Nonlinear Thinking

Big Data and the Science of Storytelling

Big data, and the analytics that make sense of the exponentially growing volumes of it, seem to be top-of-mind across the business landscape and increasingly central to both strategic and tactical decision making today.  In certain realms, marketing comes immediately to mind, it possesses the potential to become the central unifying force that moves the practice further from art and closer to science.  But, with big data has come big challenges in using the data for practical and impactful purposes.

That is why telling stories built upon data and analytics will become the critical manner for articulating the value buried deep in the lines and columns of huge stores of data. Narrative has been foundational for communication since words were first spoken.  It is the way to simplify and make sense of complexity in our lives, our businesses and our world.

Storytelling is central to the human experience.  As humans, we are wired to understand the connection between cause and effect via stories.  We think in narratives all day long.  Whatever our physical world may look like and however we choose to move through it, it is the narratives we create and pass along that bind us and the places we inhabit in a level of coherence that enables progress toward goals, actions and results.  Of course, this is not new.  What is a more recent element of the story making and telling process is the ability to incorporate the immense amounts of data that we can now generate and aggregate into a data-driven narrative through the use of analytics.

Data tells you what’s happening. Stories tell you why it matters.

This is where “the rubber meets the road” in the world of big data.  Data is inert until animated by the mathematical models that transform it into elements of insight that can be woven into a narrative that makes the complex simple and the overwhelming into something digestible and understandable.  With a data-driven story, hundreds of millions of rows can be distilled into a unique story. By following that narrative, it’s much easier to understand what’s going on beneath the surface. The data and corresponding analysis can tell you what’s happening, but you need a story to articulate the importance and the potential impact, allowing you to make decisions that are more targeted and supported.

But, storytelling is about more than simply understanding and articulating one’s world, though that is critically important.  Stories that incorporate data and analytics can be catalysts for change, driven by the insights and actions that result from “crunching the numbers”.  The impact of big data can be extraordinary with the potential to influence much of the way things will be done in the future but that requires moving out of the realm of the quants.  Telling the stories, with data and analytics, can communicate the who, what, how, when and where of the business, creating context for making strategic and tactical decision, both big and small.  To tell a great story with data and analytics, data scientists must begin to think like storytellers.

Decision science has been around for decades but computing power, communication speeds and smart technologies have driven the need for better analytic tools.  Big data is big and getting bigger and our methods and means of analysis have become faster, finer and more robust and that creates both opportunity and threat for the enterprise.  Extract insights from the data and craft a story that resonates with key constituencies and you create competitive advantage.  Bore them with spreadsheets and charts and you just may find yourself out of business.

Big data and analytics have now entered the realm of must have for the enterprise to realize the greatest success.  Storytelling has always been thus.  The combination has the potential to change the way we do everything. But the holy grail has to be the story; the story that communicates what is happening in the business and what can and needs to be done to address the challenges and exploit the opportunities that the analysis uncovers.

Perhaps most importantly, though, stories motivate action. And in today’s world of information overload, it’s crucial to be able to make informed, actionable decisions based on all of your data. 

By using analytics to create a compelling story, big data can become the transformational force that it’s promise has suggested it can be.

 

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"This is a Generic Brand Video" Video

Funny and disquieting on multiple levels, this is a creative evocation of  Kendra Eash's brilliant advertising takedown, "This Is a Generic Brand Video," originally published by McSweeney's.  Stock video provider Dissolve has taken the text of Eash's screed and set it to actual stock video clips.

From Adweek:

The results, narrated by Dallas McClain, are outstanding. You've seen all of this footage in ads from major brands. It's everywhere. And it's great that a stock video house would so gleefully celebrate the soul-sucking manipulations for which its offerings are generally used.

Watch below, and have an epiphany on how you can continue to make marketing, and brand building, more credible going forward.

 

 

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Everything You Hate About Advertising in One Fake Video That's Almost Too Real

White Paper - "Content is King, Context is Queen - Together They Rule!

One of the core themes of this blog over the years has been the impact of technology on the marketing art and science.  With the advent of digital, social, and mobile media, the strategy and execution of marketing has embraced and leveraged many new channels as avenues to influencing the target customer.  I have long viewed the development and management of quality content as critical to this new process, perhaps even more than during the decades of analog-only marketing.  With the "always-on" nature of digital/social/mobile communications today and the ability to gather real-time data on prospects, context is becoming increasingly critical to ensuring that valuable content is delivered at the most optimal point in the customer's decision process.

I thought this new model was important enough to author a white paper on it and you can access it by clicking on the image or link below.  Comments and critiques are welcome.

Download Content is King

Recognizing Strategic Dissonance

Operating in a world where the competitive landscape is ever more ephemeral, challenges to the status quo ever more profound, and the life of a successful business model ever shorter, aligning a corporation’s strategic intent and strategic action becomes ever more critical.  The more dynamic the industry, the shorter the duration such alignment is likely to be.  As intent and action become misaligned, that divergence creates what Andy Grove termed “strategic dissonance” in a California Management Review article he co-authored as well as his 1996 book Only the Paranoid Survive.

Arriving at a point of strategic dissonance suggests that the incumbent strategy no longer works as the underlying market and competitive dynamics have shifted enough to require a new strategy.  Grove termed these “strategic inflection points” to describe the giving way of one type of industry dynamics for another.  Strategic inflection points signal fundamental change in a business and require a new strategy, a modified business model, and a change in the way business is conducted.  The driver might be new technology, new regulations, emergent competition, or any structural dynamic that obviates the current environment.

The challenge for anyone, management or otherwise, is to recognize the strategic dissonance and, more importantly, to perceive the opportunity being created by the strategic inflection point and requisite new strategy.

 

Recognition that the changing nature of the enterprise’s operating environment is a true strategic inflection point occurs in stages:

• Initially, identifying and articulating the existence of strategic dissonance – the growing divergence between what the company views as its strategy and the actual actions of its management team.
• Then, confirming and accepting that the new set of circumstances is indeed a strategic inflection point that will require changes to the old way of business.
• Finally, understanding the new strategic priorities, creating a framework for overcoming the strategic dissonance, and formulating a new strategic intent.

To manage through the envelope of strategic dissonance that is driven by the emergence of a true strategic inflection point requires the management insight and discipline to see that during this period of transformation, both the old and new basis of competition, distinctive competencies, strategies, and strategic actions will need to coexist.

That is a distinctive competency in and of itself.

The Complexity of Digital Marketing

This "transit map" from Gartner visually represents how hard it is to be a marketer today.

Inbound Marketing the Hubspot Way

We don’t really endorse products/solutions/services per se here at Nonlinear Thinking but we were to make that leap, we couldn’t find a better company to endorse than Hubspot.  They have done nothing short of inventing and then reinventing the concept, process and practice of inbound marketing.

Having used Hubspot almost since its inception, the endorsement comes from practical experience.  It just makes your marketing better.

The key components in their definition of inbound marketing include:

• Content Creation - You create targeted content that answers your customer's basic questions and needs, and you share that content far and wide.
• Lifecycle Marketing - You recognize that people go through stages as they interact with your company, and that each stage requires different marketing actions.
• Personalization - As you learn more about your leads over time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs.
• Multi-channel - Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature because it approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you.
• Integration - Your publishing and analytics tools all work together like a well-oiled machine, allowing you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.

On Becoming a Social Business

Call it the tipping point, the moment of truth, a watershed event or any other synonym for when things have arrived at a point of irreversible, no-going-back, change.  Is 2013 going to be the year when social media truly becomes social business and social business morphs into business as usual?

Probably not.  Reams of data suggest that most companies are using social media.  Most of those are still really just dabbling.  Truly embracing social media as a core element of business going forward requires a belief and commitment that is still difficult to find in companies with more traditional business models and a bias towards the tried-and-true.  But with proof points on the efficacy of the practice/process/technology/culture of social media becoming more and more plentiful, it would seem that the more programmatic embrace of social media is coming closer to a need-to-have more than a nice-to-have.

The concept of a “social business” is still probably nascent enough that there remain a number of definitions running around.  In a recent report from Altimeter Group, Charlene Li and Brian Solis outlined the difference between a social media strategy and a social business strategy:

A social media strategy lays out the channels, platforms, and tactics to support publishing, listening, and engagement. A social business strategy is the integration of social technologies and processes into business values, processes, and practices to build relationships and spark conversations inside and outside the organization, creating value and optimizing impact for customers and the business alike. The most important criteria for a successful social business strategy are twofold: clear alignment with the strategic business goals of an organization AND organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy.

Social media broadly permeates society (perhaps too much!) and that means it permeates business operations on all levels.  Ad hoc social activity runs rampant across the enterprise so it stands to reason that sooner or later, every company will want to formalize and harmonize these activities into a coherent strategy and plan.  Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information and, whether informal or formal, use of those technologies allow companies to respond more quickly, take advantage more easily, and create competitive advantage.

Companies have historically tended to demonize those things that impact their business but remain beyond their control.  Though it may be stating the obvious, social media is one big, fat dynamic that is altering the playbook for business and not just in the marketing discipline.  De facto, every business today is a social business; they may just not have internalized it yet.  Possessing a strategy is merely the first step in the formal embrace of social.  That way, all those “Likes”, “Friends”, “Links”, and “Follows” can mean something more than a distraction.

Along those lines, here is a video from GE on their progression towards becoming a social business.

 

 

 

The Inevitability of Digital Marketing and the Digital CMO

A favorite debate focuses on the ascension of digital marketing over traditional marketing in today’s marketing model. Too many companies, even in the technology sector, still seem unable to grasp that such a transformation is taking place.

Perhaps the issue is that, even now, spending on analog/traditional marketing continues to exceed spending on digital marketing by a significant ratio according to Gartner Group’s 2013 U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey.  Based on the survey, average marketing spend as a percent of annual revenue, across all industries, is 10.4% while digital marketing spend is 2.5%. 

It should be noted that analog marketing tactics continue to be more expensive than digital options – media advertising being just the most obvious example.  Had the survey been broken down between B2C and B2B companies/industries, my guess is that analog and digital spending would be on a more even spending arc.

A related trend - how the advent of the digital marketing technologies that are reinventing much of the marketing model have altered the dynamic between CMO and CIO – is also highlighted by the results of the survey.  The CIOs of those same companies have seen their budget decline to 3.5% of annual revenue and with digital marketing spend at that 2.5% level, parity in technology-related spend seems not too far away.

In fact, in a 2012 report, Gartner predicted that by 2017, the CMO's technology budget will exceed the CIO's.  Pretty much every business should broadly consider itself a digital business but, right or wrong, marketing has emerged as the de facto owner of digital.  That makes the CMO responsible for driving the organization’s digital transformation, which clearly is built on many of the emerging technologies that are changing the conduct of business – mobile, social, cloud, SaaS/PaaS/IaaS.

SaaS and cloud technologies have had much to do with the changing balance of power between the two functions.  The ability to bypass the CIO organization to access key marketing technology platforms/solutions with ease in the new environment allows marketing leadership, or any other functional leadership, to avoid the traditional IT development/procurement queue and execute much more quickly on critical initiatives.

This would all seem to set the stage for the emergence and confirmation of the digital CMO, a marketing leader that not only recognizes the inevitability of this transition in the marketing model, but embraces and builds an organization to take greatest advantage of the new digital/social/mobile media.  Marketing strategy is still marketing strategy.  It is the tools, technologies, and channels that have been disrupted.  If there is a crossing of the Rubicon occurring in marketing today it is probably better to start thinking and acting digitally now than learn in some harder, and perhaps more final, way.

Compendium/Miscellanea/Almanac 04.17.2013

Stuff that has crossed my radar lately for one reason or another.

• The Strategic Plan is Dead.  Long Live Strategy. (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
• A new reality between the CMO and CIO (ZDNet)
• We’re from Corporate and We’re Here to Help (Strategy + Business)
• The Software Revolution Behind LinkedIn’s Gushing Profits (Wired)
• Pragmatic Pathway – New Approaches to Organizational Change (Deloitte University Press)
• Global Information Technology Report 2013 (World Economic Forum)
• Viral’s Secret Formula (Huffington Post)
• All eyes on the sharing economy (The Economist)
• 13 Hot Business Model Innovations (Sustainable Brands)
• Challenges and Opportunities of Investing in Cleantech and Renewable Energy (IGEL@Wharton)
• Marketers Rise to the Cloud Challenge (CMO.com)

How Content Becomes Viral

This terrific graphic from Infographic World has been making the rounds quite a bit lately, but I thought it was such a great visualization of how content (presumably good content) can so easily go viral, I wanted to pass it along.