Zimana spotlight: broadAngle
This interview with Garrison Atkisson, founder of broadAngle, was conducted via online in 2012. Portions were used as part of a post for Business Agility. I met Garrison during my grad school days at Georgia Tech. Later we crossed paths, and More »
First Digital Marketing and Analytics Seminar a Success for #Chicago Incubator @Blue1647 and Zimana
Zimana has partnered with Blue 1647, a Chicago start up and entrepreneurship incubator in the Pilsen neighborhood. Founded by Emile Cambry, and co-managed with Antonio Rowry as Chief Operating Officer, Blue 1647 provides a working space for 32 companies and More »
Zimana Client Spotlight: Scientifically Speaking @business317 merges presentation skills with social media
Eric Anderson has been a driving force with his company Scientifically Speaking (nicknamed SciSpeak). Based in Indianapolis, Scientifically Speaking provides social media and presentations coaching to technology professionals and small businesses. The end result for the client is an improved More »
Zimana Client Spotlight: @SmallBizLady Melinda Emerson – Shining a big bright light on small business
You have to admire Melinda Emerson. Her motto is to eliminate small business failure, and 2012 is shaping to be a great year for her to do so. With her media site Succeed As Your Own Boss being seen by a More »
Zimana Client Spotlight: @smallbiztrends Small Business Trends unveils new design and Twitterchats – offers more news by and for small business owners
Small Business Trends, a media site for small business tips and information, has launched a redesigned look that showcases its recent navigation bar redesign. The design adds a new look to the logo, modified colored, highlighted quotes (typically appearing in the More »
Useful #Twittertools to Discover Conversations With #Hashtags
This Audi Chicago Auto Show display reflects the growing importance of hashtags. Audi used this display to guide attendees to comment on its vehicles. Here you see an enthusiastic attendee commenting on the R8, Audi’s exclusive high-powered sports car.
Hashtags are becoming the “black” for social media – a desirable feature used to enhance a social media message. Though recently introduced in Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, hashtags have been around a while. Sometimes they are used blatantly – witness the flashing tags in the Robin Thicke’s controversial Blurred Lines video – and other times they are subtle, like appearing in the corner of a television show.
Most importantly, from a business perspective, hashtags are becoming the means in which customers research products and services. Buffer noted in a collection of surprising Twitter facts that tweets with hashtags gain twice the amount of engagement.
If your small business is looking to use hashtags more consistently, the first step is understanding the conversation surrounding a desired hashtag topic. To learn what is being said and shared, give the tools listed below a try and see how they reveal hashtag usage to your communication plans.
Topsy provides a breakdown of results by media and time period – handy for refining the understanding of a hashtag usage
A site to certainly check out is Topsy.com. The excellence of this tool is its ability to divide results by links, tweets, photos, videos and influencers. It can detail results according to past time period, so recency can be included as a factor in the results.
Twubs permit users to follow a hashtag in real time. Enter the desired hashtag in the search bar and a live feed of all tweets using that hashtag will appear. You can also select the feed speed that you want and post messaged with that hashtag directly from the feed page on the hashtag chat.
BackTweets is a very basic search engine site meant to display historical mentions of a word, hashtag, TwitterID, or URL mention. Backtweet results can compliment search results in Twitter, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and other Twitter-related applications.
This Hshtags page displays how search results can be incorporated into a list. This capability allows the user to track multiple responses and discover followers of a given hashtag phrase.
This hashtag-dedicated social media engine is in its initial beta as of this writing, but it does offer surprising and outstanding functionality. First, it can aggregate hashtag usage across the major social media platforms, so a comparison of Instagram usage can be alongside Twitter. You can also create lists according to interest. You can then use that comparison to tailor a “to do” list of text to use in your hashtags, tweets, and shared content.
This real-time hashtag intelligence tool provides charts and graphics, as well as numbers of tweets and retweets, reach, impressions and other details that will help you get more insight into the success of your hashtag.
Hashtags.org also provides some hashtag tracking, although for more in-depth analytics you’ll need to be a paid member.
Bottlenose is more akin to Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and Postling as a social media dashboard than a search engine like Hashtracking. It gives users data that reflects an overview of an owned social media channel. But it does have a unique sonar feature that permits users to discover other hashtags associated to the ones already used in a Twitter account.
Combining Bottlenose with any of the aforementioned tools should provide a thorough review of what related hashtags are worth your time.
First Digital Marketing and Analytics Seminar a Success for #Chicago Incubator @Blue1647 and Zimana
Zimana has partnered with Blue 1647, a Chicago start up and entrepreneurship incubator in the Pilsen neighborhood. Founded by Emile Cambry, and co-managed with Antonio Rowry as Chief Operating Officer, Blue 1647 provides a working space for 32 companies and a number of workshops centered on web technology and app development. The center is part of a burgeoning Chicago tech scene. The incubator offers programs such as Project Exploration, i c Stars, Code Chicago (a web & app development program for adult-learners), 21st Century Youth Project for young adults including our Girls in Fashion Tech program!), and data science courses.
The partnership consist of web analytics workshop presentations created by Zimana, with the workshops hosted at Blue1647.
The first session, held September 23rd, provided an overview of SEO, Paid Search, and Social Media, from a content marketing approach. Analytics concepts were then introduced to help answer questions about how digital marketing works for a small business. The sessions have brought in the highest response for Blue1647 workshop registrations to date.
Check out some pictures from the attendees as Zimana founder Pierre DeBois walks through the presentation. For more information on future sessions – a new session is being planned for November – contact Blue1647.
Zimana founder Pierre DeBois explaining how analytics organizes the marketing choices for a business
Zimana founder Pierre DeBois explaining how digital marketing has impacted the choices facing small businesses.
When analytics disappoints (and what to do about it) – Management Perspective
What are the management challenges that can occur with analytics? Much of it stems from human error and assumptions that cumulatively can hinder valuable results and decisions.
1. Misalignment of goals
Go back over the original purpose for a site and review why it exists. The site should reflect the core reasons for what your business provides. It also serves as an anchor for what augments the products and services – apps, content information, and the social media that compliments it. So given all that is in the site, does the web analytics goals selected support a key strategy for the business? If not, make an adjustment to the tags.
2. Poor understanding of what is needed
This is reflected in poor metrics selection. One metric is sometimes not enough to describe an objective. Considered how an objective can be described in a combination of other metrics or as a rate over relevant time periods. Try to develop questions around two or more metrics to gain a story about what behavior is happening on a site. Examine reports like multichannel and traffic flow to see what could be influencing site decisions.
3. Poor tool usage
This can stem from misunderstanding metrics, as well as misunderstanding a tool’s capability and underinvesting in the analyst. Silo a department without interaction with business operations can lead to misuse of a tool. Spreadsheets can be nortious for this. Individual spreadsheets contained errors and multiple versions of the truth.
4. Politics
Are you truly implementing steps to improve a website? Managers must make time to review and be proactive with implementing solutions, otherwise value is lost because the information is left in a “silo” with no action behind the data. Businesses can not silo analytic reporting and expect success.
In Competing on Analytics, business intelligence and analytics expert Thomas Davenport noted four characteristics that are within any company competing on analytics:
- Analytics supported a key strategy
- The approach to and management of analytics was enterprise wide
- Senior management was committed
- The company as a whole made a strategic bet on analytics based competition
Analytics must be applied judiciously, with an eye to be continually renewed. Davenport stated it best – “Without a distinctive capability (what you do to set your business apart), it becomes impossible to compete and distinguish what data is important.”
Management Education Never Stops: Business Agility #Video from UBM Deus
The video below was created for UBM Tech’s site Business Agility (sponsored by IBM). The site, a perspective on business technology that analysts and managers face, went dark about a year ago, but much of the material remains relevant.
This video examines the importance of analytics, but from a perspective of business structure. Analytics impacts how your business operates. The iterative nature of analytics creates an opportunity to manage resources and tools. These operations can then be optimized for growing a business vs. mere acquiring a business. Looking at the leaders in retail and technology give evidence that analytics, when launched properly, can provide the right boost for a business.
What do think managers should focus upon to strengthen their tool set? Share your thoughts here on Zimana blog.
