After three years, the Netflix Prize competition is coming to a triumphant close. This is where the online DVD rental company offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could improve its flawed Cinematch recommendation engine by at least 10 percent. Back when it started, I suggested one novel way that a competing team might improve results (hire a philosopher). We may never know all of the tricks employed by the likely winners.
And who might these winners be? A little over a week ago, the team called “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” delivered a 10.05% improvement. The Netflix Prize competition has now declared “last call.” The other teams have thirty days to improve on the winning algorithm.
Two things strike me about this competition. The first is how difficult it is to predict our tastes in films. I’m frankly amazed that anyone is taking the prize. (Remember, teams have been trying for three solid years!)
The second and more important take-away is this: You can never be content with your present efforts to satisfy customers. They can always be improved — and they should be improved. Even when the cost is surprisingly steep.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion contends that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I’ve been observing for some time this paradox: The more networked we become, the more we rebel against impersonality. We yearn for ways to connect in the physical space. The latest example is from the shrewd publicity efforts behind Moby’s latest album. New York Magazine reports the following:
He promoted his latest, Wait for Me, by booking a spa so that journalists [including some extremely tech-savvy writers], could listen while getting massages.
How ironic that the way to these journalists’ hearts should be through unkinked necks and loosened shoulders. Not that such novel — and decidedly low-tech — promotions of new albums are particularly new. You may recall the impact that Trent Reznor (a.k.a., Nine Inch Nails) had when he leaked new songs to a pre-release albums through MP3s loaded on USB sticks left in the restrooms of nightclubs. That was more than two years ago. (Here’s an account of that promotion, on MediaPost. Registration is required.)
My take on Moby’s high tech / high touch ploy is simple: If you’re trying to break through the drone of network buzz and isolating keyboarding, look to its extreme opposite.
I’m finding how we’ll be working in a progressively networked future a fascinating topic. Online collaboration has always been difficult. Computing — a decidedly solitary activity — isn’t easily turned into a communal experience. But after watching this video I see a glimmer of a long-distance working community that’s truly more productive than one sitting in adjoining cubicles. It’s a preview of the open source Google Wave.
Google describes a wave as, “Equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” Here’s the video:
This video is a full hour long, so let me help you with a couple pivotal features.
Google Wave allows users to extend real-time conversations onto whatever they’re working — a web site (such as a blog, in this example), a web-based document or anything else that’s uploaded and shared.
The open source APIs that Google is allowing developers to create sharing methodologies limited only to the imagination of the developers. Here you see a simple example of how two collaborators can work with the same photo set in real time, to make selections, modifications and supporting comments.
The developers who will be taking and running with this new system will be setting the limits for how we all work together in the next decade. Just as apropos to Online Community Month, they’ll be doing this development in a spirit of true collaboration: open source and forever free to be tweaked and refined.
What started with a piece by David Berkowitz on MediaPost (registration required), on Ten Ways To Decide If Your Business Should Tweet, has turned into an interesting conversation about using Twitter to support a brand, and especially about measuring those efforts. This conversation has been primarily through this lengthy post from earlier today by Marshall Sponder.
Marshall makes some excellent points (he’s not @WebMetricsGuru for nothing!), including this one: “Social Media isn’t really designed, at this time, to analyze Acquisition or Retention – but Web Analytics, is — and I maintain this is one of the strongest arguments to merge the two, in a formal way, rather than in an informal way.”
Datamining and CRM
How do you begin merging these data in a “formal” way? Tools are emerging to allow for the mining of conversations, and linking them where possible to a CRM database. Here’s Marshall’s take on this process:
David Berkowitz talks about Target Audiences, but you’d first have to figure out what your Target Audience is for your Brand or for a particular product or promotion of your Brand – then do CRM datamining using house database lists, or the Social Media CRM outreach to collect names and classify them according to Target Audience Segmentation — best done with data analytics.  Let’s say, that for the purposes of this post, my article on Entrepreneur.com on Learn to Measure Your Web Presence using Unbound Technology or Rapleaf, is the way to go.
If you’re a mom-and-pop shop, you’d do nothing as elaborate, more just Twitter research, much as I’ve shown above, but if you’re Zappos, or Dell, well … that’s another story — the story I tell in Learn to Measure Your Web Presence and others, like it.
Of course, a big brand can make a lot of money whereas the mom and pop shop, probably won’t — so a big brand can afford to spend a lot of money on data mining — and it’s well worth doing because of the potential money and value that can come from it.
Scarcity of Resources
The biggest constraint in doing this sort of work isn’t technology. It’s time. Even properly guided, the process takes many people-hours, and that is a resource in short supply for most businesses today. I see a major challenge in the linkage between prospects / customers and Twitter profiles. (Ack!, I can hear you yell. Yet another datapoint to capture in our CRM databases: The client’s Twitter handle!)
But it is becoming clear that this is an area where a business should focus some of its energies — assuming the business passes David Berkowitz’s Ten Ways test.
Years ago, Don E. Schultz co-wrote Measuring Brand Communication ROI. In this marketing chestnut, he and his co-authors built a surprisingly relevant model for tracking spending and estimated returns for each brand communication (How old is this book? The included Excel file was loaded on a 5.25″ magnetic diskette). A huge category — and ROI black hole — was customer service.
Twitter is a communication channel more than a marketing tactic, and this channel has more to do with customer satisfaction and brand education than driving sales. It’s another touchpoint and nothing more.
But like email and other important touchpoints, it should be measured. Conversations like the one taking place today will help determine how this measurement takes place and to what end.
I’ve recently disparaged the Kabuki dance of trade conferences. But even I admit they have their place. In fact, today I find myself especially sorry I won’t be able to make next week’s OMMA Metrics and Measurement Conference in New York’s Yale Club. In one day those attending it will hear from some of the industry’s leaders, and I frankly cannot find a single presentation where I’d find an excuse to duck out. That’s quite a feat.
One Day Event, Tuesday, Jun 09, 2009
9:00 AM
Welcome & Opening Remarks
9:15 AM
Keynote- The State of the Union for the Metrics Industry
We are well past the first 100 days of 2009 and a lot has changed, yet nothing has changed. New technologies and social media have invaded the online channels that we’ve become accustomed to. Yet the foundatiolid. Jeffrey Eisenberg, CEO of FutureNow, will walk us through a report card of the online measurement industry and address what’s next and what we need to do better as marketers, practitioners and vendors in order to support the shift of ad dollars from offline to online.
9:45 AM
Audience Measurement
How is the role of the audience measurement firm evolving? We’ve got panel, direct measurement and hybrid approaches to address today’s industry challenges. Who’s on top? Which approaches should advertisers and markw the approaches differ and the impact differences make on the numbers we are trying to study. We will also touch on the new IAB industry guidelines and what they mean to the standardization of reporting on audience metrics.
10:30 AM
Coffee Break
10:45 AM
The Analytics Food Chain
How do you use audience measurement, campaign analysis tools and web analytics to plan and measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns? With standards set by various organizations and new technologies providindecisions from. This panel will focus on understanding the differences and synergies of panel and census data from the various parts of the analytics food chain – what to use and when.
11:30 AM
Measuring Video and Virality
The video market is exploding with numerous vendors, business models and technology. What are the metrics and how do they fit into measuring user engagement and advertising models within video? This panel will exploity, and tying the stream back to site activity and customer conversion.
12:15 PM
Luncheon
1:30 PM
Keynote: Measuring Madison Avenue
Campaigns have moved well beyond the impression and click in today’s distributed and fragmented world of online advertising. Interactive campaigns that include the ability for users to share, respond and mashug dollars. Curt Hecht, President of the VivaKi Nerve Center, will take attendees through the measurement challenges that are facing agencies as they introduce new methods and new media for reaching their client’s target audience.
2:00 PM
Campaign Attribution
If the click is dead, how do I know how to attribute success to my campaign? Should it be on the first impression view, the click or the viewthrough? As debate continues in the industry over how to gauge campaign sends are emerging and if there is a solution to the question that has been plaguing the industry for years.
2:45 PM
When The Numbers Speak For Themselves
Do you know when to pull the plug on a campaign that is performing poorly? Or how to take action on the data once you have the results? Taking the metrics and turning them into actions is often a forgotten or weaknd optimization in meeting the goals of your marketing initiatives.
3:30 PM
Coffee Break
3:45 PM
Integrating Online and Offline Data
Tying the shelf or online purchase to the campaign data that you collect is a great concept, but not easy to implement in reality. This panel will expose you to companies who have e stronger relationship with their customers and control costs.
4:30 PM
The “Ins and Outs” of Measuring Social Media
Are your customers on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace? You are naïve if you say “noâ€. People of all demographics are engaging with each other and brands online like never before. Marketers trying to reach this audien this panel we will cover topics such as application installs, engagement, widgets, blogs, corporate Twittering and more.
Are you attending? If so, please contact me and let me know your thoughts on this first-ever event. But don’t go on too much about how terrific it was. That will just break my heart.
