provision of on-demand streaming of video content, as opposed to the movie hire business. Once highly touted, high growth enterprises such as Quickflix, Netflix, and the like now face an inability to stream their movies when faced with the infrastructure requirements that only a telco or traditional media provider – or a technology company – can provide.
My tip – either a content provider will find a way to stream video content more effectively and cheaply, OR one of the telcos will find a way to deliver video content across a mobile network cheaply and efficiently. Look for video usage on mobile devices to grow significantly in late 2013 or early 2014.
Here’s a quick but useful little infographic by Forbes revealing a bit of background into Twitter’s global user base. For some reason I hadn’t really thought about the female skew of twitter users – 55% according to this!
Sourced from Forbes online
So, one week into the new gig at NM Incite and it’s looking like a big year. Turning everyday social media commentary into actionable strategic insights at the brand, corporate and product development level (as opposed to the operational insights that people have used it for so far) will become a growing part of our industry – something I hope to continue to share at a personal level via this blog.
I’ve been doing my homework on social TV, which will become a major talking point mid-way through this year when Nielsen Research and Twitter produce the outputs of their exclusive Twitter TV ratings project. It should be exciting for the media industry, and accordingly this week I decided to give Zeebox Australia a test run on my iPad. You can also use it on your desktop and have pretty much the same experience.
Zeebox for iPad
Having used Channel 7′s Fango app previously, at first I thought I was walking into an app that simply created another walled garden of commentary within the community they sought to create. Happily, I realised that Zeebox serves more as an aggregator of TV commentary in a convenient method for its users. It primarily draws in Twitter conversations for TV programming and consolidates them within each program’s profile. If you’re not a Twitterer – then you can still make comments that appear on Zeebox only, and everyone else can continue to view them. Facebook and Twitter integration is smooth and makes sense for this app, although I noticed – but didn’t research any further – that Facebook comments aren’t detected or added to the stream of commentary. I suspect this is more to do with privacy issues in extracting that data from Facebook (most people by now would have private status updates etc). You can quite easily post out to your Facebook profile though if you’d like to get your friends involved in the conversation.
I won’t go on too much, but here’s a couple of things I liked. The first screenshot is the programming guide. 3 minutes after looking through this, I went and deleted my other TV Guide application off my iPad. The programming guide has built in alerts to remind you that a show you’ve earmarked is coming on (push notifications keep you aprised), and tells you based on how many users are viewing the commentary of a particular show – how the audience for a particular program is growing, steady, or shrinking. A simplified ‘buzz’ measurement gives you an indicator of just how social each program is based on the velocity of tweets and comments per minute, and you can also see which connections from your Zeebox network (which includes your facebook and/or twitter friends) are currently logged into Zeebox and watching a program. In the screenshot below, you can see a bunch of thumbnail profile pics for the Australian Open tennis, for example.
Screenshot of the Zeebox Social TV programming guide.
If you’re not viewing the programming schedule, then your dashboard shows what’s popular (based on tweet buzz), some key featured programs, and celebrity picks – what famous tweeters are watching and what they have to say. From this for example, on my first evening checking out the app, I somehow managed to strike up a brief conversation with Michael Ebeid, Managing Director of SBS about their SBS on Demand app (also worth checking out, but not the point of this blog post).
Zeebox dashboard
All in all, I was really impressed with the app. I’ve only checked it out on iPad and nothing else, but a great experience, I was able to figure out how to use it first time around without getting stuck, and am keen to give it a further test run soon. Tonight’s mediocre TV viewing should be more interesting with this. Through my work this year, I’ll also want to check out Social Guide as soon as it becomes available in Australia. Social Guide will have more of a direct link to the Twitter TV ratings I mentioned earlier, but no word on how that link will work for some time yet.
I’d love to know whether you would use an app like this as a TV companion, and if you do (or would), what value it adds most to your TV viewing. Does it make you feel more engaged? Comments welcome.
I’ve been poring through the annual Nielsen ‘State of Social Media’ report over Christmas and here’s another snippet of the American data from last year. It follows the growing trend and awareness of Social TV, ie the tendency for more ad more people to be using social media and ecommerce sites (social commerce, of course) while they’re watching TV. It’s great data to see, but of course I’m looking forward to being able to have a crack at the Australian data once we find a way to make this reliable and available.
Key takeouts for me from this is that 44-45% of tablet users are accessing social media and shopping sites while they’re watching TV. With the Super Bowl looming in just a few weeks, I’d be keen to see how this transforms usage, and what if any impact it has on consumer sentiment and shopping.
The full report I’m using for these snippets can be downloaded from the NM Incite website here: http://ow.ly/gLisp
Nielsen research showing simultaneous TV, tablet, and smartphone usage habits
The advantages of accessibility and agility in the modern technology world comes with many benefits for the small players – the word ‘disruption’ is used frequently. It’s helped reshape entire industries, bring down powerful but inefficient established brands, empowered social enterprise, given consumers more choice and therefore empowerment and reinforced the hope of achieving that faint but realistic dream – of starting your own company and doing well at it. The opportunities for smaller, more agile players will continue throughout 2013, as a whole new generation of entrepreneurs competes for venture capital and to spruik their business ideas, addressing increasingly fragmented markets.
While traditional venture capitalists sought mostly the opportunities that would net the largest potential audience, the current climate is such that audience size no longer matters as mush. A different product exists to address every segment of the market in just about every industry there is. Business ideas can now be profitable and return revenue even when targeting only a fraction of their addressable market, due largely in part to the growth of transactional business models. Similar to a ‘freemium’ mobile application concept, transactional business models enable businesses and consumers to use platforms normally without any upfront cost, with payment only occurring when someone actually sells something. It’s the next step along the path from ‘cost per click’ of course.
So in such a model , assuming the challenger keep their costs to,freemium,mobile, a bare minimum – they can generate customers and revenue before they ever have to approach fund managers to secure investment – by which time they have already proven profitability for a certain segment of a certain market and therefore minimised the risk to the investor. I’m not sure what the next mass audience product will be, but if investors have learnt anything from the MySpace, Facebook, Groupon and Instagram debacles, it’s that paying big money for a large audience is no longer a way to guarantee revenue. By the way – why those investors didn’t learn this from the share prices of media organisations over the last 10 years, I’ll never know.
Paying top dollar to invest in a product that users love, means only one thing: the product must change to extract revenue from those users and return value to shareeholders, which in turn almost always implies that consumer sentiment toward the product will change. For the first time we’re seeing users beginning to leave Facebook and seek alternatives – this blogger uses Path as an intimate, private social network for example, but even that will undoubtedly have to commercialise at some point and introduce various forms of transactional and/or advertising capability. Until then – it’s a beautiful user experience. The recent Instagram stoush which saw thousands of users try to delete their accounts was in response to an attempt by that company to modify terms & conditions to give them the ability to sell any image on the site without compensating the owner of the image. Naturally, once the outcry happened, Instagram backflipped, blamed their lawyers for creating ‘unclear terms and conditions’, a position I am sure their legal team felt happy about…but it gave Instagram the chance to back out of their proposal.
By the time they had done this though, millions of global users of the platform were already seeking alternatives – seeking a challenger brand with an equal user experience that they could shift their imagery to, because as everyone knows – in this day and age, there is always a challenger brand waiting to snap up your business, or to take your customers away.
IBM released a great report the other day into the performance of online Black Friday sales in the US.
You can see the report for yourself here, but I’ve compiled a few highlights:
Mobile shopping:
Mobile commerce for Black Friday accounted for 14% of traffic to retailer sites in 2011. This jumped to 24% this time around, a leap of 67%. Sales via a mobile device accounted for 16% of activity on the day.
iPads dominated tablet shopping, accounting for 88% of all tablets used to access retailer sties during the sale. Surprisingly, The Galaxy Tab was only 1.8% of tablet traffic.
mcommerce sales & traffic Black Friday 2012
‘Social Media Sentiment’:
While I’m still sceptical at times of sentiment analysis taken from social media listening tools, they are usually handy as a general guide to sentiment – in this case, IBM identified that positive sentiment regarding the Black Friday outweighed negative by a factor of 3 to 1 – not bad in my opinion.
The IBM analysis unfortunately is dependant on measuring traffic from social media in terms of upstream traffic – ie was something on a social media channel the link that was clicked on, which then resulted in a sale. While there can be no doubt about the hype for the event that was created on social media platforms, it’s safe to say that it wasn’t the direct referral traffic that traffic analysts would have been looking for.
Sales attributed to social media Black Friday 2012
Average expenditure:
While the average number of items per order and the average sale value were both down, by 12.7% and 4.7% respectively (average purchase in 2012 was US$181), total sales for Black Friday jumped by 20% year on year, indicating a growing volume of consumers accessing online sales. And, if you’re familiar with the annual rough & tumble in store debacle that happens on Black Friday in the US – then who wouldn’t want stay at home and access all the great deals from there?
