Five questions (and answers) about Data Analytics

Last December I heard +Jim Sterne speak at the Chicago DAA (Digital  Analytics Association) Symposium.  Jim is the founder of DAA and shared some key points that I thought might be helpful to my students as well as others interested in this field.

1.  What is Digital Analytics?  Jim says Analytics is more than data.  It means being able to look at customer data intelligently.The job is not just to  to make the data look nice but to make money, provide insights.

2.  What is going to be the 'sexiest' job of the 21st century?  According to Harvard Business Review, the data scientist!  This recent HBR article  talks about how LinkedIn use data science to improve how people interact with the site by suggesting people that they should know and asking them to connect.  The click-through rates on these suggestions of "People You May Know" were phenomenally high and contributed to LinkedIn's exponential growth.

3.  What do Employers need?  Companies need analyst skills like the mechanics and technology of data analysis, such as, the ability to collect, clean,  transform integrate data, store and report on it. Equally or even more important are  human-centric skills, which are explore,  analyze,  communicate,  monitor and predict.  I think this is what we call a 'whole brain thinker,' both right and left brain skills.

4.  What about this process cannot be automated?  Monitor and predict can be automated but explore, analyze and communicate, critical thinking and creativity, really are things that only human beings can do.  This is where we as data 'scientists' can add value to the organization.

5.  What further skills will the Data Scientist require?

KNOWLEDGE:  The ability to understand concepts from technology, math/statistics,  business
INTELLIGENCE:  The ability to multitask, be multilingual, a problem-solver  
CREATIVITY: The ability to drive insight from data.

Jim said to think about the Hierarchy of Data to Wisdom in this way:

Data:  This is a tomato

Information: A tomato is a fruit

Knowledge:  Fruit salad is good for you

Wisdom:  Don't put tomatoes in fruit salad

Insight:  Treat tomatoes like vegetables.

(Although I would put Wisdom as the highest form of knowledge as is traditional; Wisdom is an eternal principle  so I would say that an insight is that fruit salad does not taste good with tomatoes from which comes the Wisdom to treat tomatoes like vegetables).

Jim says Data Scientists, people who are good in Data Analytics,  make discoveries while swimming in data, their dominant trait is intense curiosity.  Right now in our Marketing 470 Marketing Technology Class we are using Google AdWords and Analytics in our AdWords projects for our corporate clients. Students seem to really enjoy looking at data and providing insights for their campaigns.  It looks like a data scientist is a rare breed and will be much in demand.  We are doing what we can in our undergraduate courses to expose the students to these concepts so they can have a chance to showcase these skills in a professional setting.  After all, Wisdom is what we seek in the educational setting, so we academics should be well-suited to helping our students along this path.  What do you think is the best way to produce "Data Scientists?"

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

NIU Interactive Students Bridge Theory/Practice Gap

We strive to create opportunities for our students to interact with companies and create real-world experience for our students.  The picture above shows a student actively networking at our Spring 2012 Internet Marketing Conference.  Last semester our Marketing Technology students worked with real-life clients like Ideosity, a web development company specializing in manufacturers with large online product catalogs to manage,  Allworld Machinery Supply, Inc. and the Department of Marketing at NIU to plan, develop and implement Paid Search and Social Media campaigns for these clients   Former Students Kalli Bravos and Tim Yapp are working at Ideosity and Allworld respectively and they wanted to come back and work with the students and learn something themselves.

We always take a strategic view of these issues, so after analyzing the competitive environment, search trends and the company's unique positioning and core strengths, the students last semester made practical suggestions to improve their clients websites.  The clients really appreciated the feedback and made changes almost immediately so they could benefit from the advice. Students then developed AdWords and social media campaigns which they implemented and measured.

Our class was even written up on Yahoo! News for our efforts.  All the clients were so happy that they agreed to come back this semester for more help and insights.  In addition, the students are helping out our own Interactive Marketing Program, which offers a Certificate in the area and teaches students paid and organic search, social media, email marketing, web site usability and testing and other real-world digital marketing skills.

This semester we are taking things a step further.  Each group right now is working on a targeted paid search campaign with a custom landing page linked to Google Analtyics as well as AdWords.  So the students will be able to provide even more analyses of their campaigns.  The students are learning how to work with IT departments to get custom landing pages put together and how to get the code that Google Analytics needs on these web pages.  I am sure they will find these skills valuable in their careers.

The second half of the semester, students will write a comprehensive social media plan for their client as well as a personal campaign for themselves, particularly highlighting how they will use Linkedin to help them in their job search.  I was just listed in the top 1% of all viewed profiles of Linkedin, so I hope this shows I am qualified to teach this material.  Of course, there are two million other people in the same category!

 Stay tuned for more news about our class and let me know if you have any questions or want to know how to hire our well-qualified graduates.  Our Internship and Job Fairs are next week and I have included a link to more information if you want to sign up.  Over 175 employers will be attending the Job Fair alone and our Interactive Students popular (we have an 85% placement rate) so don't delay getting to know these talented folks.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Content Marketing Makes Sense of Social Media

I recently attended a webinar on content marketing hosted by +Tim Ash of SiteTuners and featuring +Joe Pulizzi.  Joe says marketers are not only publishers, but teachers and story-tellers as well.  The graphic above illustrates Joe’s concept that marketers are all story-tellers now and tell their stories across channels. Joe gave the example of one of the first content marketers as John Deere.  That company had a new concept, a steel-tipped plough versus iron and created its own company magazine, The Furrow, to get the word out.  That magazine now has 1.5 million subscribers in 14 languages.

Contemporary examples of those doing content marketing well include Red Bull, which has its own media house within the company.  Red Bull has a record label, its own video magazine and a content pool of sports, culture and lifestyle material that  that includes a full media catalog, “plug-and-play web clips, documentaries, news pieces, photo shoots, the latest interviews, and accompanying editorials.”  The content pool contains over 50,000 photos and 5,000 videos alone.  Also, The Coca-Cola Company has four full time writers and a team of forty freelancers devoted to content marketing and has documented its strategic plan for content marketing on YouTube as it moves from ‘creative excellent’ to ‘content excellence.”

This trend toward content marketing is not restricted to large consumer brands.  

Emarketer reports in a recent survey that content marketing is the top concern of client-side marketers for 2013, having tied conversion rate optimization and vaulted ahead of social media engagement.  Fully 39% of marketers surveyed indicated that content marketing was their top concern in 2013 and the Content Marketing Institute indicates that 91% of marketers are using content marketing in some form.

Content marketing to me finally makes sense of social media marketing.  Although social media marketing no doubt has some value, firms still wrestle with measurement, how to provide meaningful content, and how to get away from what I call “Groupon Syndrome,” or focusing on short-term promotion versus brand building and engagement.  Enter the concept of content marketing and now the marketer can focus on telling the brand story across channels; add the Integrated Marketing Communications concept of telling a consistent message across channels and it is no wonder marketers are starting to see the value of content marketing.

Content marketing means every brand is in the publishing business now, creating meaningful content to tell the brand’s story and engage the consumer.  Telling the brand’s story cuts across channels and involves not only social media but SEO, Lead Generation and other channels. The content we are talking about is media owned by the company, often times re purposed for many types of marketing communications.  Branding is more important now than ever as the web gives us access to so much information that products and services are in more danger than ever of becoming a commodity.

Part of my job as a professor of marketing is to help make sense of marketing trends and create meaningful frameworks to explain and describe them.  Although social media is fascinating and fun, social media marketing cannot operate in a vacuum.  Content marketing makes social media make sense as a natural vehicle for telling the story of the brand and allowing customers to engage with the brand.  Seeing social media in the context of content marketing, where the same stories are deployed through other media channels, to me legitimizes social media marketing and puts it in context of other media channels.  What do you think? 

 By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.