Demystifying Data Analysis

In the world of media, marketing, apps and software, we are inundated with data. Arguably, we have more data than we'll ever know what to do with and it gets increasingly difficult to make sense of it all. It can feel overwhelming, and if you're not well versed in working with data, it can feel too much and you end up reverting to instinct rather than data. It's fair to say that instinct did ok for Steve Jobs but most people don't have his genius so are better off relying on data.

But what do you do when you're faced with loads of data after interviewing lots of people about a certain product, website or general day to day habits? This is a core part of anyone who works in user-experience. They're the people who work out what customers need or want or how they're using something and translate that into improving how your website or app will work. Of course, sometimes the advice is ignored, but in the main, it's advice you should be listening to.

If you're an SME or start-up or, perhaps, pre-startup, you can't always afford a dedicated user experience person to work with you but you need to start somewhere. This article from Rachel Hinman is a great starting point to give you a simple structure to working your way through your data to gain insights from it. Check it out now.

Day 20/30 NaBloPoMo

China, Big Data and Social Scoring - Big Brother Is, In Fact, Watching You

This isn't entirely new news from The Independent today, but it is an update about the Chinese government implementing a sort of comprehensive Klout score to each and every citizen and in turn, limiting access rights to certain services (including travelling by train or going abroad), goods and even jobs. It's the stuff of fiction of the kind of society Orwell was writing about.

"A high-level policy document released in September listed the sanctions that could be imposed on any person or company deemed to have fallen short. The overriding principle: “If trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere.” A whole range of privileges would be denied, while people and companies breaking social trust would also be subject to expanded daily supervision and random inspections.

The ambition is to collect every scrap of information available online about China's companies and citizens in a single place – and then assign each of them a score based on their political, commercial, social and legal “credit.”"

I first picked up on this story last December and wrote about it on my blog here in some depth. I hadn't exactly forgotten about it, but had brushed it to one side. But Big Data and the algorithms that are interrogating Big Data are not going away anytime soon. And in that respect, we're all affected in some way or other. We are being measured and tracked and assumptions are being made about us all the time based on our home address, where we work, where we travel to, the products we buy, how much money we have and who we are connected to.

There are clearly some very useful aspects to scoring to make certain things in life and business easier - after all, we have extensive credit scoring in Europe and the US. But that's not a perfect science by any stretch of the imagination and is prone to fraud, abuse and misuse. This will likely increase. I don't think there is an easy answer to this. Some kind of scoring is inevitable when there is data available (and it's available in bucket loads). We are being scored all the time at some level - from targeted advertising to credit scores. Is it the price we have to pay to have a digital life?

On a side note, but not entirely unrelated, I recently went to see Orwell's 1984 in London at The Playhouse Theatre. It's very powerful and pertinent to today's society and I highly recommend it. It's on a limited run and closes on Saturday 29 October. Catch it while you still can. Or you could read the book as a refresher.

Friday Tidbits

I’ve been neglecting my blog in favour of Facebook and I think it’s time to get back to my blog and give it some tlc. I’m going to start with an easy post listing some things I’ve been reading and thinking about lately. So here goes...

Jakob Nielsen talks sense about UX in the corporate world. The older readers among you will no doubt remember Mr Nielsen from the early days of the web and his seminal book Designing Web Usability – The Practice of Simplicity. Well, he’s still around and still dishing out sound advice such as in this podcast and interview about how to tackle usability in the corporate world.

Male exec gets it completely wrong on diversity within the ad industry and has to resign his very senior and very well paid role within global ad agency. Read all about it here.

Brexit – A story in maps. This article is fascinating whichever way you did or didn’t vote. It’s not nearly as clear cut as we might have thought and the picture is more complex than London, Northern Ireland and Scotland are in and the rest of the UK voted out. It depends on which way you cut and interpret the data for a much more nuanced view. I don’t envy Theresa May and the job she has on her hands right now.

A great read on burnout here – a modern day and very real affliction. “Burnout is not simply a symptom of working too hard. It is also the body and mind crying out for an essential human need: a space free from the incessant demands and expectations of the world. In the consulting room, there are no targets to be hit, no achievements to be crossed off. The amelioration of burnout begins in finding your own pool of tranquility where you can cool off’.”

Monday Morning linkage – 27 April 09

How to make money on the mobile internet – a presentation round up from Sergio Falletti’s session at The Mobile Internet Forum in Vienna.

Comprehensive case study from Guinness and their use of mobile marketing for the Hong Kong Sevens (a rugby tournament for the non-rugby fans out there).

SMS biggest riser as mobile marketing recall increases significantly in early 2009 according to recent GFK research into advertising and marketing.

Rory Cellan-Jones meets Malcolm Barclay, the inventor of one of the many home-crafted applications being sold for the iPhone (short BBC video) and Rory also discusses the birth of the new mobile applications industry (including a short interview with James Whatley aka Whatleydude).

Are we living in a Totalitarian State in the UK? Political correctness going over the top? And what about the Government snooping on our every email, telephone call and web visit? [My personal opinion is that the government is neither equipped to deal with the data, nor has the justification to go down this track since there is no evidence to suggest it will make our lives safer and will be prone to abuse since it’s humans who will be running it not robots.] I agree, give us back our private lives.

Technorati Tags: linkage,links,mobile marekting,data,sms marketing,mobile internet,mobile web

Silly mobile tariffs

I spoke at the Future of Mobile conference recently and stated silly mobile tariffs were holding us back as an industry. And they are silly. They're complicated, there are too many of them, there's lots of very small print (which I can't read even *with* my glasses on), extra roaming charges on a per megabyte basis (who knows what a megabyte is anyway and how do you know the size of a page *before* you click on it?) and well, they're just so unnecessary.

And if you don't believe me, go take a look at MobileMeg who has attempted to collate all UK mobile data tariffs (albeit I suspect it's a little out of date as I know Tesco has recently introduced a new mobile data tariff - yet another one!). It's not pretty and it's not clever. Network operators - sort it out! Complexity is not a good thing.

Technorati Tags: mobile,mobile tariffs,tariff,tariffs,mobile data,data charges,network operator,UK,megabyte,roaming

The usefulness of data collection

Every company seems to want your data these days - gender, date of birth, postcode, what you buy, what you like, who you hang with, how often you do all this. Yet what do they do with it?

Seemingly, very little.

Tell me, why did Sainsbury's think it was a good idea to send me a personalised email promoting nappies and baby goods?

I've shopped at Sainsbury's, offline, for over 20 years. And online, I've shopped with them a handful of times in the last 2 or 3 years I reckon.

So tell me, why would I want to stock up on baby food, accessories, wipes or toiletries?

I have never bought nappies in my life - not even for my nieces when they were born.

I am single.

I have no children. [Well not if you don't count my involvement with my local brownie pack in Tooting Bec. And they're not babies anyway.]

My shopping habits haven't changed. I still don't buy meat or cigarettes. I still don't buy baked beans or marmite. And I still don't buy Johnson's baby lotion or Pamper's.

Have they made an assumption because I've bought baby wipes a few times that I have a baby - even though I've bought them for use at a festival and I've never bought any other baby products? It's a tenuous link at best and anyway, I usually buy my baby wipes at Superdrug or Somerfield.

Or are they being super-clever... and they've worked out that a couple of my facebook pals have had babies recently?? I somehow doubt they're following me to that degree, and they certainly shouldn't be if I haven't given them permission.

If it's not going to be useful or used, why bother collecting the data at all?

Technorati Tags: data,demographics,data collection,targeting

Mobile advertising - all hype?

I ran a session for the Institute of Direct Marketing last week and shortly after the session I got an email from one of my students who'd picked up on this article from Simon Mansell of TBG London. Said student thought it was quite amusing and a juxtaposition of what I'd been talking about for two hours that morning.

The article's not particularly well written so, to give Simon the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was a rush job, or it was heavily edited to fit the page or maybe Simon isn't exposed to the world of mobile [yet]. Or any combination thereof. But the facts just aren't straight.

The gist of the article is that mobile advertising has failed to deliver, the example being that the Google search interface is incompatible with mobile. And to some extent I agree - at least with the mobile search issues. I don't think that problem has been fixed yet, but it will be, over time. And actually mobile search is still a very small part of the mobile advertising, let alone mobile marketing, mix.

However, Simon really missed the elephant in the room and that is wap and the related wap advertising. You may think that wap is cr@p and isn't working and is expensive and at times, I'd have to agree with you. But we are seeing flat rate data plans from the network operators, including Pay As You Go customers, and the opening of the walled gardens from the operators with T-Mobile's web 'n walk for example.

But things really are moving with wap and wap advertising. The latest M:Metrics statistics show that 89.5% of UK mobile subscribers have a mobile phone with a web browser and some 44.8% of active users access news/information at least once a week and about a third of all UK subscribers browsed or downloaded from wap in the last month. None of that is to be sniffed at. And if you look globally, active usage is very much higher in India and South Africa, where data charges are almost nil. This is a ripe environment for wap advertising.

Add to that, that big brands are using wap advertising (think Coca Cola, The Times, Adidas), and that the GSMA has launched the first mobile advertising standards in conjunction with the MMA and that Admob has already served almost 3.5 billion wap adverts in its short existence, plus the acquisitions of Screen Tonic and Third Screen by Microsoft and AOL respectively, this is becoming major league.

Wap advertising is just one element of the mobile marketing mix but it's already an increasingly important one. It occurs to me both as observer and participant in mobile marketing and advertising that this wap advertising thing is really really happening and those who choose to ignore it do so at their peril.

Interesting mobile statistics from M:Metrics

The folks at M:Metrics have just released some of their research into mobile usage on to the world. It's pretty comprehensive stuff. Did you know...?

• 50% of US mobile phone owners own a cameraphone rising to 63% of French mobile owners and 3 out of 4 (or 75%) of us in the UK - seems we Brits like our cameraphones (good news for the guys at Moblog!)
• Figures for using MMS have remained stable for the last 6 months with about 30% of UK phone-owners using MMS
• 85% of UK users use text-messaging vs 39% of US mobile phone owners so the US has a little way to catch up, but I have no doubt they will over time.
• Mobile internet browsing is a little bit down in most countries vs the last quarter but it's still . (Hmm, I wonder if poxy data charges and slow speeds have anything to do with that?)

M:Metrics runs regular web briefings where you get to find out some of the latest statistics and findings. Find out more about these on their website. In the meantime, below are the various data tables I received from them which make for interesting reading.

Used network services for photos/video

	Aug-06		Feb-07
Country	Subscribers	Percent	Subscribers	Percent
France	8,796,960	20.5	9,432,842	21.2
Germany	9,238,968	20.5	9,590,281	20.8
Italy	13,156,342	31.3	13,779,059	31.3
Spain	8,671,452	28.4	9,316,644	29.1
UK	13,363,233	30.7	13,187,929	29.6
US	28,218,336	14.5	30,692,545	14.8

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2007. Survey of mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 31 August, 2006, n= 12,458 French, 15,078 German, 11,909 Italian, 12,228 Spanish, 15,051 UK and 35,016 US and the period ending 28 February

M:Metrics applies trusted media measurement methodologies to assess the audience for mobile content and applications. As the world’s most authoritative mobile market measurement firm, M:Metrics delivers the most accurate mobile market metrics through the world’s largest monthly survey of mobile subscribers as well as automated data collection methodologies. Below are the findings of its February Benchmark Survey of mobile statistics for France, Italy, Germany, Spain, UK and the USA. All the information is the copyright of M:Metrics Inc. 2007.

French Mobile Subscriber Monthly Consumption of Content and Applications

M:Metrics Benchmark Survey: February 2007

Activity	Subscribers (1000s)	Percent	Percent Change
Sent Text Message	32,811	73.70%	2.50%
Used Photo Messaging	9,433	21.20%	0.80%
Browsed News and Information	3,308	7.40%	1.90%
Used Personal E-Mail	2,851	6.40%	3.80%
Purchased Ringtone	2,297	5.20%	-0.10%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger	1,431	3.20%	1.20%
Used Work E-Mail	1,086	2.40%	8.90%
Purchased Wallpaper or Screensaver	932	2.10%	-4.70%
Downloaded Mobile Game	630	1.40%	-1.60%

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2007. Survey of French mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 28 February, 2007, n= 12,847

German Mobile Subscriber Monthly Consumption of Content and Applications
M:Metrics Benchmark Survey: February 2007
Activity	Subscribers (1000s)	Percent	Percent Change
Sent Text Message	37,541	81.60%	1.60%
Used Photo Messaging	9,590	20.80%	5.20%
Used Personal E-Mail	2,633	5.70%	1.50%
Purchased Ringtone	2,311	5.00%	6.10%
Browsed News and Information	1,531	3.30%	3.00%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger	1,488	3.20%	3.50%
Used Work E-Mail	1,349	2.90%	4.00%
Downloaded Mobile Game	1,277	2.80%	6.50%
Purchased Wallpaper or Screensaver	922	2.00%	-0.30%

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2007. Survey of German mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 28 February, 2007, n= 15,834

Italian Mobile Subscriber Monthly Consumption of Content and Applications
M:Metrics Benchmark Survey: February 2007
Activity	Subscribers (1000s)	Percent	Percent Change
Sent Text Message	37,326	84.80%	-0.20%
Used Photo Messaging	13,779	31.30%	-1.90%
Used Personal E-Mail	3,777	8.60%	-5.30%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger	2,550	5.80%	-3.60%
Browsed News and Information	2,536	5.80%	-11.70%
Purchased Ringtone	2,227	5.10%	-5.60%
Used Work E-Mail	2,006	4.60%	-1.50%
Downloaded Mobile Game	1,468	3.30%	-6.70%
Purchased Wallpaper or Screensaver	1,283	2.90%	-1.50%

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2007. Survey of Italian mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 28 February, 2007, n= 12,864

Spanish Mobile Subscriber Monthly Consumption of Content and Applications
M:Metrics Benchmark Survey: February 2007
Activity	Subscribers (1000s)	Percent	Percent Change
Sent Text Message	27,302	85.30%	2.20%
Used Photo Messaging	9,317	29.10%	5.60%
Used Personal E-Mail	2,686	8.40%	1.90%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger	2,176	6.80%	1.20%
Purchased Ringtone	2,158	6.70%	-3.50%
Browsed News and Information	1,825	5.70%	-3.10%
Downloaded Mobile Game	1,777	5.60%	-0.80%
Used Work E-Mail	1,616	5.10%	0.10%
Purchased Wallpaper or Screensaver	837	2.60%	-0.10%

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2007. Survey of Spanish mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 28 February, 2007, n= 13,354

U.K. Mobile Subscriber Monthly Consumption of Content and Applications
M:Metrics Benchmark Survey: February 2007
Activity	Subscribers (1000s)	Percent	Percent Change
Sent Text Message	38,080	85.60%	0.30%
Used Photo Messaging	13,188	29.60%	-1.40%
Browsed News and Information	6,092	13.70%	-4.00%
Used Personal E-Mail	3,136	7.00%	-1.70%
Downloaded Mobile Game	2,252	5.10%	-6.60%
Purchased Ringtone	1,949	4.40%	-5.70%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger	1,854	4.20%	-0.60%
Used Work E-Mail	1,571	3.50%	-6.00%
Purchased Wallpaper or Screensaver	895	2.00%	-1.10%

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2007. Survey of U.K. mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 28 February, 2007, n= 15,536

U.S. Mobile Subscriber Monthly Consumption of Content and Applications
M:Metrics Benchmark Survey: February 2007
Activity	Subscribers (1000s)	Percent	Percent Change
Sent Text Message	81,184	39.20%	3.70%
Used Photo Messaging	30,693	14.80%	4.30%
Browsed News and Information	20,480	9.90%	-0.50%
Purchased Ringtone	19,999	9.70%	-0.10%
Used Personal E-Mail	17,343	8.40%	2.40%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger	13,797	6.70%	9.10%
Used Work E-Mail	10,187	4.90%	0.00%
Purchased Wallpaper or Screensaver	6,839	3.30%	-0.90%
Downloaded Mobile Game	6,752	3.30%	-7.40%

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2007. Survey of U.S. mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 28 February, 2007, n= 31,832

In-flight SMS being trialled on Qantas

Don't get too excited about the potential for mobile usage on planes just yet - this is just a trial, it's data only and on just one plane. Passengers on the selected Boeing 767 flying between Australian cities in the next 3 months will be able to send and receive SMS and access GPRS services for email and wap usage, but no voice facilities will be available. Passengers will need to have international roaming enabled as the aeroplane will operate like a roamed-to network and of course, there will be the associated cost.

I think this is kinda neat, but don't they already have broadband access on international Japanese flights or did I just dream that up?? I'm 99% certain that a friend of mine on a recent trip to Japan was instant messaging me from the aeroplane.

Via El Reg.