Location connecting social and marketing

Location-Based Social Marketing

For extreme introverts the great thing about social media is that you never have to see your connections in real life. But for people who like to actually interact with people face-to-face, as well as the businesses that seek to get people in a physical door, that can actually be a shortcoming. Location-aware social media can bridge that gap between the virtual and physical.

Location awareness is what distinguishes the Locye social media platform. It allows users to “observe social activity at real-time hotspots and places of interest worldwide” and to post content that those nearby can see. For those who don't want to give too much away, there is an option to post anonymously. Users can also select whether they want their posts kept up for just a day or for a virtual eternity. 

Locye's Founder and CEO, Sajjad Mustehsan, discussed the platform's potential for marketing with me. He said that it “will soon be offering business-to-consumer marketing capabilities” with three defining characteristics:

Read more in Location-Based Social Marketing

The problem of visibility in today's complex supply chains

Supply chains today are integral to building a competitive advantage. As they grow in complexity, those who manage them acknowledge that they do not have as full visibility as they should. Technological solutions can point the way to more visible, better managed, and more efficient supply chains that deliver better value for companies and their customers.

While there is wide variation in the supply chains of various businesses, there are still some identifiable trends. The 2017 GEODIS Supply Chain Worldwide survey (PDF) delves into some of them. The report draws on the responses of 623 professionals in 17 countries from various functions related to the supply chain, including finance, operations, marketing, strategy, IT, and management.

The majority (67%) of people surveyed in a position of supply chain leadership rank as C-Level or top management. This does appear to play some role in successfully strategies because businesses in which that position is help by “a middle manager seem less profitable.”

The top concerns for those who responded to the survey were, not surprisingly, “containment of their costs (32%).” That fits with their awareness of dealing with “global competition (28%).”  However, more than half (57%) reported that they see “Supply Chain as a competitive advantage, enabling the development of the company and not” merely an area in which to reduce expenses.   

Read more in 

Today’s Complex Supply Chains Demand Visibility Solutions

Data Scientist Interview

Domingos Lopes is about to begin a new job involving machine learning at Google after having completed the NYC Data Science Academy 12-Week Data Science Bootcamp. He came in with a strong math background, having earned a PhD in that field from NYU in 2016. After deciding that he did not want his job prospects to be limited to academic settings, Lopes decided that the best course of action was to acquire data science skills. In addition to the technical skills like Python fluency, he expects to draw on the ability to communicate data insight and work effectively in a team setting as he embarks on his career at Google.

Read more in https://www.switchup.org/blog/alumni-spotlight-domingos-lopes-hired-at-google

Wait, what?

This is not a post on the popular book that bears that title. (I did write about that here:  uncommoncontent.blogspot.com.) This is my reaction to the number a billion that sounds impressive but is really completely meaningless without context.*

When I shared a link today on LI, it offered me three other links to read. Among them was a FastCompany article, "Six Ways YouTube Is Primed For The Future (And Four Areas That Need Work)" Now read what it says for the fifth and see if you have the same reaction I do:

5. YouTube’s rebuilt algorithms have led viewers to watch 1 billion hours of video a day. YouTube is optimized for what it calls “watch time,” which encompasses what users view, how long they tune in, the length of their overall YouTube session, and so forth. Together, these signals help YouTube algorithms decide which videos a user is most likely to watch shortly after they’re posted and which will lead to the longest overall viewing period.

Do you get what's missing here? How many viewers are there? How many hours did they watch before the algorithms were rebuilt?

Without those two pieces of information, we really have no way of knowing how much of an advance one billion hours of video a day represents. Sure, it sounds like a lot, but we don't know if it represents the two billion people watching an average of a half an hour a day or one billion watching an average of an hour, or half a million watching two hours.

 We also don't know if the actual goal was to bring in more viewers or to keep the ones already watching on the channel for longer. That's a pretty important piece of context, as well, if one is to judge if the algorithms are accomplishing what the company intended for them. The article does refer to 800 million YouTube consumers of music but doesn't clarify whether or not that represents the viewers in total and if that number represents an increase over the number before the adjustment to the algorithms.

The bottom line is this: Don't be dazzled by numbers, no matter how large, that are presented without the relevant context.


*Related post http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2016/10/data-visualization-you-have-to-c-it-to.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2017/09/missingness-at-museum.html