Get to grips with analytics
Jinfo Blog

24th June 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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A little flurry of activity in the world of web analytics should have information managers on the alert. As is often the case with these things, they’re mostly happening outside the territory that information professionals customarily inhabit, and the individual developments may not be particularly significant – but their cumulative effect is. First off is the news that the marketing technology company Lotame has teamed up with semantic web service OpenAmplify to further increase its ability to market to ‘highly engaged’ audiences. The partnership enables Lotame to scan content as people create it, and to associate the content creators with the sentiment – the levels of emotion and engagement – they express about brands, activities and other topics (http://digbig.com/5bbtsp). Closer to home as far as the information community is concerned, Twitter has recently acquired a web analytics company called Smallthought Systems. Twitter had previously been using another Smallthought product – but when it launched Trendly, a tool to help websites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data, Twitter got interested enough to buy the whole company (http://digbig.com/5bbtsq). As the CIO magazine website comments, the key to the success of Twitter’s Promoted Tweets (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29204 for more on these) will be its capacity to analyse the popularity and effectiveness of those ads so that campaigns can be evaluated and optimised. This could be especially challenging for Twitter, the CIO article suggests, because its Promoted Tweets look just like ordinary ones and its usage is going through the roof (http://digbig.com/5bbtsr). What matters for Twitter will matter no less for other companies as well, and this September the Software & Information Industry Association is hosting a brown bag lunch in New York on the topic of making money from analytics. Covering predictive and behaviour analytics, as well as the web variety, it dangles the prospect before prospective attendees of using analytics to increase revenue, reduce churn and find up-selling and cross-selling opportunities (registration details at http://digbig.com/5bbtss – will also be available as a webcast). If it all seems a bit too much like marketing executive or chief information officer territory, then a recent report from the Centre for Information Leadership at London’s City University may provide a bit of context. Responding to the Millennial Generation, by researchers Martin Rich and David Chan, concludes that, as those born after 1983 increase as a proportion of the workforce, the challenge for enterprises will be how to integrate them effectively and maximise their contribution (http://digbig.com/5bbtst and follow link). They’re already completely at home with social networking as consumers, and will become equally comfortable with its analytical potential as they enter the corporate world. Information managers might do well to build such skills into their own recruitment wish lists.

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