Digital Marketing, Analytics and Music

June 8, 2016December 16, 2017

Core metrics for measuring marketing’s financial performance

On Marketing Metrics

This is an excellent white paper on marketing metrics. It applies to any industry (paper’s focus is on healthcare). Developed by the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development, it’s worth your time. Below is the intro and link.

HAVE YOU BEEN IN THIS MEETING? IT’S BUDGET TIME. Marketing says it is contributing financially to the organization. Finance asks, “How?” After 30 minutes of back and forth, the meeting ends in less than a draw. No one wins. But even with over thirty years of contributions, the marketing profession has yet to develop standard guidelines for measuring its financial performance. In this time of accelerated accountability, it is a fact that the absence of measurable standards is no longer acceptable—for any discipline. Fortunately, efforts are underway to establish both basic standards and advanced metrics for healthcare marketers. This white paper focuses on efforts to date to achieve both.

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May 11, 2016December 14, 2017

For Delegation to Work, Coaching is Necessary

Delegation: Senior leaders want to believe that delegating a task is as easy as flipping a switch. Simply provide clear instructions and you are instantly relieved of responsibility, giving you more time in your schedule.

The allure of delegation is tempting, especially considering how much time it can free up.

That’s the dream. In reality, we all know it almost never works that way. You’re often forced to step in at the last minute to save a botched deliverable. And because you jumped in to save the day, employees don’t have the opportunity to learn. They aren’t left to grapple with the consequences of their actions, and therefore are deprived of the chance to discover creative solutions. What’s more, morale takes a hit — employees begin to believe that no matter what they do, their work isn’t good enough.

Read the rest of this HBR article HERE.

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May 4, 2016December 16, 2017

Original Electronic Dance Track, “No More”

Uploaded a new dance track for your listening -hopefully- pleasure, No More:

YouTube: (filmed in Maui):

Dance Track “No More” on Soundcloud:

If you prefer the dance track on ReverbNation:

Lyrics

No More

You’re dreaming

A flight into the blue

Of crashing waves behind you

And a sense of solitude

You’re leaving

You’ve been here for a while

The lies that you’ve been living

Disguised by every smile

Keep breathing

Take one day at a time

When falling down

Look around

With nothing left behind

I’m hoping

Hoping that you land

You’ll realize you’re not alone

And reach out for a hand

You’re floating

Floating out to sea

And waiting

Waiting on a dream

Well I’m right here

And you’re not there

You hide inside

And no one cares

You’re broken

There’s no one else to blame

Been dragged around

Kicked while down

So tired of the game

So wake up

Not too far away

You’ll watch the sunrise breaking

On a beautiful new day

You’re waiting

Waiting on a dream

You’re floating

Floating out to sea

I’m hoping

Hoping you can see

You’re making

A life that has meaning

Well I’m right here

And you’re not there

You hide inside

No one cares

Well I’m right here

No more lies

You’re moving on

So say goodbye

Say goodbye

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April 30, 2016December 16, 2017

Management: Your late-night emails are hurting your team

What’s your management approach when it comes to communications? This article can’t be shared enough. Credit to HBR.

Around 11 p.m., you realize there’s a key step your team needs to take on a current project. So, you dash off an email to the team members while you’re thinking about it.

No time like the present, right?

Wrong. As a productivity trainer specializing in attention management, I’ve seen over the past decade how after-hours emails speed up corporate cultures. That, in turn, chips away at creativity, innovation, and true productivity.

If this is a common behavior for you, you’re missing the opportunity to get some distance from work, Distance that’s critical to the fresh perspective you need as the leader. And, when the boss is working, the team feels like they should be working.

Think about the message you’d like to send.

Do you intend for your staff to reply to you immediately? Or are you just sending the email because you’re thinking about it at the moment, and want to get it done before you forget? If it’s the former, you’re intentionally chaining your employees to the office 24/7. If it’s the latter, you’re unintentionally chaining your employees to the office 24/7. And this isn’t good for you, your employees, or your company culture. Being connected in off-hours during busy times is the sign of a high-performer. Never disconnecting is a sign of a workaholic. And there is a difference.

Regardless of your intent, I’ve found through my experience with hundreds of companies that there are two reasons late-night email habits spread from the boss to her team:

Ambition.

If the boss is emailing late at night or on weekends, most employees think a late night response is required. Or that they’ll impress you if they respond immediately. Even if just a couple of your employees share this belief, it could spread through your whole team. A casual mention in a meeting, “When we were emailing last night…” is all it takes. After all, everyone is looking for an edge in their career.

Attention.

There are lots of people who have no intention of “working” when they aren’t at work. But they have poor attention management skills. They’re accustomed to multitasking, and used to constant distractions. Regardless of what else they’re doing, they find their fingers mindlessly tapping the icons on their smartphones that connect them to their emails, texts, and social media. Your late-night communication feeds that bad habit.
Being “always on” hurts results. When employees are constantly monitoring their email after work hours — whether this is due to a fear of missing something from you, or because they are addicted to their devices — they are missing out on essential down time that brains need.

Experiments have shown that to deliver our best at work, we require downtime. Time away produces new ideas and fresh insights. But your employees can never disconnect when they’re always reaching for their devices to see if you’ve emailed. Creativity, inspiration, and motivation are your competitive advantage. They are also depletable resources that need to recharge. Incidentally, this is also true for you, so it’s worthwhile to examine your own communication habits.

Company management can help unhealthy assumptions about email and other communication from taking root.

Be clear about expectations for email and other communications. Set up policies to support a healthy culture recognizing and valuing single-tasking, focus, and downtime.

Vynamic, a successful healthcare consultancy in Philadelphia, created a policy called “zmail.” Email is discouraged between 10pm and 7am during the week, and all day on weekends. The policy doesn’t prevent work during these times, nor does it prohibit communication. If an after-hours message seems necessary, the staff assesses whether it’s important enough to require a phone call. If employees choose to work during off-hours, zmail discourages them from putting their habits onto others by sending emails during this time. They simply save the messages as drafts to be manually sent later, or they program their email client to automatically send the messages during work hours.

This policy creates alignment between the stated belief that downtime is important, and the behaviors of the staff that contribute to the culture.

Also, take a hard look at the attitudes of leaders regarding an always-on work environment.

The (often unconscious) belief that more work equals more success is difficult to overcome, but the truth is that this is neither beneficial nor sustainable. Long work hours actually decrease both productivity and engagement. I’ve seen that often, leaders believe theoretically in downtime, but they also want to keep company objectives moving forward — which seems like it requires constant communication.

A frantic environment that includes answering emails at all hours doesn’t make your staff more productive. It just makes them busy and distracted. You base your staff hiring decisions on their knowledge, experience, and unique talents, not how many tasks they can seemingly do at once, or how many emails they can answer in a day.

So, demonstrate and encourage an environment where employees can actually apply that brain power in a meaningful way:

Ditch the phrase “time management” for the more relevant “attention management,” and make training on this crucial skill part of your staff development plan.

Refrain from after-hours communication.

Model and discuss the benefits of presence, by putting away your devices when speaking with your staff, and implementing a “no device” policy in meetings to promote single-tasking and full engagement.

Discourage an always-on environment of distraction that inhibits creative flow by emphasizing the importance of focus, balancing an open floor plan with plenty of quiet spaces, and creating part-time remote work options for high concentration roles, tasks, and projects.

These behaviors will contribute to a higher quality output from yourself and your staff, and a more productive corporate culture.

~Maura Thomas

Original POST

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April 9, 2016December 16, 2017

How to stay skeptical of metrics

Question the Metrics

I love this post. Originally titled, Misleading Types of Graphs For The Media, it not only tears down the repeated claims and promoted metrics of video dominance, traditional media reach and more, it also questions info we are presented and often take for granted. Much like Nate Silverman discusses in The Signal and the Noise, be sure you are discerning the correct application of metrics and context. Long, but so worth your time. -pw

The Importance of Skepticism

My friend Avinash Kaushik posted a wonderful article the other day about the importance of analysts to have a skeptical nature. I absolutely agree with him. Skepticism, along with fact-checking, and a strong urge to take a step back to look at things from the larger perspective, is the key trait of anyone working with metrics and media strategies.

But I want to expand on his article because there are several types of graphs that I see all the time. Each painting a completely misleading picture. And each one of these is dominating the media landscape. And constantly used in presentations at pretty much all of the big media conferences.

So let’s talk about this.

The curse of the market share graphs

The first truly misleading graph metrics is the one most people use to indicate market share. Either of their own business, their audiences, or the things that we use to get our publications to the market.

For instance, take a look at this graph:

Here you see two different things/products/whatever and how they changed from 2011 to 2016. So, what conclusions do you get from this?

The conclusion most people come to is that the yellow market has experienced catastrophic decline. While the red market is dominating more and more.

Right? Eh… no. What if I told you that the yellow market hadn’t declined at all? And to prove this, here is the exact same graph but using the raw numbers instead of a percentage.

What’s actually happening here is that the market overall has expanded. The yellow market has experience only a minor growth. While the new red market has created an entirely new market on top of the old one.

You see how bad this is?

The first graph forced you to come to entirely wrong conclusions.

So, one of many places where this is happening is when people talk about the rise of mobile. For instance, people keep talking about how laptop computers are dead, and the graph they use is the one below.

What you see here is the same as before. As a percentage, mobile has been growing rapidly over the past five years at what looks like the expense of laptops. And if you see this graph (or those similar that are widely circulated by media executives) you may indeed think that laptops are dead.

What makes this graph even worse is when it is backed up by graphs showing volume of sales, where, again, mobile is dominating. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. We buy a new mobile at a much higher frequency than laptops. Especially today where we have so many devices to play with.

So, are laptops dying?

Is it game over for desktop computing? Nope… not even close.

Because here are the exact same numbers, but this time drawn using their real data instead of as a percentage. And what you see here is that laptop use per person is the same today as it was five years ago.

The growth of personal laptop usage may have peaked, at slightly less than 3 hours per day. But it shows no sign of decline. What has happened instead is that we now have a new mobile market on top of the old one. It’s not killing the laptops. It’s extending it.

Think about how many times people have told you that mobile is killing laptops over the past few years. Both at media conferences and on Twitter. It’s just insane how many have been fooled by looking at percentages instead of the actual numbers.

Don’t be one of those people. Always insist on seeing the real metrics.

There is, however, an even worse example than this. And that’s when we see studies from newspaper associations. Almost all of them are using completely misleading graphs by default. Either because they don’t know any better. Or, worse, because they are trying to hide the decline that we all know is happening.

The main reason why these graphs are so bad is because not only are they based on total percentages, they are also leaving out critical data.

Think about it like this. Imagine your market was defined by three types of audiences. Print, digital and not reached. Not reached are the people who have stopped reading newspapers as we know them.

Now imagine that we map this change over the past five years, we might see something like this:

What we see here is that the market overall is going up (due to the growth in population). But the share of people who don’t subscribe to newspapers is increasing. For newspapers, their market is in heavy decline. And even though digital is growing, it in no way makes up for the decline.

Sound familiar?

But then the newspaper associations do a study. And instead of looking at the market as a whole, they decide to only look at their remaining market. In other words, they decide to simply ignore all the people who have been lost, and then map the rest as a percentage.

The result is a graph that looks like this:

Now we have the same problem as before. This graph is not only completely useless, but also completely misleading. Now, you no longer see any sign that the market is in trouble. And while digital is growing, it looks like print is still going strong.

This is terrible.

One example of this was when the Canadian newspaper measurement agency Vividata published this study:

Just look at this. This graph actually makes it look like newspapers are winning. They are up from 77% reach to 81% reach. And even the magazines are doing fantastically. Sure they are down by a bit, but it’s nowhere close to anything that could threaten their future.

This is great. The Canadian newspaper industry has apparently found a way to keep winning with print. No problem here. Right?

Eh… no. The reality is, of course, that the media industry in Canada is in just as much trouble as newspapers anywhere else in the western world. And that their circulation and advertising revenue is in a terrible state… like what we see here:

I’m not saying that Vividata’s data is wrong. It’s probably an accurate reflection of what they measured. But what I am saying is that they designed the study to only look at things that had no real use for the challenges newspapers are faced with.

As they say:

Seventy percent of newspaper readers still read a printed edition daily. That’s down from 90% five years ago. While print remains the leading source for most newspaper readers in Canada today, digital and cross-platform continues to grow.

No. Just no. This is an idiotic way to look at the data.

The future of the newspaper industry is challenged by external factors. So it makes absolutely no sense to do a study that only looks at the internal factors. This is stupidity at its worst, and it has a serious consequence.

When the Spiegel’s Innovation report was leaked last week, one of the key problems they found was that they ‘lacked a sense of urgency’. And of course they did. If you are constantly being told print is still leading and digital is growing, you don’t feel any need to change. Things sound like they are going fine.

But this is not the reality.

So, be skeptical about newspaper studies. Almost every one of them is disastrously misleading. Especially so if they are based on percentages. Whenever I see a newspaper study that has percentages in it, my red warning lights begin flashing.

Not understanding what is being studied

Another huge problem that we see with studies and metrics about the media industry is that we often see that studies that are measuring one thing are used to prove something completely different.

One example is this slide from BBC’s Esra Doğramacı at the News:Rewired conference.

I have lost count of how many times I have seen media people use this study in relation to video. And people were absolutely lapping it up at the conference. Several people tweeted that video was the only thing to focus on in the future.

But this is not what that study is saying. The Cisco study has nothing to do with video consumption. It doesn’t tell us anything about whether people actually watch video more than before in relation to the media.

There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, the Cisco study is looking at the volume of network traffic going through their routers for all internet traffic as a whole. It’s not looking at video consumption specifically.

This alone is highly misleading. You think that an increase in video use means people also watch more video. But that’s not necessarily true.

Consider this.

Imagine that it’s 2010, back with poor wifi and relatively slow mobile devices. You look at the consumption patterns of a single person. So, you have a person reading 10 articles, at 2 MB, and spending 2 minutes reading each. Then this person also watches one video, at 360p (again because of slow connections), at 16 MB, spending 6 minutes.

What you get is this:

As you can see, 44% of the data usage metrics and 23% of the time spent goes to video, the rest goes to the articles.

Now fast forward to 2016. We now have 4K and amazingly fast wifi connections, so now we have got this:

You see what’s happened here?

In this example, the consumption pattern stayed the same. This person is still only spending 23% of his time watching video. But look at the data usage metrics. It’s now 96% going to video.

And this is what the Cisco study is predicting. It is looking at the size of the video files and it’s projecting how much data that will require in 2019. Cisco is not talking about time spent.

Read the rest of this post HERE

Written by Thomas Baekdal

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