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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris tackled the thorny ethics of what you put in your AI models, based on leaked memos from Tiktok allegedly discriminating against protected classes. How do we know when an AI model is behaving badly by accident and by design? What are the steps we should take to prevent or mitigate this sort of thing in AI? Listen now to hear an in-depth explanation of AI explainability in layperson’s terms and the liability and risks you might be ignoring. Episode Sponsor In Ear Insights is brought to you by Sponsored, a self-serve podcast marketplace that connects marketers with podcasts to reach technical audiences. Instead of hiring someone for ~$60k/year to manage and scale your podcast sponsorship channel, Sponsored does all of the heavy lifting for you to place the sponsorships, track the performance, and manage your budget. For every sponsorship booked, Sponsored donates a large portion directly to human-I-T, a non-profit organization based in the U.S. that provides low-income individuals and nonprofits with access to technology, the internet, and digital training. Go to sponsored.us/inearinsights to receive $500 off your first podcast sponsorship placement. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-interpretability.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we’re talking about interpretability and explainability, artificial intelligence and the way it’s being misused. So over our friends at the content marketing world Slack, brought up his whole Twitter thread from adore me, which I assume, based on the context is a lingerie company. And they took some time on their own Twitter feed to point out that they were being discriminated against on tik tok. And the reason for it was because of things that are essentially, you know, certainly not ethical, and possibly illegal depending on whether or not protected classes are involved, specifically Tiktok circulated internal memos saying these are the kinds of content that we want to remove from our platform, they have quality raid, like rating guidelines. And in those guidelines, they talk about things like abnormal body shape, chubby has obvious beerbelly obese to thin, ugly facial looks, people with scars, missing teeth, facial deformities, dilapidated housing, interior backgrounds. So it’s a very, you know, some of the stuff is definitely falls in the category of protected classes either based on race, based on disability, things like that. And the what’s happening behind the scenes is, is being built into their algorithm in the same way that Google takes its search quality rate, like ratings, and uses that to train their AI have to say this is a good search result, this is a bad search result. Tiktok is using the same these same quality guidelines to train their AI as to what content needs to come down. And one of the things that dormy pointed out was that almost all their content that features someone with darker skin gets taken down. Whereas people with lighter skin does not obviously this is a case where when you’re looking at the output of an AI model is a very serious problem. So in the content marketing world, slack had asked, this makes me wonder about the future of AI based technology who is liable? When algorithm is based? Is it the company selling the technology, the engineering team, the brands who buy the AI based technology? So Katie, in your perspective, particularly an outsider who doesn’t use Tiktok, and things and you see, the results of an algorithm has clearly gone off the rails by design, like this, is the this is contaminated data going in? Who is responsible here? Who’s Who is responsible? And from your perspective, as an executive, as a leader? What are the solutions that you see? Katie Robbert 2:41 Well, let me back up for a second. And let’s just focus on that leaked internal memo. Now, I’m looking at this on Twitter. And, you know, a dormy is saying that this is what Tiktok is, has put out as a memo. Now, when you look at the screenshot, there is nothing on this, to identify that that’s what Tiktok had actually put out as memo. There’s no watermarks. There’s no, you know, company brands, and I’m not defending Tiktok to say that they didn’t say those things. The thing that, you know, that sort of strikes me first is the terminology used abnormal body shape, chubby, have obvious beerbelly You know, a lot of these things are completely subjective, you know, so when you say, I think this person is ugly, someone else might say, this is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. And so all of these things that they’re trying to ban from their, you know, algorithm are completely subjective. You know, it’s not a black and white thing to say, you know, we will not allow, you know, violence or, you know, you know, list a whole bunch of other things like, so that’s the first problem. I mean, there’s so much to unpack here. The when you’re asking who is at fault, who’s accountable, it’s whoever wrote this memo, and whoever decided, yes, this is a good idea. You know, and so what adoring me is saying is that they’ve worked with the other major social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and that their content has not been a problem before. And so you would imagine that Tiktok being one of those, they’re still newer, you know, in terms of being a social media platform, trying to gain all of those followers and sort of take take on the market, but they would start playing the same game. In terms of Okay, what is Facebook doing? What is Twitter doing Now, granted, to say, what is Facebook doing? Let’s follow that model. There’s a whole other dumpster fire to unpack but in terms of this particular context, it’s what you know, what are the other major social networks do That are right and or wrong that we can learn from it. And I don’t see the other major social networks using their algorithms to discriminate in the same way. And that’s, that’s really the crux of it. So, you know, I don’t use Tiktok, I don’t use a lot of social media, that doesn’t change the fact that whoever came up with this model, whoever came up with this algorithm, it’s blatantly wrong. Now, if Tiktok is going to come out and say, No, this is who we are, this is who this is what we stand for. We don’t want these things on our platform. Great, go ahead and say that publicly, and then people can make a decision, whether or not they want to use the platform. But if they’re trying to pretend that it’s the algorithms fault, they never, you know, they’re like, Oh, no, we just sort of made suggestions. It goes back to Chris, what you want to talk about is people are at the core of developing these algorithms. So therefore, it’s not the algorithms fault. That’s like saying, like, my soup came out too salty. It’s the soups fault? Well, who put the salt in the soup in the first place? It was you dummy. Christopher Penn 6:10 Oh, that’s absolutely right. And we’re hitting on here is that at the end of the day, artificial intelligence is nothing more than software, right? It’s no different than your word processor. It’s no different than you spreadsheet. It is not the spreadsheets fault. When the math comes out wrong, right. It’s, it’s what the user put into the spreadsheet that that makes it come out wrong. And so the the question of liability, I think it’s an important one, because yeah, if this if these things are true, and they are alleged, because this has not been a court case court finding it, then you have, you have really serious problems, it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like a car, right? If if somebody goes out and gets into an accident in the car, right, it’s not the car manufacturers fault, unless they clearly have a manufacturing defect of some kind. But if you get drunk and go out and crash your car, and it’s your fault is the operator. So in the case of liability, it’s not necessarily the maker of the algorithm, if it’s a third party piece of software, it’s the user. And so in this case, it would be Tiktok is specifically around what training data they fed it because what these quality grading guidelines are, is they’re developing a training library, these are the things that we want to see more of on our platform. And this gets to the heart of the debate between interpretability explainability, what adoring me to hear is is doing is is pointing out an explainability problem. They see the output of the algorithm. They say, this is what we see, and this is what’s happening here. It’s not happening there. And there’s a very clear difference between the two. But what nobody has except Tiktok, and would need to come out and in a court of law is the interpretability of the Okay, open up the software, open up the model, open up the training data, and show us prove to us that the model is not discriminating that these that you know, these allegations are false. And this is a situation where I think not enough companies are giving thought as to how they’re using their technology, and particularly how they’re using their data. And whether it has intentional bias or use, as shown here or has accidental ones. Katie Robbert 8:26 The other example for Tiktok is there’s a singer named Liz Oh, she’s very popular right now she plays the flute. And she happens to be a black woman who’s on the heavier side. But she’s someone who embraces it. And she’s, you know, come under a lot of criticism of, well, no, you can’t possibly be in good shape. In order to do these performances and concerts, you have to lose weight. And she’s the first person to say, watch me. So she’ll get on a treadmill run and sing an entire set of songs just to demonstrate. And it’s it’s impressive to see, by the way. But she’s also someone who’s criticized Tiktok because Tiktok continues to remove her content, have her in a bathing suit. But yet they keep other people in bathing suits up. And so there is definitely it’s not just a dog, it’s other people on the platform experiencing the same kind of discrimination. And so, you know, you’re right. I don’t think that these companies are thinking sort of that long term. You know, what do we do with this technology? What do we want it to do? I think that there’s a lot of let me rush to be the first out of the gate in the market. Let me be the new shiny thing that people sign up for. Because what’s the next thing what clubhouse now like, I know that it’s audio, but there’s gonna be some, you know, algorithms and biases probably built within there too, because it’s just shoved right out the door. People like I want to be the next big thing. I want to be the shiny thing. I want to be the startup that makes a bazillion dollars without that long term thinking. And I think that bias in technology is still something that’s very not well understood, because there is an assumption that the algorithm knows what the heck it’s doing. It doesn’t. It knows what you want it to do. Christopher Penn 10:24 And as customers, we don’t get access to the interpretability side, we don’t get to do code inspection. Unless, I guess maybe for a select few vendors, if you’re a big enough spender on the platform, you could request that as part of your compliance. But for for those of us who would be average, folks, we don’t get that. Katie Robbert 10:41 Well. And if Tiktok said to me, do you want to inspect my code? I probably go, sure. I don’t know what I’m looking for. And that’s part of the challenge as well. So even if these companies said you can go ahead and inspect my code, most people wouldn’t even know where to start with that. Christopher Penn 11:00 Right? So what’s up? What should a marketer be paying attention to that if there are platforms where you have allegations of, in this case, intentional bias, then there are obviously platforms where the machines themselves are making interesting and or questionable decisions like Facebook, which has gotten so big that there are no single team of engineers that knows entirely what the whole algorithm is doing? The same is true of Google, what’s a marketer do to do to reduce their liability? To avoid funding things that might be harmful to their customers? What should people be thinking about in terms of their responses? Katie Robbert 11:43 Oh, well, I think that definitely do your homework. So if, let’s say, for example, you know, we run paid social ads for our clients, and they say I want to run ads on tik tok, I want to run ads on Snapchat, and Facebook and all the other major players, it is our responsibility as the person representing that client first to do our homework and find out, you know, if these articles have, you know, people complaining against the software exist, you know, have people reported, yes, this is a bias platform, it’s taking things down, you know, randomly because of the way that it’s felt. And then also, you know, it’s our responsibility to check and see if any of those, you know, developer notes exist, or any sort of version of those in a way that we can understand how the platform is built, just sort of doing our homework, in terms of what that platform not stands for, because it’s a social media platform. It’s social media. But really sort of like if we can get sort of any more insider information, in terms of what it does, but also, you know, what kinds of audiences are on those platforms? So am I reaching the right kind of audience? And so, you know, a really terrible example is, let’s say a client came to us and said, You know, I want to reach an audience I don’t normally reach I want to advertise on parlour, we would have to start to question, okay, why do you want to reach that audience? What about that audience Do you think makes them a good fit? And they might be a good fit for their product? Who knows? But it’s really on us to sort of do that due diligence to understand is this where you really, really, really want to be? because now you’re going to start spending money? Christopher Penn 13:32 Is there is now an ethics question. Is there room in the marketers toolkit to go onto this on these account platforms, set up dummy accounts, you know, which is misrepresentation, post content, to experiment to test to see like, Hey, I’m going to put up copies of pictures of from, you know, somebody’s account of different people, different shapes, sizes, languages and stuff, and see what gets taken down? Katie Robbert 14:05 Oh, that’s a tough question. I mean, like, you’re going into it ready for a fight, like you’re assuming the worst. Um, you know, I do think that, you know, as a marketer, you should be having legitimate accounts, on a lot of these platforms just to understand what they’re all about, and what the interactions look like, what the engagements look like, what the algorithms tend to do. So you should definitely have those accounts, whether or not they’re dummy accounts or real accounts, or, you know, test accounts, whatever you want to call them. Now, if you are, I think, you know, my personal perspective, if you’re going in there, just for the sake of exploiting an algorithm and then reporting on it publicly, I think that that might start to cross that line of those ethics because instead of just sort of Like, you know, what do they call it like that kind of like screw you journalism where it’s like, I’m going to go in there and get the story, you know, and then just forget whatever the company has to say about it, you probably should be reaching out and working with the company to say, Hey, you know, I posted up these couple of things, you took them down. Can you explain that to me why that happened? And then you can start to do that, you know, investigation explanation, but I think blindsiding, the company without having the full story is a little bit problematic, because then you’re just contributing to, you know, well, this is my opinion, and they took it down, and they just randomly took it down, you don’t know, they might have taken it down for the wrong reasons, but at least give the company an opportunity to see that this is a problem. So I don’t think it’s a good idea to set up a test account or a dummy account, and then just start like, baiting them into doing the wrong thing. Okay, I think that’s Christopher Penn 16:01 what took a moment to thank our sponsor. In-Ear Insights is brought to you by sponsored a self service podcast marketplace that connects marketers with podcasts to reach technical audiences. Instead of hiring someone for $60,000 you to manage and scale your podcast channel, sponsored does all the heavy lifting for you to play sponsorships, track performance, and manage your budget. For every sponsorship book sponsor donates a large portion directly to human it a nonprofit organization based in the US that provides low income individuals that profits with access to knowledge of the internet and digital training, go to sponsors.us slash In-Ear Insights to receive $500 off your first podcast sponsorship placement. Again, that’s sponsored.us slash In-Ear Insights, and we thank them for their support of the show. So for companies that are building their own AI, then we do have access to the interpretability. So we can open up the code and things like that. Do you feel like anybody’s got sort of an ethics QA process in place? Or is it all just kind of assumed that the coders know what they’re doing? Katie Robbert 17:07 It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that. I would like to believe that there’s some sort of an ethics QA process in place. But my guess my, you know, uninformed assumption is that it’s left up to the developers and then hand it off to the executives and the investors to say, here’s what we built. You know, you can ask me questions, but I’m going to answer you in such a way that you don’t understand what I’m saying. Such as the way of developers and engineers, they don’t do it on purpose, sometimes they do. But this is something Chris, that you and I have talked about in terms of bias and artificial intelligence and some of the job opportunities that would be coming up because of AI. So the notion of will a, I take my job, maybe sort of, but there’s other opportunities. And one of those opportunities is that committee to make sure that your algorithm is being built in an ethical way. And so those committees are those groups are key ways. It can’t just be a group of your peers, it can’t be that homogenous, like, okay, I am a white woman, therefore, another white woman should be looking at this algorithm that’s problematic. You need people from different walks of life, different voices, different backgrounds, ethnicities, experiences, skill sets, to be looking at this algorithm to be pointing out, that’s a bias, that’s a problem that works, you know, sort of check all the boxes, you also need to before you even build the thing, figure out what you want it to do. And if you can sort of write out, you know, we want to bias against this thing. We don’t want to bias against this thing. Like be be clear and open upfront with what you want this thing to do. And don’t just say, I want an algorithm that shows you know, fun puppy and kitty content. Well, it’s going to probably grow bigger than that, or, you know, even sort of at a micro level, are you biasing against, you know, dogs of a certain color. So a real example of that is black dogs tend to not get adopted as often or as frequently, because they either look scarier, they’re harder to photograph, you know, list a whole bunch of things that are silly, but that’s a real thing that happens to dogs. So take that and bring that to humans. And you can imagine what that’s like. Christopher Penn 19:37 It’s interesting, because in Silicon Valley, in particular, with the big tech companies, there is a very binary perspective on interpretability versus explainability. And AI, are you doing one or the other, and a lot of the big tech companies fight very hard against interpretability because it makes your code much more expensive, both to create and to maintain because you have to be able to pick two You know, stop the machine and pull it apart at any given time. And that is a a substantial technical hurdle. But what I hear you saying is an interesting take on it, because it’s it’s not binary in the sense of, you should have an a, an explainability, Council of non technical people to look at the output go, Yeah, that’s right. That’s not right. And then have a technical group to sit to look into the code and say, these are areas where there’s likely to be problems. You know, this when this module goes into production is likely to have these issues. And in at least in the case of Tiktok, here, you might even be able to have not interpretability on the code side, but interpretability on the data side to say like, yeah, the data you’re putting into the model is flawed. So don’t even bother building the model yet, because you what you’re putting into the machine is wrong. Katie Robbert 20:50 Yes, that is what I’m saying. Because I, I feel like if you’re still trying to develop something that’s blackbox and secretive and mysterious, you know, that nobody else will ever figure out, you’re doing it wrong. There’s so many people who now understand how programming languages and development works, that someone’s going to be able to unravel it and point out these issues that you should have caught upfront. And you know, just because you’re being transparent about how the thing is built, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re vulnerable, for someone else stealing the thing they can try. But then it also sort of brings up like you need, what protections are you putting in place to make sure that, you know, your copywriting and trademarking, etc, etc. But back to the point is that, you if you have an algorithm, if you’re building an algorithm, you should be able to explain it in a non technical way exactly how it works, so that people can understand it, buy into it. And you can also get that constructive feedback to say, Have you thought about this particular scenario, this might be biased against it and do all of that work up front. Companies that are building these big algorithms that aren’t doing that work, It baffles me because you’re going to spend so much money, you know, in your brand reputation, defending yourself, lawsuits, all of these things when you get it wrong, why not spend a little bit more upfront to get it? Mostly right out of the gate, but then also say, you know, what, we’re still learning help us do better. Christopher Penn 22:36 Yeah, well, it’s same question we ask people, why didn’t you spend money on analytics and measurement upfront? Katie Robbert 22:44 baffling, what’s, you know, because the the planning process for everyone except me is the most boring process, I think it’s fantastic. They just want to go ahead and get the thing out the door, you know, plans and organization and timelines and, you know, discovery be damned? Christopher Penn 23:05 Yep. Well, to sum up in the development of any kind of software model, whether it’s done with machine learning or not, bias can creep in all along the way from the people you hire, the strategy you pursue, the technology choices, you make the data you put into the machine, what the machine comes out with, and then ultimately, what you do with it. And you need to have interpretability, which is understanding the technical, you know, bits and pieces, and explainability, explaining the real world results of what your efforts have created at each of these stages, in order to avoid creating situations where you are being lit up in the press, like a Christmas tree for creating something that is either accidentally or intentionally biased. And if you work at a company, where they’re creating unintentional biases against protected classes, it is time to update your LinkedIn profile, because that is not a company you want to spend any time working at. In addition to making the world a worse place, at some point, that company will be subject to a very, very large lawsuit and your job security is not assured. So if you’ve got questions about anything we’ve talked about, in today’s episode, head on over to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for markets we can chat with over 1500 other fellow marketers about everything from basic questions like hey, how do I figure out what’s what to do on Instagram, to the most complex questions like dissecting neural models? And if you’re wherever it is, you’re watching or listening to this if you head on over to Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast, you can find out how to subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. Thanks for watching and listening. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care. want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this episode, Katie and Chris discuss the essence of community management. What makes a community thrive? What harms it to the point of dissolution? How do we ensure the communities we’re building are set up for success? Listen in as they diagnose the Analytics for Marketers community and identify things that could be improved. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-communitymanagement.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to understand data science better as a marketer? Would you like to learn whether it’s the right choice for your career? Do you need to know how to manage data science employees, vendors agencies, take the data science 101 workshop from Trust Insights. In this 90 minute on demand workshop, you’ll learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey, you’ll learn how to build a KPI map, how to explore and analyze Google Analytics data, how to construct a valid hypothesis, the foundation of marketing data science, the basics of statistical concepts like centrality distribution, regression clustering, which determine what those words mean essential soft skills in data science, and how to hire marketing data science professionals or agencies. The course is on demand so you can watch it whenever you want. You don’t have to be at any place at any time. And it comes with the videos, audio recording, PDF of the slides, automated transcripts, KPI map example and a sample workbook with data because this is hands on, you get to try some of the stuff out. If this sounds good, just head on over to Trust insights.ai slash data science 101 that’s Trust insights.ai slash data science 101. In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we are talking all things community community management, why they exist, what to and not to do So Katie, start us off even having some thoughts about digital communities and communities in general. But obviously, with your current circumstances, more of our communities are digital than not. Katie Robbert 1:39 Yeah, you know, we were talking last week about communities and I’d mentioned the peloton community. So I’m one of the you know, 1000s of people during the pandemic who got a peloton because I just didn’t feel safe going back to the gym, even though they had reopened at one point. And what I quickly realized is why peloton is such like a cult following and the community. And a lot of it is around the inclusivity and not be like, hey, you’re one of us you’d want but there really is a something for everybody. And so over the weekend, I did what they call your century. And so it’s your 100, you know, act of whatever thing it is you do, whether it’s running or strength training, and so I was on the bike, and they immediately sent me an email. And they were like, here’s a code for your free t shirt that says you get the century club. And I was like, you know, this is all really nice, because you get a little badge on your bike. And so it’s like, it’s that continued motivation to keep you bringing back and then obviously, you can like ride with your friends and you know, chat with people on social media. But then it also, the other side of it got me thinking that a lot of communities get it wrong, because you at the core of it, the purpose of a community is we’re all just looking for someplace where we belong, and we can fit in and we can find people of our own. And so, you know, it’s sort of it started me thinking even back all the way to like, you know, high school and middle school and elementary school when you’re trying to find those little cliques of people that you belong with. And it’s really difficult to do. And some of us still feel like we haven’t quite found, quote, unquote, our people. And I’m, I’m definitely one of those people who I’m still sort of like, swimming around trying to figure it out. I mean, we have our own slack community analytics for marketers, and I’ll be honest, sometimes I feel like I don’t even belong there. Because I, a lot of the feedback I get from other people is I don’t feel smart enough to ask a question. So I just lurk. And so that, to me, says that we’re not doing the right thing, to make people feel welcome and to make people feel comfortable just being a part of the community. And so it just, it made me start to think about the do’s and don’ts of having a community or even being a participant in a community. And, you know, sort of what, what is the goal of having community so it just brought up all these questions for me, Chris, what do you think? Christopher Penn 4:08 It’s interesting because this, there are so many ways to do communities right and wrong, like you were saying, I belong to a huge number of offshoot niche communities. They’ve got like 20 or so slack instances and 30, some odd discord servers that I’m a member of. And yeah, some of them definitely more than others. Have that a sense of Yeah, these are our people that I choose to spend time with willingly, right? Because there’s always those folks that you know, you have to be in a community because of work or something just to just see what’s going on. But then there’s what you do in your free time. And the things that stand out to me that well run communities do is there’s a sense of egalitarianism that no one person is more important than others. There are obviously community managers and moderators who keep the trains on the rails. The best communities are, I think, almost like benevolent dictatorships, in some ways, there’s a clear purpose. And then there’s very strong moderation to keep bad actors from being bad actors, you know, the communities I’ve been in that turned toxic, didn’t have that moderation, right? You know, bad actors got away with bad stuff, and it doesn’t take much to cause harm to community, right? It’s like, you don’t need to drink a gallon of cyanide to kill yourself just a little bit will do. And the same is true with communities, there’s, there’s, it doesn’t take much to ruin one. It just takes an odd one unchecked bad actor to sort of poison the well as it were. And it’s interesting, because that need to belong is physically wired into us, like we are, we are tribal creatures. And that’s just sort of a natural thing we do. Because as animals, we kind of suck individually, we’re not particularly well armed or well armored, you know. So our only advantage is that we can think and we act in packs. And so biologically we have that needs to belong. Katie Robbert 6:09 Well, and think about, you know, all those different communities you belong to you. So there’s, you know, no shortage of slack communities, or Facebook groups or discord communities, or, you know, Twitter, those chat rooms, or exactly, but, so there’s no shortage of places. So what you could say to someone like me, like, you know, why do you feel like you can’t find your people? You know, why do you feel like you can’t, you haven’t found like that right group. And I think one of the things that, at least from my perspective that communities get wrong is Yeah, I can join any slack group I want, I can join any discord group I want, that doesn’t mean that I belong there or welcomed, you know, they might have that automated bot that says, you know, welcome Katie, please introduce yourself. But then if nobody engages with me, if I ask questions, and nobody responds, if I’m trying to jump into a conversation, and I accidentally kill the conversation, like, I no longer feel like I belong in that community, and it’s kind of that sad experience of like, okay, am I just sort of being like, ignored until I leave this group because I don’t belong? Or is it really just a function of how the community is set up and run that there’s really no good moderation, nobody continuing to engage all the all of the people some way or another. And I think that I’ve seen it, you know, both sides, and I’ve definitely had both kinds of experiences. Christopher Penn 7:37 A lot of the things that when you’re talking about the, the essence of community in a lot of ways, you’re talking about emotional fulfillment in some way, right? This, this community gives you something that you’re missing in your life. And, or it also reinforces the things that you value about yourself, right? If we look at, you know, I hate to drag us there, but if you look at politics, right, and just how strongly people feel about their group, whatever their group is, it is that it’s so strong, that has become part of their identity. Like that is where that’s that’s sort of like the, the apex of community when you’ve done such a good job that this becomes part of your identity, it’s been very difficult to dislodge. You know, as someone who’s an avid peloton, fan, right, you know, when you start wearing the swag, you start, you know, having the the the, the jargon or the lingo that only other people in the community have, you have that this shift in who you are, and who you believe yourself to be. And that sort of is the pinnacle of community expression. Now, the challenge is obviously, that gets very dangerous as we saw, I’ve seen the last years years really with politics that can become very toxic if it’s mismanage unintentionally or intentionally. But yeah, it’s it’s that emotional fulfillment, that sense of connection. And one of the things that, you know, what, let’s point the finger at ourselves. One of the things that I think that we get wrong with analytics for marketers, is that there isn’t a water cooler, there isn’t a sort of a general let’s just, you know, have BST on what music you’re listening to, and things like that. It’s a very focused community. So it has utility, but it doesn’t have emotional connection, because there is no place for people to just talk about fluffy stuff. Katie Robbert 9:24 I was thinking that exact same thing as I was thinking through this idea of, you know, what communities do right and what communities do wrong and we really have limited people down to what they’re allowed to do within the community and that that is probably a big reason why we don’t get more engagement or people who are continually asking questions. So that’s something I definitely want us you and I to explore, you know this year is to how can we strengthen our community and make people feel a little bit more welcome and you know, our conversation last week about peloton What made me think of this because you had made, you know, sort of the tongue in cheek comment of you know, cults are really hard to build. But in some ways, you know, peloton is a great example because it does have a cult following. And there really is a little bit of something for everyone you have, you know, your strength, your bike, you’re walking, you’re running your meditation, your yoga, like, sort of any level of fitness. And even if you go into a class with a more advanced instructor, the first thing they do is talk through, if you’re a beginner, this is how you can also participate. This is for everybody. So the messaging within it is all very, they try really hard to make sure everybody feels like what they’re doing is achievable. And I feel like not, you know, we in slack groups don’t do that same thing. And so it was that idea of how do we take this model that obviously didn’t spring up overnight? It’s been grown over a number of years, and start to replicate that in other places, because it’s obviously working for them, and what can we learn from that. And I think you’re right, we need to think about like, Are people coming there because they want to be around similar minded people are people coming there because they only want to talk about analytics and marketing, or people coming there so that they can sort of like blow off some steam and share some puppy photos with people who might also enjoy them. So I think that there’s a lot of work for us to do in order to make this a more welcoming and friendly community. And, you know, it’s it does kind of, it’s kind of a bummer that right now with the pandemic, you know, most communities are kind of forced to be online, because I’m someone who doesn’t want to be online more than I have to be. But it’s the only place where I can find other people to connect with. Christopher Penn 11:52 And I think one of the things that at least the better communities I I’m in the ones I spend more time and have is, you know, they have a tremendous number of channels within that community. You know, even if you look at the Trust Insights, the our internal Slack, there’s way more channels than their quote needs to be for a business, right? We have now playing the stuff you were watching and listening, you have random quotes board, we have you know, where am I, you know, social good stuff. So there’s a lot of things that are expressions, essentially of ourselves in my one of my discord servers, there is, you know, a watch party channel, there’s music games, pets, you know, this, this is a channel just for pets photos, because people were sharing them so frequently in other channels that the moderators like I look, I can you put this into like one spot. So this created a pets channel. And the advantage of that is not only a chance for members to self Express, right, emotionally, but it then helps you build those strong Common Ground links, oh, you have that a dog just like mine, or Oh, we listen to the same kinds of music. Well, I didn’t even know that this kind of music was the thing. I found this, this odds with metal alternative rock group in one of these communities like, Oh, that’s actually a pretty cool group. And the more contextually appropriate, you know, values, appropriate opportunities you have in a community for somebody to connect, the easier it is for people to forge those strong connections because they see, oh, this is something I’m interested in, you know, and another one of my discord servers, we have a fitness channel, it’s just like, here’s, you know, the things we’re trying. I’m currently leading an eight week sort of yoga thing, with help with some apps and stuff. So there’s all these different things that you can offer, particularly in a pandemic, right. And in a digital age, where it gives people a chance to, they’re there for that central purpose, whatever the stated purpose of the community is, but then it gives them the ability to learn more about their fellow community members and find those common grounds. That’s when you ever you look on LinkedIn, there’s always those jerks who are just like, I’m here to add you to my professional network and this, Katie Robbert 13:59 meet those, please stop pitching me those things. I don’t want to just randomly show up in your network. I know that that that didn’t happen. Christopher Penn 14:10 But that’s sort of like that very shallow level of of networking. Whereas when you talk to somebody about your dogs, or the music you listen to or the the cryptocurrency you’re investing in, you have the opportunity to learn about real network net real Oh, I want to get to know this person. They seem like they are an interesting person I want to hang out with. Katie Robbert 14:33 So let me ask you this question, Chris. Because it’s sort of it’s not that it’s counterintuitive to the work that we do, but I don’t think it’s what we’re known for is sort of that human to human connection. Where does automation fit in? And where does automation get in the way of building a community? Christopher Penn 14:52 Um, the easiest way I would say is that there are certain things that are processed based like well Messages, rules, things like that, that are important that the automation serve to make sure everyone has the same consistent onboarding experience, right, just like any any company. And automations real advantages in the monitoring, right? community moderators cannot be on 24. Seven, they shouldn’t be. And in some of the largest communities, they actually do have shifts, like moderators have shifts to make sure that somebody is always around case a member needs help. But automation can help with a lot of that if you have a known list of terms that you prefer not see mentioned in your community, right Yo, bots can monitor for an alert a moderator immediate, like, hey, somebody just said, you know, this racial slur, even in jest, it’s still one of those things like app now can’t out here. You know, that’s, that’s not okay. And really giving you more insights and collecting the data about your community, one of the signs of a, I think of a very healthy community is that it is around the clock, right? It’s, there’s somebody always on people always talking about something, sometime, one of my discord servers, there’s 400 people in the community. So about a third of the size of analytics for marketers, there’s literally five or six people actively talking anytime a day, because you log in first thing in the morning, like the only you missed 900 messages, like holy crap, you guys, chill. But people in Malaysia, in Japan and Australia are going on to their day, and they have their, their group. You know, when you look at analytics for marketers as our example, it’s pretty quiet outside of working hours. Is that okay? Yes, right now. But if we want to, you know, this is one of the things to weigh in your community strategy, if you want to build that strong community, you also have to acknowledge that it’s going to be something that bleeds outside of work hours. Katie Robbert 16:49 Hmm. I agree with that. I also think in terms of automation, you know, I think that there are ways to keep people engaged, where you include some of that automation, you know, hey, we haven’t heard from you in a while, everything, okay, just sort of like those automated check ins or, you know, you’ve been a member for 100 days, congratulations, here’s a little, you know, 100 Day gift, or something, you know, for you, you know, just to sort of remind people, like, we value you, you’re part of this community. And it in some ways, it is a little bit like just that participation trophy for showing up. But sometimes showing up, you know, is half the battle. And I think that some of the thing with communities is there’s this expectation of, if you join, you have to do all the work to become part of that community. And I think communities need to sort of meet people where they are and help draw them in. So if I join a community, and the only message I ever get from it is, you know, welcome from the welcome bot, and nobody else or like, Hey, we saw you stopped in or anything like that, then it’s sort of a flat, you know, great experience. Whereas if there is a community member, manager, or a team, or even just sort of ambassadors in there who are like, hey, it looks like we have a whole bunch of new people. Welcome. You know, just like, Hey, I haven’t heard from you yet. Do you have any questions like anything like, you, you’re doing half the work, so don’t expect your members to show up, and do all of the work to become engaging members, like you have to pull them and give them a reason to continue to be there? Christopher Penn 18:28 Yep, you know, and some other obvious things in one of my other servers, there’s a channel just for biographies, like people who put their biography and then, you know, as you interact with somebody go into the biographies channel, and go, Oh, you know, if the person’s posted a bio, you can read more about them, you know, get a sense of who they are, where they spend their time and things like that. But you’re right, communities, and really no different than any other human relationship, right? It’s give and take has to be an equal partnership, if you want to be successful in the long term. And, you know, as we’ve been talking, no shame on us for not making it more like that in our own slack group. So we have some work to do there. I want to dig in a bit more, though, on this idea of, we’re not necessarily known for human human stuff, how do we unpack that and, and pivot like, so I would argue we’re half known for that, namely, you know, for the machinery. Katie Robbert 19:20 Well, you know, I think part of that is that you’re known and I am unknown. And so I think there’s this also sort of public perception. And so, you know, the other sort of, you know, and this quis with a grain of salt is not an Oh, woe is me, like, here’s my childhood traumas, you know, commentary, it’s more of the, you know, when I walk into a room, the first thing people ask is about you. And so it’s, we could be known more for the human if there was more of an opportunity for me to engage within communities and promote that and that’s, you know, that’s on me to find those communities to To spread that message, and it’s something that I’ve been working on and trying to do I, anyone who knows me really well knows that I am very much an introvert and very much like the shy kid, I don’t want to do a lot of talking, that makes it really difficult, when the only thing you really have to work with are digital communities. And if the community is not set up in such a way that you feel like it’s a, you know, safe, positive space for you to not immediately be judged, or immediately get backlash, if you misstep and say something that’s even slightly the wrong thing to say, then it’s really hard. Whereas I think the other side of that, Chris, is you’re a very well known entity in the digital space. And it almost feels like you can walk into any room and people like, Oh, it’s Chris Penn, I know exactly who he is what he stands for, nobody has to really question that. But you’ve also been working really hard at that for the past 1520 years. Whereas I am newer to the space. And so I have a lot of work to do. And so it’s easier for you to walk into a community and say, Hi, I’m Chris Penn. Here’s my five books. Here’s my 200,000 blog posts that I’ve written, you know, and people immediately know who you are. Whereas you know that, and that’s more of the AI data analytics side, whereas more of a human Organizational Behavior connection side is the stuff that I do. People like, cool, I don’t know who you are. Oh, you work with Chris Penn? Christopher Penn 21:27 Yeah, so how do we how do you pivot that? Okay, you know, obviously, I think the easiest place to start is in a community that you own right? There are 1500 some odd people in analytics from markers. What’s what do you think our game plan is a to bring that balance to the human in the machine side? And, and how do we achieve those that those different goals that we have with the community and also make the community more valuable, make it more vibrant? Katie Robbert 21:57 Mm hmm. I think some of it has to be consistency. And so more consistent posting more consistent sharing of information from authored by both of us authored by me, authored by you, authored by Trust Insights, collectively, I think that there needs to be more of that consistently so that people can start to see both voices. You know, a lot of the questions we get in the community are more technical. So maybe there’s an opportunity for a less technical channel, more of that, you know, not humans and marketing, but more of that human organizational behavior, side of marketing that isn’t strictly about which algorithm should I be using to analyze my data? So I think that there’s a lot of different ways to approach it. And, you know, yes, you know, I own the community, you own the community. We also don’t want it to be such that only you and I can ever ask questions in the community. And I think that that’s something that we haven’t done a great job of, is letting other people know, like, hey, it’s okay for you. To start those general questions. I think a really good example of a community that does kind of run around the clock is our friend, Gini Dietrich, she has the spin socks community. And you know, you can see that it’s fairly active all day long, from a lot of different voices. Even on weekends, even you know, overnight, people are asking questions. And it’s not just Ginny, who owns the community, who’s asking these questions, most of the time, she’s responding to questions, she’s, you know, introducing other people. And I think that that’s an example of a smaller community that’s done really well, where people feel like I can talk and engage all the time. Christopher Penn 23:43 I think another great one is the content marketing world, the CMI, slack. You know, they have daily questions that are asked to the entire channel, Jeremy bednarski. Does that, you know, some some questions get a lot more responses than others. But there’s no backlog of questions you can ask people, and they have regular scheduled activities. They have a Twitter chat every Tuesday at noon. And it’s actually a really good way for them to attract new members to their community, as well as get their existing communities involved. They have book chats with noted authors and things. So again, it always reminds me of like my parents retirement community, like you know, there’s bingo on Tuesday nights. But those consistent practices, like you said, consistency and activity. As much as I despise the phrase in the sales context, I believe it’s true to community management, context, activity begets activity, doing stuff gets other people to realize it’s okay to do stuff. And I think having a lot of those different hooks in creating opportunities for people to engage is definitely one of the things that can be helpful. You know, we’ve talked, we’ve talked a lot about things we’ve never actually fully defined the community management role, it might be time to do that. Katie Robbert 24:56 I think it might be Christopher Penn 24:58 so to wrap up community’s not just yet another marketing buzzword and much more like a relationship you want to build with a whole bunch of people. And as with any relationship you give as much as you take, if you want to be successful in the long term. If you got questions about this stuff you want to have suggestions about, hey, here’s something that would like to see in the Trust Insights community, pop on over to TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics for marketers, you’d like to somewhat gently tell us everything we’re doing wrong. That’s the best way we Katie Robbert 25:30 can take it. Okay, and Christopher Penn 25:34 as always, no matter where you’re listening to or watching this episode, please stop by Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast, you can subscribe to the show in all kinds of different places. I will talk to you folks soon take care. Bye. want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris ask the question: why don’t we focus on or measure SEO for customer retention? After all, useful, valuable content isn’t solely the provenance of new customer acquisition. Keeping existing customers happy and providing them value is equally or more important – but we don’t typically measure that in marketing. You’ll learn about the importance of site search, UI/UX, Google Analytics for customers, and more. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-seoforretention.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to understand data science better as a marketer? Would you like to learn whether it’s the right choice for your career? Do you need to know how to manage data science employees, vendors agencies, take the data science 101 workshop from Trust Insights. In this 90 minute on demand workshop, you’ll learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey, you’ll learn how to build a KPI map, how to explore and analyze Google Analytics data, how to construct a valid hypothesis, the foundation of marketing data science, the basics of statistical concepts like centrality distribution, regression clustering, which determine what those words mean essential soft skills in data science, and how to hire marketing data science professionals or agencies, the course is on demand. So you can watch it whenever you want. You don’t have to be at any place at any time. And it comes with the videos, audio recording, PDF of the slides, automated transcripts, KPI map example. And a sample workbook with data because this is hands on, you get to try some of the stuff out. If this sounds good, just head on over to Trust insights.ai slash data science 101. That’s Trust insights.ai slash data science 101. In this episode of In-Ear Insights, we are back after a brief hiatus with the world kind of getting settled in. And about we talked this week about different applications of SEO. So the big obvious one is customer acquisition, you put up great content attracts people to your website, they convert marketing looks great. And that’s pretty well established. But I was thinking based on some recent comments in our free slack community analytics for marketers, which if you head on over to Trust insights.ai slash analytics remarketing, you can join over 1500 other folks talking about this. So thanks. But some comments recently about SEO and customer retention. And I thought this is a really interesting line of thought, because it’s not something that marketers traditionally think about, certainly creating content. It’s not something we measure especially well. And it’s not something that’s on a strategic roadmap, even though we know that there’s a sizable and there always should be a sizable percentage of returning users to your website, particularly those customers. So Katie, when you when you think about yourself as a consumer, how much do you search for stuff for companies where you’re already the customer? And you know, they’re not going to get any revenue out of you immediately. But things like the product manual for your blender, things like that? How much search Do you do as a as a returning customer? Katie Robbert 2:42 a decent amount? And I think that, you know, you’re right, we don’t think about, you know, SEO for retention. You know, traditionally, in general, broad strokes, we think about SEO as an awareness tool. So that when someone is you know, searching for something on a search engine, your brand, or your products, or your things are the thing that pop up so that they can find out about you. But you’re absolutely right, Chris, there’s that whole other second half of the journey. So, you know, for me, as a consumer, you know, I might be looking for reviews of other products that this company might offer, or, you know, to your point, like, okay, I bought the thing, but it didn’t come with instructions, or it says, you know, go to our website to get instructions, which to me, first of all, is a terrible user experience. Like, just send me the goddamn instructions. Like, don’t make it difficult. That’s a pet peeve of mine, but that’s for another day. Or, you know, I’ve had the thing for many years. And I forgot how to change the settings on it. Like, you know, how many people have like, you know, regular standard alarm clocks and can’t figure out how to change it for, you know, the time zones or the clock in your car, you know, it’s right half the year, it’s wrong the other half of the year, because you can’t figure out how to change it. So the this long winded rant is the way of saying yes, SEO is important for every stage of the customer journey, not just awareness. And that then changes the strategy because you at the front of that journey, when you’re trying to do the awareness, you’re trying to do the, you know, how do I and what do I? And now you’re trying to think more about the Why do I care about this? And why do I need to continue to care about this thing? And you know, it’s not as black and white is like how and what goes at the beginning and why goes the end? you’ll still need a lot of that helpful content, but that helpful content changes in nature. So instead of, you know, what is the best blender, it’s how do I use the best Blender? Now that you have the thing, Chris, what are your thoughts on it? Because you’ve been thinking about this? Christopher Penn 4:51 I think it’s there’s two different parts to this. One is obviously the broad search right? If you particularly have a product because you’re right Some appliances that like, Oh, yeah, I think that manual got, you know, recycled by accident, I have to go and search out the manual or like you said, devices guy change this once a year and I can’t remember how. But then the other part I think is really important that people just don’t spend enough time on is on site search, right? What are people searching for on your website? How often are they searching for it? And those search opportunities should be obvious content opportunities, right? Because clearly, if someone’s searching for it, for example, you know how to pay Trust Insights, you know, like, if you’re a customer, how do you pay Denali, we want them to ask that question, and you’re not paying us. But it’s an opportunity, it tells us there’s a gap in our site content, if people are searching for something, and they can’t find it, particularly if they’re returning us a particular if they’re returning customer, we almost have an obligation to provide that information to them. If you were a blender company, right? Someone’s searching for, you know, you know, wildside, jar 750. They couldn’t find it. They couldn’t, your site wasn’t intuitive enough to make it obvious. Go somewhere. So they just went straight to search and and typed it in. So there’s opportunities there to find content gaps to say like, Ah, yeah, we kind of missed, we missed the boat on this one. And I would bet because of the attribution problems that we’ve been having, as a as an industry, you will also attract a fair amount of search to that content from customers that you didn’t know were customers, because you didn’t have analytics data. One of the things I was looking at recently was I was looking at dark search traffic on on my personal website, because about 12% of my overall traffic is dark, meaning I have no attribution data. But when I when a correlation analysis between the known channels, it had the strongest correlation of a strong correlation to search traffic. And there has been this thing in the search marketing industry of there is dark search traffic where you don’t have data. So you need to figure out what it is those people are searching for. And it’s clearly if somebody is arriving on your site, and you don’t know who they are, but they then go to your search bar and type, you know, blender jar 750 manual. Okay, this is not somebody who is just random, this is somebody who probably is a customer, and couldn’t find what they’re looking for. So there’s some measurement challenges, to search for the second half the customer journey. And then there’s the filling in those content challenges. And I don’t think companies paying enough attention each even though it would benefit them on both the acquisition and the retention side. Katie Robbert 7:32 So I have two questions for you. Related to that. So one, do you think that it is a disadvantage if a website does not offer some kind of site search? And two, do you use search console? Or do you use Google Analytics to figure out what people are searching for? How they find you? And what they find out? You know, from your website? Like how do you determine that you have those content gaps? Well, Christopher Penn 8:02 I’ll do that in reverse order. So you should be using Google Analytics for Site Search. Because it tracks it very well. And it puts it into the the interface we all know and love. And then on the first part, I find that a site that does not have some search facility to be less functional, it’s a less it’s a, it’s a site that has not given serious thought to the user experience, to say like, Hey, we know, we’re not the world’s best UI designers. So here’s a search bar in case we just did a crappy job with our navigation, there’s almost there’s almost kind of an implied arrogance to not having a search bar, like, oh, our design is so good. You don’t need a search bar, when the rest of us are like, I can’t find shit. You know, you made it with all day, you made your menus entirely out of emoji. Why did you Why would you do that? And so, yeah, I think modern sites should have some kind of search facility. Because the other risk you run into then is, if your site doesn’t have on site search, people will go back to Google. And then they start googling things. And you could potentially actually attract them to a competitor. It’s like, Oh, I was looking at this thing. I could find like up, oh, look, this other segment offers, you know, analysts consulting, check them out. And then suddenly, now you may have introduced competition You didn’t even you didn’t even necessarily want. Katie Robbert 9:28 So you’re saying I just want to back up a bit. So you’re saying that there’s an implied arrogance to a lack of some sort of a site search, but I would counter with, it’s a lack of understanding of how important making your site searchable is, and maybe that’s a lack of understanding about SEO in general, that you’re thinking, well, I don’t have a blog. Therefore, I don’t need Site Search, because there’s nothing to search on my site. I don’t have content and so do you think that maybe there’s a disconnect of Well, no, there is content on your website, the fact that you have a website, in general means that you have some sort of searchable content, even if your site is only, you know, like my personal site, even if it’s only five pages big, I still want to make it as easy as possible. So do you think that maybe, you know, I’m sure that there is a arrogance where my site is so great and so intuitive, I don’t need to include a site search. But I would also argue that there’s the other side of it, where it’s a lack of understanding of how important site search and SEO is, even if you don’t have a blog, for example. Christopher Penn 10:35 I think the root cause is not being customer centric, right? Whatever the reason, confusion, delusion, arrogance, whatever it comes down to, you’re not thinking like the customer, you’re thinking from your company perspective. And you’re forgetting your customers. Our customers don’t live in your world, customers don’t live see that site 20 times a day, because it’s their homepage and know it, you know, like the back of their hands, they, a lot of them, depending on your analytics could be like the first time they’ve ever come in visited your site. So yeah, I think it’s it’s that lack of customer centricity, as as cliched and as beaten to death is that term? Is it still true? You have to think like, the average customer who doesn’t live in our world all day? Katie Robbert 11:21 Well, and so I, I know the answer to this question, but I feel like we should explore it is, what’s the solution to that, Chris? Christopher Penn 11:29 Well, in general, it’s with a search in particular, I roll out the feature and measure it. If nobody uses Site Search, then yeah, you didn’t have a problem, right. But if suddenly, you start seeing 20 3050 100,000 queries for stuff that you thought was obvious on your site, then you know, that there’s an issue, there’s an issue that you need to either resolve through content through navigation, one of those two things, but it always comes down to you know, put, put it up, test it, see what happens and see see how people behave. And also, in the navigation, please make it obvious that magnifying glasses to pixels is not helping anyone, Katie Robbert 12:11 I would build on that and say, do some actual UX testing with your customers. And so one of the, you know, more straightforward user experience exercises is, is to, you know, literally put the website in front of someone and say, you know, find, you know, my blender instruction manual, you know, and then you just record the session, you know, obviously, you let them know, that’s what you’re doing. But then you watch and see, like, Where are those pitfalls? Like, isn’t intuitive, because you have a big button on your homepage that says, click here to get the blender, you know, instruction manual? Or, you know, they start looking for things like, Well, where’s your search bar? Or Where’s your, you know, resources, or Where’s your this, whereas your that and so having that conversation, helps you understand the way that people who aren’t you who, like you’re too close to it people who aren’t you are thinking about, so you can sort of get a lot from that conversation of, you know, asking them to complete a task and having them walk through what they’re thinking as they’re completing that task, and where they’re stumbling, that would really inform a lot of those features, Chris, that you’re mentioning rolling out. And the reason I say that, that you would start with that is because rolling out a new feature on a website is not as easy for every company as it is, for example, Trust Insights, because it’s literally just you and I and we can kind of do whatever we want with our website. We don’t have, you know, hundreds of meetings and, you know, forms and budgets and these things like, we don’t do it willy nilly. But we do it in such a way that we’re agile, and we can roll things out. And so just sort of that alternative to people who don’t have the luxury of just rolling out a feature and testing it. Christopher Penn 14:03 You know, you bring up something really important there. We talked a few episodes back about people using Microsoft clarity, which is a UX tool, similar to like hot jar and stuff like that. And it occurs to me, if you’ve got a set up, and you know, all the privacy disclosures and stuff are updated on your website. You could filter down a clarity just to people who used the search function on your website and then watch their user journeys. Watch that whole visit that whole session, go What did this person try to do that they even needed to use the search bar, and that would give you some of that user testing. The other thing that comes to mind is when you look at services like Google Site surveys, which is part of Google surveys, you can install a little widget on your site that asks those common four questions. You know, did you accomplish what you set out to do today on the website and things like that is in a little pop up and you get a couple of 100 responses a quarter? enough to tell you ah yeah. Our site’s not not getting the job done here. Or Yeah, people are generally satisfied. So those websites satisfaction surveys. I believe I think it’s for an on site survey. It’s a penny per response, and you get the first 200 every quarter for free. There’s no reason not to put that on. I mean, if you can’t find $2, in your marketing budget, something’s gone wrong. Katie Robbert 15:18 Yeah, I think one of the first questions that always asked is did you find what you’re looking for? And that’s even something that, you know, if you have one of those automated chat bots on your website, I see them pop up all the time, did you find what you’re looking for? That’s a great question to start with, because people are obviously on your website to find out information or do something with you. So if they say no, okay, that’s a big deal. I mean, you know, in a world where going shopping at physical stores was a little bit more normal and safe. One of the first things that cashier asked is, did you find everything that you were looking for? And normally, you just said, like, yep, okay, like, I’m ready to leave. But a lot of times, we will say, No, I did. And, you know, I’ve done that with cashews group, like, actually, I was looking for, you know, the following three things, and I didn’t find them. Can you help me? And it’s just such a great question to start with, because it’s an open ended question. You know, some people might be like, yep, I’m good. Stop talking to me, or like, it opens up this, you know, what the layout of your store is not very intuitive. Trader Joe’s, and I can’t find a gosh darn thing on all of those pack shelves. And really, I just want to get some jingle jangle, and you can’t tell me where it is, because it changes every year. Not that I’m better. Christopher Penn 16:38 It’s because I actually do it to the store layouts that made it just because I know my store really well by now, but I know having trouble finding it. But ya know, anytime that somebody is running into interface issues, it’s also an upsell opportunity. It’s it’s one of those things is a quote, my favorite quotes, any opportunity to be helpful is an opportunity to earn money, right? That’s it. So when you think about sight search, you are having opportunities to be helpful, which means you have an opportunity to upsell or at the very least, to retain the customer. So to circle back, how do we measure the customer retention aspect of search? Because it’s pretty easy to measure acquisition, right, you know, forms filled out shopping carts filled, etc? How do we measure not losing a customer? Because our site, you know, royally annoyed them? Katie Robbert 17:32 I think we, you know, you run surveys, you do those, you have to do quantitative and qualitative measurement. And so you need to ask people, you know, are you willing, so, for example, like, if you ever have to call your cable company, which is a pain in the butt, the first thing they ask you in the call is, are you willing to take a brief survey at the conclusion of this call? And so you can do the same thing on your website, or you can have people, you know, click a box to say, is it okay, if one of our representatives calls you, and asks you about your experience on our website. So there’s that qualitative aspect. But then there’s also the quantitative aspect of, you know, Chris, you’d mentioned rolling out new features, doing that a B testing, I think there’s a lot of different ways that you can test and make sure that people are finding what they need. But you can also pair that with your returning user data from Google Analytics, your retention data, your, you know, return sales data, you know, people who purchase multiple times, you know, so there’s a lot of different ways to measure I don’t, I think it really depends on your customer experience and your website. But there’s a lot of different metrics that you could use in order to understand if you’re getting SEO right, for that second half of your customer journey. Christopher Penn 18:52 Yeah, I think if you were to take a lot of the scores from like surveys, if you do the like the website satisfaction survey, you have an ongoing actual analytics and data. And you look at that with your returning user data. And then you dig into your CRM, and you look at things like, you know, either form generations, because you do have existing customers, at least in our business, filling out, you know, additional content to watch our webinars and things. But more importantly, you’ll get your churn numbers and things, particularly if you’re like a large high volume b2c transactional business and run a correlation analysis. And if you see that your your basket of customer satisfaction numbers, and your basket of churn numbers strongly correlate, then you could make a case that Yeah, we need to do some testing here because these numbers are too close to be comfortable. It’s like, maybe we really are, like pissing off all of our our customers and that that’s, you know, that’s contributing to the churn rate. So just as you can do attribution analysis for customer acquisition, you absolutely can apply the same mathematical principles to your existing customers where the outcome you’re measuring staff acquisition Is churn and say like, Okay, what? data? What variables seem to have a relationship with that churn number? And what can we do to bring that number down? Maybe it is website satisfaction. Maybe it’s too many emails, you know, maybe, you know, it’s it’s our CEO stormed the Capitol. Who knows what the reasons could be. But there’s any number of things and without that quantitative analysis, like you said, it’s hard to to tease that up, but it is a knowable thing. Katie Robbert 20:31 Well, even you know, just starting with looking at Do I have returning users to my website is probably a good place to start, you know. So that’s an indication even before you go down the road of retention, SEO, why aren’t people coming back to your website? What is the function of your website that people don’t return to it? Is it purely transactional, they buy one washing machine every six years, and they never return, then you probably don’t need to worry too much about it unless you’re trying to house instruction manuals. But if you’re a site like ours, where you want people to get information, you want people to sign up for services can keep coming back for different services, you know, find it as the training, resource, all those different things, then you probably want to have a high number of returning users. So I would start there. Christopher Penn 21:19 Yep, I would also look at your churn of your email list. That’s an easy proxy for figuring out if people care about us anymore, like a granted me it has to mean also that your emails worth reading. But if you’re sending out a lot of email volume, and you’re noticing, you’ve got a lot of churn on your list, like yeah, you may not be satisfying customers anymore. So give these ideas some thought SEO is can be applied to the second half of the customer journey. You can measure it and you can figure out what are the things that have a relationship to audience churn, to acquisition churn, and of course to customer churn. If you figure those things out. The old Maxim that it costs more to acquire a customer than just to keep it will help you boost your numbers and make your job as a marketer less difficult, because every delighted customer is also becomes a marketing channel for you. You got questions about this episode or anything we’ve talked about today, pop on over to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for Marcus join our slack group of over 1500 other marketers just like you who are interested in talking all things analytics, data marketing strategy, you name it, and where it is. you’re consuming the show. hop on over to Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast to subscribe to the show. so you don’t miss an episode. Thanks for watching. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care. want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris talk through how to make marketing operations during a crisis. When big, macro events have the world talking, what’s appropriate and what’s not when it comes to marketing? How should marketing leaders weigh the different operational decisions? Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-nowwhat.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to understand data science better as a marketer? Would you like to learn whether it’s the right choice for your career? Do you need to know how to manage data science employees, vendors agencies, take the data science 101 workshop from Trust Insights. In this 90 minute on demand workshop, you’ll learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey, you’ll learn how to build a KPI map, how to explore and analyze Google Analytics data, how to construct a valid hypothesis, the foundation of marketing data science, the basics of statistical concepts like centrality distribution, regression clustering, which determine what those words mean essential soft skills in data science, and how to hire marketing data science professionals or agencies, the course is on demand. So you can watch it whenever you want. You don’t have to be at any place at any time. And it comes with the videos, audio recording, PDF of the slides, automated transcripts, KPI map example. And a sample workbook with data because this is hands on, you get to try some of the stuff out. If this sounds good, just head on over to Trust insights.ai slash data science 101. That’s Trust insights.ai slash data science 101. In this week’s In-Ear Insights, 2020 is the year that keeps on giving. And here we Katie Robbert 1:29 are number like 45th or something December at night. Christopher Penn 1:34 So the big question that we’re wrestling with today, and we thought we’d sort of share our brainstorming out loud with you, because I’m sure a lot of folks are having the same conversations is with all the turmoil going on right now. Particularly since we are a United States based company, even though we have you know, friends and clients around the world, we are still sensitive to what’s happening within our our country, the events of the last week, and things have proven that we are living in an extremely volatile time there. For anyone who’s been under a rock, there was an armed insurrection attempt last week at the nation’s capital. And according to some posts on social media, there’ll be two more attempts on the 17th of the 20th of this month. And so one of the things we’ve talked about in the past is crisis management frameworks. Like when is the appropriate time to shut up? And just, you know, if you have nothing useful, the content content to the discussion, you shut your mouth, right. That’s what our parents used to say, you have anything nice to say? versus Do you still continue to run your business, which is important and you know, businesses, assuming that they’re, you know, ethical businesses do contribute to the world do spend money to keep people’s livelihoods going? Or do you also tap into? No, we do have a point of view, we should say something. So there’s a lot to unpack here, Katie, you are the CEO of the company, you’re responsible, ultimately, for what happens with the company? What’s it like in the very warm seat that you’re setting? Katie Robbert 3:10 I’m not gonna lie, I’m kind of nauseous. You know, it’s, I tend to be very aware and sensitive of how everyone else around me is feeling. And I’m not saying that other people aren’t. But I really try to take that into consideration when making decisions, such as this. And so, you know, I really am in that headspace of, do we just go ahead and shut up and wait it out? Or do we move forward with business as usual? Now, you know, the big channel that I’m focusing on right now is social media. So you know, I still think that we’re going to send out our newsletter, you know, as planned, those are sort of the business as usual things. But right now, social media is right at the center of all of this in terms of, you know, the division of people and the opinions and the fake news and the Real News, and, you know, everything else going on? And, you know, obviously, some big things happened with certain accounts getting banned, and people feeling like the violation of their, you know, first amendment and the free speech and, you know, privacy and so, my feeling, my initial feeling is that, you know, we don’t we, as a company, don’t have anything to add to that specific conversation right now, unless we had a perspective on data privacy. So you know, putting up organic social posts, like, hey, do you know your digital customer journey isn’t what’s needed right now, I feel like that can wait, because we still have other channels such as email and you know, people are still reading the content on our website, which we should absolutely keep pushing out, we have, you know, our podcast or live stream, those things should keep going forward. I feel like that, you know, when I’m looking at overall, you know, reading the room and taking the temperature, we don’t need to be putting up our organic social right now or any sort of paid social. I feel like anything related to social right now can wait. Um, you know, and I would love to hear sort of the, you know, other side of that, because you’re absolutely right, Chris, like we have another couple of weeks to get through, we have the inauguration, but then you sort of have to play that game of, well, after the inauguration are things suddenly amazingly going to get better? It’s not like midnight on January 1. Like it doesn’t like flip a switch. So at what point do you have to say, Okay, I have to get back to normal. My gut is not right now. But at some point, we’re going to have to. Christopher Penn 5:53 Yeah, I would agree with you. I mean, I think, certainly for brands, doubling down on organic and paid search right now is a smart idea. Because if someone’s looking for you, particularly by name, then they’re interested in doing business with you, right. And so it makes a lot of sense to put a lot of emphasis on that that way, you’re not reaching out to people who don’t want to hear from you. They are coming to you, right, they’re asking, I know, management consulting from Trust Insights, if they’re googling for that. Yes, we want to hear from you. In terms of the conversation itself, and things, it depends, you know, as with everything on what do you what do you have to contribute to the conversation, if you did? You know, I certainly have no shortage of opinions about where I stand and things and unsurprised. And it stands on the side of data. Right. And provable things stuff. So. But in terms of Do we have anything to offer to the discussion, publicly? I’m not sure. privately, yes, and this is something that, you know, we didn’t talk about it last year, because it wasn’t appropriate to. But during a lot of the awareness, and events around Black Lives Matter and stuff, you know, as a company, we took private action behind the scenes, everything from making donations to doing some volunteering, and some pro bono work for people to try and, and do our part to make things better. And I absolutely think in in this situation, today, there’s room for doing that, again, again, it’s not something that you want to publicize. But there are things to be done, there’s data to be analyzed. One of the things that came out over the weekend was some some hacktivists, if you will, just copied the entirety of the contents of parlour, but that one chat app, and made it available as a 70 terabyte Docker image that anyone who is interested in analyzing the data could are the things that we could offer in that situation, possibly, I don’t know. But certainly, more eyes on solving a problem generally is is better. Not always. But you know, there’s no such thing as too many cooks in the kitchen. But I know that every company has talented people working at it. I know every person you’re working in marketing and data science and AI has skills to offer. And I don’t think it’s a bad idea for people to give some thought to. Okay, if I were to contribute, if I were to donate my time, how would I do it? And what could I do to make things better? Because you can’t go back in time, you can’t undo something? So what are the things that in your view of the world would make the world a better place? Katie Robbert 8:43 I think that’s a really good way to think about everything that’s going on right now or has been going on because what you’re trying to do is, it’s not that you’re taking the emotion out of it, but you’re trying not to make a purely emotionally driven decision. And so, you know, Chris, if we took data out of it, and we’re just saying, like, this is right, this is wrong. You know, it’s a black and white issue, you know, being like, it’s only one thing or the other, there’s no gray area, we could take a lot of really big missteps, because we’re not looking at, you know, any sort of data that’s available or really thinking about like, Am I doing this? Because I want the pat on the back, or am I doing this because I think it’s the right thing to be doing. And I think that that’s also sort of when you’re making those decisions, especially as a very public brand. I know. There was a few brands that chimed in on the insurrection that was going on last week, and it didn’t go well. Even though they had the best of intentions. It didn’t go well because it wasn’t the right time or place for that particular brand, to be a part of that conversation because they’ve never been a part of that person. conversation before. And I think that that’s something that, you know, as I’m thinking about how we fit in or what we’re doing, or aren’t the actions we’re taking, it’s the same thing. You know, have we taken part in these conversations before publicly? Will it feel off brand to us, even if you know, in our own little bubble, we’re talking about it constantly, we’re looking at the data constantly. We have to balance that with that external perception of well, Trust Insights has never weighed in on this before. Why now? Christopher Penn 10:32 Yep. This is actually a conversation I’m having with my oldest kid about what the difference is between, you know, doing good work and doing what’s called performative work, you know, in the LGBTQ community is called performative ally ship where you, you do things and you talk about stuff that’s really for your own benefit, right, you’re changing your logo, to be a certain set of colors and things, as opposed to doing things that actually make the situation better. And it’s funny because, in, in one of the religious traditions I grew up in, you know, this whole idea that, you know, if you, if you pray in public, you get your reward, you get the pat on the back, and there’s, you know, whereas if you pray in private, you get the better reward, at least according to that particular doctrine. And I think there’s merit in that idea in that philosophy for how companies should be approaching this. Because, yes, to your point, a lot of brands did a lot of performative stuff last week, and the question was, well, where have you been for the last four years? Right? Why have you not been contributing to this conversation? From the beginning? Why have you not been helping people who have been disenfranchised, and, you know, for some of the people involved in these situations, there is an understandable reason behind what they’re doing. Right. And, you know, it’s really important, I think, for people to to, that we’ve we’ve gotten is a weird place in society where we’ve equated understanding with agreement. And I think that’s incredibly dangerous. Like, you can absolutely understand someone’s reasons for doing something, even if you completely disagree with them. But you have to be able to think like they did go, Oh, this is why this is happening. If you do, you can’t do that. It means you have substantial flaws in your data analysis capabilities, right? Because we’ve talked a lot data is more than just numbers, it is also understand the why of something. So I don’t think these brands have jumped in, I have given a lot of thought to the why. And they kind of jumped in very, in a very performative way. And it Yeah, you’re right, it backfired. Whereas if you’re giving serious thought to Okay, well, what is the reason for group A, for their actions? What’s the reason for Group B or group C with reason for their actions? And then, based on that analysis, can you find something that improves the situation for at least the majority? If not everybody? You know, in in the example I’m thinking of with some of this data analysis work, there are some people who clearly committed criminal acts. No question. Identifying, isolating or removing those people from the equation by making sure that law enforcement has that information will be a useful first step, because what they did is helpful to know one, right? It’s just like taking any type of contamination out of a product, right? If you can remove contamination, then the product becomes usable again. So what are the things that you could do? Well, the things we could do as a company, Well, certainly making donations to causes that are working towards better data around these kinds of things. Contributing our time and our own analysis and letting the appropriate folks know, like, Hey, we did this thing privately, like, we did this thing, if it’s useful to you great, if not, tried it anyway. and promoting a viewpoint of Okay, you don’t have to agree with it, but you do need to understand it. Katie Robbert 14:00 Well, and I think that that’s, you know, I know, something that we we did do publicly last year, during a lot of the Black Lives Matter protest was share some resources. So, you know, we weren’t necessarily taking a stand one way or the other, even though we all had, you know, strong similar opinions, but publicly, just knowing how, you know, I don’t even know what the word is, you know, how not temperamental not fragile, but basically how react volatile, volatile people can be, especially on social media. You know, you want to make sure that you’re walking that line in a neutral enough way, that you’re not just complacent, but that you’re being helpful without getting political without getting this is a really difficult thing to do unless your brand is a brand that has been doing that all along. So to suddenly jump into the fray. You’re going to get eaten alive. And so, you know, one of the things that we can do in this particular, you know, situation, if we do want to have a voice in this conversation on social media is, to your point, Chris, sharing some data analysis to help people understand what’s been going on, or how to wrap their heads around a lot of the information they’re seeing, you know, without giving that commentary on the analysis, but here’s the data. And then also just sharing some resources to help people understand maybe a little bit more about how, you know, privacy and how communications work on platforms, such as Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram and parlour, or why these companies have been able to make the decisions they have. And they’re not necessarily violating your right to free speech. But it’s really about what you have agreed to, when you signed up to use those platforms, because those platforms, even though people use them as news platforms, they’re not news platforms, they don’t follow the same conventions as a newspaper, for example. Christopher Penn 16:09 That’s true. The other thing I think, is important to differentiate because it is gotten muddled, is that there is a difference between, you know, politics and points of view, versus values and what’s right or wrong. And I think that has gotten lost. I think, for a lot of folks who are trying to figure out, you know, conversations and where they stand in a lot of stuff. It’s a mistake to conflate the two, you can have political beliefs that are all of a spectrum. But ultimately, you do need to be clear about what is right and what is wrong. You do need to be clear about what is honest and dishonest. And that’s where I think the line can get muddy because like if you look at for example, if you go to TrustInsights.ai dot AI, our website, you can see our values page here, the values that we stand for, and in this particular situation, there are very clear lines of division about is something honest, or dishonest is something something fair and just or discriminatory. And biased is something selfish or selfless. And so I would say additionally to brands thinking about, you know, do you get involved, look at your own values, right, if your values stand in opposition to a certain point of view, then I don’t see it as contradictory to take a position that is aligned with your values. Now, if your values are out of sync with what you actually believe, you may need to go and revisit what your values actually are as a company. But I think there is a case to be made that when you have something that is clearly out of sync with your corporate values, and you’ve been living them the whole time. Some cases very publicly, some cases not. Then there’s less harm and less risk in participating in a conversation, if it is if your perspective is aligned with the values you’ve always stood for, and you have members of your community who will say like, Hey, you know, these people have been on the side of, you know, honesty the whole time, or these people have been on the side of improvement, or whatever the your corporate values are. Now, if your corporate values are kind of a muddy mess, like, you know, we believe in the leveraging of synergy. It’s gonna have a harder time. But being very clear about those values means that it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody in your community, when you do take a stand on something that matters to you. Katie Robbert 18:40 I agree with that. And, you know, I do want to be clear that I am not saying that, you know, just because you’re a brand doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an opinion on, you know, the environment that we’re currently living in, like, you absolutely should have an opinion, you do have an opinion, you’re a human being, of course, you have an opinion. I think what the message that I’m trying to get across, and what I’m trying to work out for myself is it’s okay to have an opinion, but how do you thoughtfully share that opinion? You know, it’s not that you’re avoiding conflict, but you’re not necessarily bringing conflict upon yourself. You’re not trying to damage your brand reputation, just so that you can, you know, have your two cents in the conversation. So it’s really trying to find that balance of obviously, you have an opinion, everybody has an opinion, whether it’s a strong opinion, or no opinion, no opinion is an opinion. You know, one of the things that I saw last week on Twitter was someone was saying something along the lines of, you know, if people aren’t speaking up and saying that everything that’s happening right now is wrong, then those are people you don’t want to be following. And to me that was the wrong way to approach it. Because People could just be jumping into the conversation just to be echoing like the echo chamber of, we have me too. And I don’t want to see this happen. And you know, I’ve always felt that way. But I’ve never said it before. And it’s, it just felt like the wrong message to convey of like, Well, everybody should be standing up against this thing. Well, yeah, but there’s ways to do it so that it doesn’t just feel disingenuous and inauthentic. And so Chris, to your point, taking a look at your company values is a really good place to start. And so, you know, obviously, if you value honesty, you can speak about, you know, here’s what I feel, or here’s what the truth is, the challenge there is that you’re still going to get that, you know, reaction of people saying like, Well, no, what you’re saying isn’t the truth. And so you just need to be prepared, that it’s not going to be this perfect little moment where everybody agrees with you. That’s definitely not where we’re at right now. And so it’s just a matter of how much of that are you willing to work with, and you can’t necessarily come at it combative, Lee, if someone says, I think your opinions wrong, okay, you have to be okay with that continuing to argue with people on social media is just gonna bring you down that rabbit hole. And I feel like even my thoughts right now are sort of incoherent and spiraling, because there’s so much to wrap your head around, there’s so much to process. And so, you know, I think the bottom line is, I think what we as a company for Trust Insights, what we’re gonna end up doing is really taking it day by day, sort of seeing like, what feels appropriate, what is appropriate, where are we comfortable, you know, potentially having someone say, that was the wrong move? You know, okay, are we had the best of intentions, but we did the wrong thing. You know, what is our level of risk? Christopher Penn 21:53 I agree, I think it starts with your values. And Are your parents admonition to if you don’t have anything nice to say? or in our case, you don’t think productive to say to the conversation? If there isn’t a focus on how do you make things better? It’s okay to err on the side of not saying a whole lot right now, while you figure out the right approach to to making things better, and to be committed to saying, Okay, how do we, whatever the situation is, whether it’s racial injustice, whether it’s income inequality, whether it’s gender bias, whatever things with focus, how do you make the thing better? How do you improve the things so that the maximum number of people achieve the maximum number of amount of positive benefit? Now I don’t think that there’s any major value system in the world that would disagree with that general example of, you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As for how that rolls out, tactically, you’re right, it will be a day by day thing, we’ll figure it out. But in general, again, erring on the side of are we making things better? Or worse? are we adding value or taking value away from people because every moment that you spend looking at a piece of content isn’t what you could have been doing something else? And so we don’t want to take time away from people that they could have been doing something more productive, republished something that isn’t all that productive. So if you’ve got thoughts about this, and you got comments about it, pop on over to our slack group, go to TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics from archives we have over 1500 people in the community asking them questions just like this. Like how are you folks handling the situation? What’s your perspective biggest the ground and love to see you there and wherever it is you’re watching listening to go? Go to Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast to subscribe to the show to make sure you don’t miss any episodes. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. Visit Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris tackle the disconnect between what marketers think is hot versus what customers actually want. Do people really want more time on their screens? Do people need more meetings on their calendars? Watch or listen to find out the results of a survey and how content strategy for 2021 might change. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-contentformats.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to understand data science better as a marketer? Would you like to learn whether it’s the right choice for your career? Do you need to know how to manage data science employees, vendors agencies, take the data science 101 workshop from Trust Insights. In this 90 minute on demand workshop, you’ll learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey, you’ll learn how to build a KPI map, how to explore and analyze Google Analytics data, how to construct a valid hypothesis, the foundation of marketing data science, the basics of statistical concepts like centrality distribution, regression clustering, which determine what those words mean. Essential soft skills in data science, and how to hire marketing data science professionals or agencies, the course is on demand. So you can watch it whenever you want. You don’t have to be at any place at any time. And it comes with the videos, audio recording, PDF of the slides, automated transcripts, KPI map example and a sample workbook with data because this is hands on, you get to try some of the stuff out. If this sounds good, just head on over to Trust insights.ai slash data science 101. That’s Trust insights.ai slash data science 101. In this episode of In-Ear Insights, it is a brand new year it is 2021 is an arbitrary date on the calendar. But one of the things that happened over the holiday break, I ran a poll to my newsletter folks, asking them what content would you like more of and in what format? And the format question was an interesting one, the five choices were email, video, audio, text, blog posts, and live streams. And what came up was very interesting email was the winner. By about 30% of respondents followed by text blog posts, then video, then audio at the bottom with only 12% was live streams. And well, the folks who replied back to the episode of the issue the newsletters, like everyone in marketing is saying live stream live stream live stream. And all these markers are talking about and evangelizing it. Why did it come in last for your newsletter survey? And I said, Well, there’s a bunch of reasons I can think of but Katie, what’s your perspective on the thing that everybody’s talking about? As the next marketing trend? Like for example, there’s a new app clubhouse, which is essentially talk radio, live talk radio, is the thing and was talking about? And then there’s the reality of what customers want when we survey them? Why is there such a disconnect? Katie Robbert 2:52 It sounds like there’s a couple of things going on. I think there’s the you know, what we as marketers think our customers want. And then there’s what they’re saying like, No, I don’t have the energy. So when you look at an email newsletter, versus a blog post, for example, they could essentially be the same kind of thing. They’re both just written word, but what is being delivered to you and one, you have to go seek out. So the email newsletter is being delivered to you were so like, at my convenience, I can read it, it’s waiting there, someone has handed it to me all nice and packaged up versus the blog post that I have to actively remember that I have to go find and read. So that’s one difference. The next is, you know, with a live stream, or a video or an audio, you know, you are somewhat beholden, you know, you can speed it up a little bit, but you’re somewhat beholden to the speed in which the content creator gets to the point. And so with, you know, a blog post or a newsletter, you can try to skim and get to the point faster. And of course, it wouldn’t be a new year without my dog barking through a podcast. So here we are. The point being is that when I think about that, I would have also said either a newsletter or a blog post, because something that I can take my time and read at my leisure versus waiting for someone to talk at me and get to the point. I would much prefer something delivered to me that I can read in my own time. Christopher Penn 4:28 Yeah, that was what I was thinking of in terms of, you know, the why people answered the way they did. And for those who are watching the video version of this, just got the poll results on the screen. The other thing that struck me in particular with live streaming is that it’s it’s what we call appointment media, where you have to be at a certain time at a certain place to consume the content. And honestly, you know, it’s the beginning of 2021 we’ve we’ve had this pandemic now for over a year we’ve been in, you know, in the various states of Russia. For 10 months now, a live stream is nothing more than another zoom call at this point, not sure that anybody wants more of those, particularly since it’s at a certain date in a certain time. It’s another meeting, I raise your hand, if you would like another meeting on your calendar, I don’t see any hands up right now. And so unless the content is so spectacular or so entertaining, I don’t know that, that people are willing to make the time for it, as opposed to at least you know, when you record a live stream, the video is available later on. Some of my favorite bands on YouTube have, you know, live streams of acoustic shows and stuff live. And these are bands that have 234 10 million followers on YouTube. And when you go in, and you look at the live streams, like 400 people on like, out of your 6 million fans, you can only get 400 of them to show up for a live free show. What chance do marketers have, you know, with 100 or 1000 followers, we’re getting more than like, what? Katie Robbert 6:05 Well, it also comes down to you know, Chris, this is something you and I talk a lot about is you know, when you create a tutorial, you record a video, whereas I personally am someone who much prefers to read a set of instructions, I don’t want to watch a video. And so that’s also sort of a learning preference. I struggle to follow a video, whereas if you give me step by step instructions written out, I can do that. And so I feel the same way about, you know, consuming content where I would rather read something where it’s easier for me to literally just, you know, scan my eyeballs back up if I miss something, whereas with a video, I have to stop it, go back, try to re consume it, you know, make sure I’m understanding what the person is saying. And I don’t have that written thing as a point of reference. Because they Oh, yes, I understood what they said or no, I misheard what the messaging was. And so again, that’s just a personal preference for me. But you’re absolutely right. It is like one more meeting on your calendar, even if, you know, you’re watching it on demand. after the fact, there’s still that, you know, sense of fatigue with watching another video, try and consume more information. And, you know, with a newsletter or a blog post, you can more easily just sort of skim through, pick out the things that you care the most about, and then move on. Christopher Penn 7:28 I think the two concepts embedded in here are, you know, friction and speed. Right? When you have a piece of text, I mean, you can read anywhere from 250 to 400 words a minute, right. And when we speak, when I speak at my fastest I’m speaking at about 180 words a minute, most people speak between 120 150 words a minute. And so just by having the text in front of you, you can at least double the speed at which audio can be delivered. Right. You know, I’ve heard friends say, Oh, yeah, let’s get your podcasts by listen to it. We have 1.5 x speed so I can get to it faster. Okay. I mean so much. You want to get it over with as quick as you can. But they’re trying to just get the information out of it. And to your earlier point about an email just being there, right. It just it just shows up. I think the watchwords I feel like the watchwords for our marketing going into the new year are make it faster for people to get the information because there’s still only 24 hours a day. And remove as much friction from the process as possible, make people do less stuff. You know, our friend and colleague Mitchell said that last year, when we were recording our client service shows, don’t be another thing on your clients to do list, right? When you have a live stream, you got to remember where it is, you got to remember the app, you got to remember the time you got to show up. That’s a lot of things as opposed to any newsletter, do nothing, it just shows up. Katie Robbert 8:55 It’s true. And you know, you can also sort of, you know, make the comparison to you know, let’s say you’re googling for a recipe, you know, how many times have you gone to be like, oh, okay, this is the recipe I need. But then you have to scroll through eight pages of how the person got inspired. In the, you know, mountains of France when they saw a butterfly this one time flying over the crested moon to then you know, land on a blade of grass that then inspired them to make a lasagna. Tell me tell me what’s in the lasagna. Just get to the point. I just want the recipe. Do I need 10 pounds of noodles or 15 pounds of noodles. Like it’s that kind of frustration that the second somebody has that experience with your content. It’s immediately a turn off and they you’ve probably just lost a subscriber or a watcher or you know someone to consume your content, because you have frustrated them today where they can’t get to the point fast enough. And you know, I’m fascinated by people who listen to podcasts that fast Like 1.5 X or two X, I can’t consume content that fast. But what it does say, Chris, is that, yeah, we just need to not bury the lede just get to the point and move on Christopher Penn 10:13 it, it goes back to kind of what we named our live stream and what, so what like, what is the point of this thing. And I told him, I’m cooking recipes. I’m like, just tell me what temperature the oven supposed to be. That’s really all I care about. I figured out this chemistry behind the grass, but Katie Robbert 10:31 you don’t want to one time took a walk through the woods and saw our beam of sunlight coming down onto the forest ground. And it suddenly reminded them of this story that their grandmother one time told them. Oh, my God, just tell me how many coconuts do I need? Well, Christopher Penn 10:46 so you know, that raises a really interesting question, because one of the things that’s shown up in like orbit media is content serving and content marketing world and marketing props, and all these different companies, they’ve been talking about the state of content marketing, particularly for b2b is even saying content keeps getting good, high ranking, high performing content keeps getting longer and longer and longer orbit media study last year said that over the last five years, the average length of a piece of content has gone from like 700 words like 3100 words. And unless it’s like 330 100 words, you know, of pure solid gold. That’s a lot of you know, my grandmother’s lasagna stuff. I feel like he’s getting stuck in there. What I would like to know, and maybe was something we should research for one of our live streams is why is the content getting longer if in fact, it’s getting less valuable? And why is it performing better? Is it just that people are, you know, have the time to just dig into one piece of content and they they plow through the whole thing? Or is it that what you’re doing for the search algorithms, feeding them more and more text, which helps the deep learning models? Isn’t In fact, what people like? But it’s what like machines? Like? Katie Robbert 12:03 I think it really depends, I think it depends on the purpose of the content. So some content is purely for, you know, the sharing story aspect of it. And so here’s my experience, here’s your experience, I relayed the experiences. Some of it is informational, educational, and some of it is that pure entertainment. And so I think it really depends on the purpose of the content as well. Not all content is educational, some of it is experiential, or, you know, entertainment. And so I think that, you know, when we’re looking at, why is this content performed better, I think we also need to figure out, like, what is the purpose of this content? Who’s consuming it? So I do think you’re onto something where, you know, the machines are ranking it better, but it’s not necessarily what people like. So I think that there would probably be two studies there. One, what are the machines ranking? And two, what are people actually responding and engaging with? Christopher Penn 13:01 Right, because at the end of the day, if somebody doesn’t show up in your inbox saying, I want to do business with you, it’s kind of a moot point. You know, this is something that we’ve seen a lot of, we had a big campaign, at the end of last year for a client, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars in ad spend. But the focus was on a result, you could take them to the bank, not how many impressions did something get, and I continued to see a lot of folks getting lost on what metrics should matter. When we come back to this idea of, you know, agility, or speed, I guess, in reducing friction, the less friction that your content has, the faster you get somebody to the thing that matters to your business, right. So if you if you make it an email newsletter easier for people to click to do business with you, that’s gonna work wonders for your business, even if the machines don’t favorite as much, because one of the other things we have to keep in mind is that all these algorithms, Facebook’s newsfeed, Google’s SEO algorithm things, they don’t operate for your benefit. They don’t operate for our benefit. They operate for Google’s benefit and Facebook’s benefit to sell more ads. And so we have to keep in mind that benchmarking for what machines want is inherently benchmarking for another company’s interests and not ours. Katie Robbert 14:22 I think that that’s a really good point. And definitely something that we should explore, you know, with our network this year is, you know, are we doing it for Google, or are we doing it for ourselves? And so this sort of like goes into the whole like, you know, idea behind SEO, why are we ranking so high for SEO, but is it really benefiting us at all? You know, so something that we talk about internally a lot is our own, you know, newsletter, and, you know, it’s something that we want to take a look at, because yes, we have a lot of subscribers and it shows up at the beginning of our classes. journey, but is it the thing that helps our customers convert? We have to dig a little bit more and do some testing with that. And so there’s a lot of, you know, work to be done of, you know, is it the right content at the right time to get someone to convert? Or do we just want to use it as something that helps people, you know, get information. And so there’s purpose of the content, there’s delivery of the content? And then there is, you know, what does the content do for your business? Christopher Penn 15:27 Yep. So as we look at 2021, and all the different ways we can market to people, at least until life starts to resemble, you know, pre pandemic life. And people can start going out and seeing other people face to face, which will probably be more towards the end of the year, I think we have to keep in mind that people don’t want to spend a whole lot more time in front of screen if they don’t have to. Or if they do, it has to be really, really good. Like, if it’s a choice at 7pm, between your live stream and the Mandalorian I got bad news for you, Max percent of the time, you know, the customer is going to be choosing you know, Disney plus over you, because it’s just more entertainment, something to help them feel better. So, as we look at our plans and strategies for the year, we got to figure out how can we deliver stuff fast? So that’s consumed faster? How can it be made to be, you know, as frictionless as possible? And how can it maybe provide some of those aspects of entertainment? You know, certainly, neither one of us. Will I can’t speak for you, Katie. But I will say for myself, I’m not gonna be doing anything that will resemble stand up comedy, or Katie Robbert 16:45 no, you can rest assured that, you know, my comedy is not for everybody. So I’m not gonna try to make money off it. Christopher Penn 16:54 Exactly. So if we’re not going to be in the entertainment business, and we’re mostly in the education and coaching business, then we’re gonna make our content as as quick as it can be, and as painless as a Caribbean. Ask your customers, what I would strongly suggest you do is run a poll, a simple poll, in your newsletter, your email communications, asking people, well, what kinds of content? Do you want more of what format Do you want and make it super easy? Again, these are just simple one click polls, nobody has to fill out a form or jump through any crazy hoops and resist. Resist the temptation to you know, and particularly the sales teams temptation to say like, Oh, no, we need to ask 40 questions on a polling? Oh, make it one click one and done. And ask people what they want this year. I think you’ll be surprised that what you hear the marketing gurus talking about, versus what your customers talking about, probably going to be very different things for the year. any parting words, Katie? Katie Robbert 17:52 No, I mean, I think that’s it. Talk to your customers use this time to really just dig in and ask people what they want versus assuming you already know. Christopher Penn 18:02 Alright, speaking of asking people if you’ve got questions or follow up comments on this, head on over to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers are free slack group, where you can chat with over 1500 other marketers about analytics and data science and coaching and strategy and just getting help getting help from your community on the things that you are troubling you. And as always, wherever it is, you’re consuming this if you want to get more regularly go to Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast to subscribe to the show. Thanks for watching. We’ll talk to you soon. want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. Visit Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris look at the year that was: the highs, the lows, the lessons learned. What allowed companies to survive? What doomed others? How did some of our beloved practices like forecasting fare? And what should we think about changing for 2021? Pull up a chair, grab your beverage of choice, and let’s give 2020 the send-off it merits. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-eoy2020.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to use AI in your marketing but you’re not sure where to start? Take a class with Trust Insights and the marketing AI Institute. The AI Academy offers more than 25 classes and certification courses to start you on your AI journey including our intelligent attribution modeling for marketers certification. One membership gets you access to all 25 classes. Visit Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to learn more and enroll today. That’s Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to enroll today. Are you struggling to reach the right audiences? Trust Insights offers sponsorships in our newsletters, podcasts and media properties to help your brand be seen and heard by the right people. Our media properties with almost 100,000 people every week from the In-Ear Insights podcast to the most timely and in the headlights newsletters. Reach out to us today at Trust insights.ai slash contact to learn more, again, that’s Trust insights.ai slash contact in this week’s in In-Ear Insights it is the end of year it is the end of a was simultaneously a very fast and very, very, very long year filled with more changes that anyone could have forecasted last time this year, we were all had these, you know, grand marketing based silly things like 2020 vision and stuff and then the world prepared for it irrevocably changed. So we’re looking back this year at the year that was and some of the things that stood out. So Katie, what, beyond the most obvious thing, the pandemic? What are the things that stood out for you this year from a marketing and business perspective? Katie Robbert 1:43 Um, you know, I think the thing that stood out was really the agility. Um, you know, how quickly can marketing teams adapt? How quickly can they, you know, become a relevant part of a conversation versus just, you know, being five days behind, you know, how quickly can we all adapt to different trends? You know, I saw an article yesterday about the top Christmas gifts this year, and I saw a couple of things on there that I was a little bit surprised to see. I think one of them was like a Mr. Coffee, like coffeemaker was one of the top Christmas gifts this year. And it’s, that doesn’t strike me as very Christmassy, like, as a gift. But it might make sense. People are home all the time and making coffee all the time. So it’s like, How quickly can we adapt to what’s actually going on versus what we had planned? One of the things, Chris, that we had planned for TrustInsights.ai this year, and we had started to roll it out what were quarterly Predictive Analytics reports available for marketers to be able to use in their content planning and their ad spend planning. We rolled it out literally the day after the pandemic started. And I remember very clearly, we got an email from someone saying, I don’t need this right now. I’m getting 1000s of emails about, you know, the pandemic or the Coronavirus. It was very it was early March. And it just struck me is like, man, we really got that one wrong. Christopher Penn 3:18 We did, but again, it I think this year really did a a painfully fantastic job of explaining the limits of some of what you can do with data and forecasting. You know, we have said for years, go back and watch all our old keynotes from his early back as like 2014. We’re starting to talk about this stuff first, that black swan events, you know, those unusual events are things that break predictive forecasts. And this was like a 700 pound SWOT. This will bite your arm off. And it showed it showed because it changed everyone’s behaviors, business people. You know, for me, one of the things that I always look at when you’re looking at any kind of crisis situation is I take the tack that crisis amplifies what’s already there. So people who are good become better people who are bad become worse and situations that your companies get tested to see if they are strong enough to adapt. And we saw plenty of companies this year look to your point about agility that weren’t fast enough and strong enough to to make it and we saw plenty of companies that did that innovated that found the way out. We saw lots of people you know you and I’ve been working from home for three years now. And I’ve been homeschooling my kids for 15 years. So you know that to me was not new. But a bunch of other things were new. I finally get to you know, not be a complete freak wearing a mask. Katie Robbert 4:54 You know, and it definitely says something to sort of, you know, you’ve always been a full retail anchor in technology in marketing, but also it sounds like just in your, you know, everyday life, you’re always trying to be one step ahead. And what also strikes me is the amount of companies. So we were just talking about how we got the timing wrong on one of the things we were rolling out. But also, in some ways, the tone deafness of a lot of the messaging and, you know, trying to exploit what was going on in order to have some sort of like, you know, cutesy snappy, like marketing campaign. And, you know, given the amount of devastation that we’ve experienced this year, it just feels wrong. You know, that like sort of tongue in cheek, Chris, you pull the data on the most overused words. And a lot of them were like, unprecedented, and so on and so forth. But the fact that those are overused, because people are trying to use them to sell you something. It’s just, it just feels wrong. And I think that, you know, when we reflect on this year, one of the things that we know, from asking our audience from asking our network is that people are exhausted, because everybody was at home this year, marketing teams really only had digital media to work with digital channels, emails, social ads, you know, millions upon millions upon millions of pieces of content more than was planned, probably because they had nothing else that they had, you know, to serve up to their community. And it just I think you’re right, we’ve absolutely seen this year, sort of our limits, the limits of certain teams, the limits of certain companies, our own personal limits, in terms of what we’re capable of giving, but also what we’re capable of taking in. And I think that we need to remember that moving into next year of, you know, we’re starting to see that light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re not out of it yet. And so at least for the time being, we have to have more empathy and be more mindful of everybody around us, not just you know, how many dollars can we bring in? Christopher Penn 7:09 mindful and the thing, the other thing is intentional, when I look at my to do list and this year, like the Louis the first page is all stuff that I didn’t get to, you know, all the client work got done. All the priority stuff got done, but as a bunch of things like coding projects, and things that are just kind of languishing on the list. And that is, because, at least I don’t myself, personally have not been intentional enough about saying, nope, this hour of the week, I’m just going to work on a coding project, regardless of what’s going on in the no meetings during that block, etc. And I feel like in talking with others, a lot of other people are in that situation to where they haven’t been as intentional enough in in their work as they want to be. And they’re kind of like, it will be your got away from me, I’ve we’ve talked to a lot of people, a lot of clients, like, yeah, the year just got away from us. And we have one client, right, that’s trying to scramble to make up ground. because there wasn’t that I was presence of mind throughout the year to keep an eye on the analytics, keep an eye on the data and go and you know, as best as you can forecast and go, Okay, this is kind of where we’re going to be by the end of the year, instead of going on December one, Ah, no, we aren’t, you know, minus 40%. To our goal, we should try to fix that in the next 31 days. Katie Robbert 8:26 You know, it’s interesting. Mindfulness is not something that comes easily. And I think that one of the reasons why we’ve all struggled to do things with intention and to do things mindfully is that we’re literally just taking it day by day, and every day feels like there’s a brand new dumpster fire every day, there’s a new crisis. Every day, there’s a new this, there’s a new that, and it doesn’t really give us that space, to be mindful. And I think that, you know, yes, we can create it. But at the same time, we kind of feel guilty about taking that time when there’s so many other things on fire. And so I know that for us, we usually try to take, you know, a couple of days every quarter to just sort of say, what did we do? What do we want to do? And we’ve skipped over that this year, we’ve just kind of like, continue to go through, like, what are we doing today? Let’s get this done. Let’s get this done. And it’s partly survival. And it’s partly just, we’re emotionally physically exhausted and don’t have the resources to create that mindfulness and to create that space in order to think through what do we intentionally want to be doing? Christopher Penn 9:34 It’s true and a lot of that, you know, when you listen to wellness folks is about you know, enforcing that creating those boundaries, making those boundaries exist, but also is, you know, if you think about sort of your own internal resources, like a bank account, now this this year overdrew, everyone, right? So you know, what of finance experts say when when you’re essentially starting overs is start small, but be you know, be be vigilant about it. So okay, yeah, we can’t, we know we don’t have the the wherewithal to do a two day retreat every quarter, right? Let’s start with an hour, let’s start with an hour where like, this is our hour and nothing other than like a trip to the ER, this is gonna change that. And you start to build back your fortunes, you know, anybody who’s watching who’s who is legitimately, you know, done the rags to riches a couple of times, you know, without having to rely on on unsavory means they start small, they find something they latch on to, and they grow it and they grow it, and they get back to where they were, maybe they even exceed where they were. I think, you know, when you look back at 2020, you’re right, we spent down a lot of our emotional and mental resources, and we didn’t invest a whole lot. There was there were limited opportunities to invest and and there’s not something I think people had in mind. So going into the next year, folks will have to give some thought as to whether that’s important to them. And if it is what they’ll do to really enforce those boundaries. Katie Robbert 11:11 Mm hmm. The name of the game is consistency. And that’s something that we’ve kind of lost a little bit of track of, again, because we’re just trying to navigate, you know, every single day between the business and personal lives, and you know, everything else? Well, so let’s focus a little bit on some of the good stuff that we learned this year, especially for ourselves and within Trust Insights. And so, you know, as we started talking about earlier in the conversation, we definitely tried to do some things that just weren’t the right time. And those, those efforts will come back at some point when the time is right. But Chris, what are some of the things that you think that we’ve done? Well, this year, Christopher Penn 11:52 um, you know, this year, we’ve written a ton of code, we I think I’ve listened better to what folks have going on, you know, one of the things that we were talking about before the show got rolling is, this year, we set up for the first time our own link shortening server for a search for what we share on social media and email. And just having data insights like this. For those who are listening to the podcast, you can check the video version of this out on our YouTube channel. And you can see what I’m showing, it’s just a list of, of pages in Google Analytics. And these are all these are not necessarily ours, this is all going to be shared. And when you look over the year, you get a sense of what people are interested in having a finger on the pulse of what’s on people’s minds. I think it’s something that we’ve done well, from a data perspective. And of course, from a community perspective, this year, we really built up our slack community analytics for markers, which, if you go to Trust, insights.ai slash analytics for markers, we’re now for almost 1500. Members, there has been a pretty significant effort to grow a community again, with intention, I think, listening to folks and being able to ask people questions and stuff that that went very well. I know, from a personal professional development perspective, the silver lining, to a lot of events, just kind of having to pivot is that there is now so much free stuff floating around out there. Every single conference that I would have gone to, or I would like to have gone to this year, was online for free. And I have a backlog of like 200 sessions from a bunch of these different events that I’ve been going through, you know, Sunday mornings is watching, as I do chores and things and has been amazing, just to see like, okay, that event worth going to this event like, okay, I should, we should seriously consider when it reopens, you know, going to this one, because it was just so eye opening, it’s what’s possible, and being able to bring in all that information, say, Okay, here’s, you know, a professional development plan for myself for the next year, like work on these things, build these things. We tried a bunch of new techniques and code this year, that has really worked out well. I’m very proud of the fact that we made substantial changes to a lot of our core code that makes it run better. And, you know, with our, our collective feedback and client feedback, being able to say, yeah, you know, this report that wasn’t as useful is more useful now. Because we gave some time and an intent to, but so what of the report. So I think from a bunch of different perspectives, there was a lot that happened this year that was inadvertent, inadvertently positive as a result of all the major changes. How about you? Katie Robbert 14:38 I think that we have really had an opportunity to look at what kind of value we’re trying to bring to the market, what kind of value were we trying to bring to our clients. And so we’ve seen a lot of our clients go through, you know, this crisis with the pandemic because they are consumer brands. They’re directly involved. You know, with the consumers and you know, people who are dealing with it. And so I think what we’ve been able to do, I think you’re absolutely right. I think the listening, you know, listening better, listening more, really trying to not upsell, like, just anything to make $1. But really trying to figure out, you know, is this thing that we can do? valuable to anyone, will it help make anybody’s life easier, and we’ve always lived by that kind of mantra. But now this year, it was really explored and experimented with, because we really wanted to make sure that, you know, not only were we providing value to our clients, but that moving into next year, they didn’t just see it as like a stopgap they started something that they really want to partner with us on, which I think is fantastic, because that’s the kind of work that we really enjoy doing is seeing other people succeed based on the work, you know, that we do, and we can provide to them. You know, so I think we definitely did a lot more soul searching, if you want to call it that in terms of what we provide. But I think you know, you’re right, we we definitely banded together, we took a look at some of the things that we were doing, saying, Is there an opportunity to do this better? Do we need to be doing this thing over here. And I think that, you know, despite the fact that we feel like we didn’t really do a lot of things mindfully or intentionally, we did, we just didn’t do it in those dedicated pockets of time. They were just spread out in drips and drabs over the year. So when you add all of those things up, and we look at what we’ve done, we see that there’s a lot of positive and it’s something that I would encourage, you know, other marketers and other companies to do is it’s so easy to focus on all of the negative, what didn’t happen to take a moment and look at all the positive. And that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do, you know, within this podcast, it’s not our typical, you know, here’s an analytics challenge. Here’s how we approach it. This one is a little bit more of those, like soft skills, which is different for us. Christopher Penn 17:03 It’s different, but you know, I think, this year, everything got fractured. But time itself got fractured in a lot of ways. I remember a number of memes floating around saying, you know, 2020 was January, February, March, march, march, march, march, march, almost November 3, November 3, November 3 for the month, and then they’ll Happy New Year. In that, in those moments, one of the things you do have to do is to be able to make the best use of the time that you had, I remember as one coworkers to drive me up a wall years ago, who you know, would say like 45 minutes or 30 minutes between meetings, I can’t get anything done, there’s not enough time to sit down and get a deep work done like well, then do something else. But don’t just sit there playing video games for 30 minutes, you dummy. And this year, having you’re looking at calendars looking at the year, the past, there’s there’s a lot of fractured time. And so to your point, if you can make use of 15 minutes between meetings, you can make use of, you know, an odd block of time, and make a little bit of progress on any one thing. Then Yeah, at the end, it does add up. It’s kind of like, you know, fitness and weight loss, you just do your workout consistently a little bit every day and and you eventually get your goal, but it’s never almost never something that’s instantaneous. Look at what, Katie Robbert 18:31 God no, I was gonna say I would actually compare it more to sprint planning, where you have to break down your milestones into much smaller little chunks. And so that could be one of those things, you know, moving into next year, if your to do list feels big, daunting and overwhelming. I know something, you know, that has helped me and you know, I do struggle with anxiety is, you know, Chris, to your point, what can I get done in 15 minutes, you know, everything feels big and overwhelming right now everything feels like it’s gonna take hours, everything feels like it’s gonna be, you know, the only thing I can do today, and it’s really those small, incremental things, you know, that are going to help you keep putting one foot in front of the other. Christopher Penn 19:15 Yep. So looking at the data of what people shared, and we’re interested in this here, it’s interesting, not surprising, interesting social media. A lot of some email marketing came back this year podcasts and stuff. And so going into next year, I feel like we’re at a point where we’ve finally managed to reboot somewhat of our media landscape and have a better understanding of it now. And one of the things that occurred to me over the weekend is people now are at a point where they have more meetings and they know what to do with. I were just looking at the the Disney plus announcements recently on Disney plus is creating a 21 new shows and spin offs of spin offs and things. And it’s like, Okay, well, that’s a lot. You know, that’s a lot for people to consume. And everybody who in the digital environment trying to figure this out, Disney has abandoned movie theaters, they said and focusing entirely on, on streaming shows now for which is where they’re making their investments. And so for us, as marketers, we have to think, how can we make our content faster and fit into those smaller blocks of time, you know, if you have 15 minutes between meetings, that’s enough to read an email newsletter, at least skim it, that’s not enough to listen to a live stream, that’s not enough to even possibly listen to a podcast. So providing transcripts and stuff like we do with our show, makes your content a little faster, people are gonna read like almost three times as fast as they can listen to a podcast. So as we go into the new year, be sure that you’re looking at your data and seeing what things are getting traction, what things are not getting traction, email has been massive driver of business this whole year, and I don’t see that changing. We’ve said many times past episodes, people are tired of looking at their screens all day long, you know, if they can, if they can get in, get out and then go on and do something else. They should, I think there’s an opportunity for marketers, and it’s one of the things you have to be very selective about. But I think there’s opportunity for something like print magazines, in very limited runs, or maybe you just print on demand. To make a comeback just for people to have something to do that isn’t a screen, you know, a paper book. possibly some kind of other interactive physical things. Again, this is not something you got to do at scale, because it gets crazy expensive, but maybe for your 10 best customers, maybe you do a limited edition, you know, quarterly piece of dead DRI, just so they have something to look up at isn’t the normal stuff. So Katie, what do you What’s your parting advice for people going into 2021. Katie Robbert 21:53 It’s the same advice that I would give them this year, you know, be gentle with yourself, you know, take things like literally one task at a time, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, which, you know, this year has been very easy to feel. People who didn’t previously struggle with anxiety are now experiencing anxiety for the first time. And those of us with anxiety, it’s only been amplified. And sometimes it feels like you can’t get anything done. And so, you know, tackling your to do list tackling the goals of your company, if you’re a smaller company, even if you’re at a larger company, you know, breaking it down into smaller increments, so that you can see, I did this one thing, and it pushed me more towards my goal, I did these two things, and it pushed me closer to my goal, you may not be able to see all of the progress all at once. And Chris, to your point, it’s a lot like working out, I can ride my bike for 16 minutes, one day, I’m not instantly going to have a six pack, I have to continue to do these things consistently, you know, incrementally in order to get those results. And I think that that’s sort of where a lot of us are headspace is is I need I need results. Now. I need something instantaneous. I need something to cling to, I need something good. But really breaking it down and doing those smaller bits and pieces are what are going to get you there and make it sustainable. Christopher Penn 23:11 Yep. So from us to you. We hope you had a good enough year, right? We hope that you have a safe and happy holiday season. And here’s hoping for everybody in 2021 that we have and equally safe, healthy and prosperous here. I’ve avoided making substantial predictions, because we just don’t know what’s going to happen. But we could say with moderate moderate certainty that by the this time next year, things will look closer to the world we used to know than they do right now. We don’t know the exact timing what’s going to happen, but it’s a pretty good bet that a lot of stuff will be starting to get back to normal. So be ready, be ready for change. Change is not slowing down. It’s going to be even faster next year. So be ready for it. No, that’s going to happen. And ride that wave as best as you can to to bring yourself to business success. Thank you for listening and watching to everything that Trust Insights did this year. And we hope you have a great one. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris tackle the challenges you’ve listed in our quarterly survey, especially around scaling your marketing, lead generation, and dealing with incredible uncertainty. How do we scale? How do we generate more leads? Tune in to find out! Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-2021challenges.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:04 In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we’re talking about looking ahead to 2021. And some of the responses we’ve gotten from our fourth quarter survey, which by the way, if you haven’t taken the survey for this, I’ve encouraged you to do so you can pop on over a T Trust insights.ai slash newsletter, you’ll find it in the most recent issue that we put on the website. So if you haven’t already ticket, please go ahead and do that. Katie, you’ve been reading through is the results, you’ve been seeing some patterns in what people are worried about, as we enter the new year? What do you see? And what do you make of it? Katie Robbert 0:41 What I’m seeing is that we’re all in the same boat together, everybody is struggling with the same kinds of things moving into next year, because a lot of marketers have had the same kind of year in 2020, have, you know, their customers have tightened their budgets, they don’t want to spend money, you know, they have had to cut headcount. They’ve had to reduce their own marketing budgets. And so a lot of the themes that I’m seeing are, you know, how do I scale? How do I amp up my Legion? How do I reach my right target market? And how do I establish value? And those are four really big challenges for anyone. And to be quite honest, those are some challenges that we’re facing moving into next year, as well. We’re a very small company. And, you know, we’re often asked, Well, how do you scale? How are you going to do this? And, you know, the thing that’s obviously top of mind for me as well is how do we get more lead gen. And what we do know is that people are exhausted. Everybody is exhausted by getting ads, and emails and social posts. And so all of those tried and trued methods are going to fail us moving into next year, because the only thing we’ve had to rely on is digital, because we can’t do things in person. And so I don’t have a good answer to that. And that’s something that you know, Chris, you and I and john are going to be figuring out over the next few weeks and months is, how do we tackle that? So what have you been seeing from the survey results? Christopher Penn 2:19 very much the same that we saw early on a lot of people asking about, you know, what do we do a virtual events because people are completely toast on those. And we’ve seen it just in our own monitoring of, you know, major event hashtags and things that they’re pulling 2010 20% other spots they used to, we’re looking at, for example, dreamforce, it was a 10th of the volume used to be when it was an in person event. And so the things that I see, broadly, represent more the economic climate than the macro social climate. I mean, yes, the pandemic has, obviously caused virtual event, real world events to stop. But more than anything, it’s the economic impacts, every time we go through a major stumbling block in the economy, we see the focus go back down to the bottom of the funnel, like assembly, leads, right? brand goes up. And that’s all leads. And scale is a polite code word for do more with less, you know, when, when we were working at our former shop, you know, when when some hit some rough patches, the big focus was suddenly all about Okay, what can we do to do more with less? How can you How can you service the same number of clients with, you know, a third of the people kind of thing? How do you How are you thinking about tackling, particularly the one on scale? How do you think you’re tackling it because lead gen is not safe? Easy, but it’s straightforward? How do we scale? Katie Robbert 3:48 So interestingly, and Chris, because you were wrapped up in lots of client work last week at something that john and i talked quite a bit about, offline, we were sort of thinking about that moving into next year, and the solution that we kept coming back to, and it’s not a new technique, it’s not magic. So you know, you don’t have to get your pens out to start writing this down, is we need to document and automate some of our processes. And so there are I’m gonna put in big, heavy quotations, easier techniques that we do at Trust Insights that Chris, currently You are the only one who has knowledge of how they are done because you develop these processes. And, you know, let’s say you decided to take a week off and somebody needed something, john, and I would be a little bit up a creek without a paddle. If we don’t have these things documented, in some way, shape or form for us to replicate the same work that you do. And so while Is it the best use of my time, and John’s time to be also doing the exact same things that you do? Not necessarily, however, One of the ways that we will scale is by all of us learning all of the basics of things around like SEO and Google Analytics that we can then pass on to contractors and other analysts that we bring on, that’s how we will be able to scale is by taking some of those lower hanging fruit things off of your plate so that you can then focus on more of those advanced tools and techniques. Now, that’s unique to us at Trust Insights. But one of the things that everybody should be doing is documenting your processes, seeing where those repetitive tasks are. And looking at where you can introduce some automation, the biggest time suck that I still see for all of our clients is reporting. And that’s just a no brainer, you can automate majority if not all of the data extraction, and then putting it into some sort of a spreadsheet or a dashboard, and just spend your time on the analysis and actions. That to me is the is the easiest way to scale is just automate that stuff. Christopher Penn 6:10 automate, the other part that I think is vitally important in what you’re saying is figuring out what stuff to stop doing. You know, there, if there’s a report that takes you 10 hours to put together, and it’s a complete waste of time, and nobody ever looks at it, it’s probably time to stop doing that report. I mean, there’s, there’s no value in it. When I look, you know, even just, myself when I look at some of the things that I do every week, is it not the best use of my time, but is there value in it? And for some reason? Maybe not, you know? Or could I take the next step and automate it even more to the point where, okay, okay, it’s now push them a button. And I can come back in, you know, in two and a half minutes after get a cup of coffee, and it’s done in that case, that’s, that’s a great use of time. Because anything we can use to clawback time is is essential. You know, when I look at this, like the SEO reports we’re putting together for clients, they are, they’ve gotten shorter, like they’ve gotten slimmer over the years, it used to be our SEO reports, and I 25 pages, now it’s down to nine or 10, because we’re like, you know what, you didn’t read it, you didn’t get any value out of it. And we turns out that done for you, as opposed to do it yourself, or do it with help has really become the mantra of a lot of people because again, to your point, part of scaling me and saying, let’s get to the good part, let’s not spend an hour looking at the charts, just tell me what to do. That’s, that’s another trend. We’ve had a lot with clients CEOs, just tell me what to do. I’m too busy. Just tell me what to do? Katie Robbert 7:44 Well into that, you know, it’s interesting, and the other time suck, that I see is meetings. And so if you are still having, you know, a one hour meetings a day on every single individual topic, you’re probably not getting anything of value done. And so when, when I see people coming back saying I need to scale I need to scale I need to scale. Look at your calendar, how many meetings Do you have more meetings does not equal more productive and more busy, the more meetings you have does not make you more important. And that’s to be quite honest, that’s something that I had to learn to my career. I remember being a project manager, and I would have days where I would have no meetings, and I had this irrational fear. That meant, number one, I wasn’t important. And number two, I wasn’t able to get anything done. And that was partially the culture of the company that I was working at. Whereas the more meetings you’re wrapped up in, the more important you must be. And that’s just not true at all. If anyone’s telling you that then they’re lying to you. And they have been misinformed and so really challenged when someone puts a meeting on your calendar. What is the purpose of this meeting? What are we going to get out of this meeting? And the old adage? Could Is this a meeting that could have been an email? Christopher Penn 9:09 Yep. The other thing that I saw on the survey that is still concerning, is there are a lot of holdovers and leftovers, people working with old stuff. And again, we’re talking about how do you scale? Well, part of scaling is knowing what’s working and leaving old stuff behind I saw one response to when talking about getting links with a certain domain authority or domain authority is correlated, you know, in the world of SEO, it’s not causal. And so much more goes into SEO now than then used to be that I know where this person’s head is, you know, I know they’re stuck in roughly 2015 as a as a time period. And so, part of scaling doing more at less is a leaving old stuff behind and upgrading to newer stuff that gets you to decisions faster and not focus on stuff. Doesn’t matter, I see so much out there that is, you know, really, really old thinking. And some things, yes, some things are timeless, you know, figuring out how to provide value to your customers, as Tyler was talking to your customers is timeless. But a lot of these older analytics and metrics, they’re they, they don’t stand the test of time. They’re like, you know, looking at a new kids on the block album. Katie Robbert 10:25 I take offense to that. I would argue that new kids on the block is timeless. But that’s a debate for another day. Um, but no, I think you’re absolutely right. And so, you know, there’s, it is interesting when you see where people’s heads are at moving into next year. And again, a lot of that is because of the company culture or where the company is, you know, on that roadmap digitally, you know, even just saying the word automation to a lot of companies like it gets everybody’s hackles up, because they’re like, Oh, crap, I’m gonna lose my job. And obviously, Chris, you and I have covered this topic a lot. And that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to lose your job. If you introduce automation, it actually means your when, and I’m pointing my screen, but you’re looking at a lot of challenges of I need more time, I need to be able to scale I need to do staffing. And always you will have time to do those things when you introduce that automation. So it is definitely interesting. How How do you Christopher Penn 11:32 identify the candidates for automation for yourself, like I know for myself, I go by the programmers rule, if I copy and paste it more than three times I need to automate it, I need to put some kind of function there. But how do you when you look at your own process, in your own documentation, say, you know what, I this is a clear candidate for automating this, because this is just dumb. Katie Robbert 11:51 It’s very similar. I mean, that’s really sort of the best way to gauge whether or not something is a good candidate for automation. And so, for me a lot of my work, it can’t necessarily be automated in the traditional sense, but it can be streamlined. And it can be broken down into very quick, repetitive tasks that I can have somebody else learn. So, you know, setting up a new client, for example, involves like three or four different systems. So I can’t necessarily push a button and automate that. But I can streamline the process. And one of the things that I’ve had to challenge myself with, over this past year, and I had a lot of help from our virtual assistant was making things more repetitive and not reinventing the wheel every single time. And so having someone who’s completely objective from the outside, and you may not have this luxury, but having someone else look at what you’re doing and say, do you have to do it that way? Do you have to, you know, do it a unique way every single time? Or can you, you know, make 90% of it the exact same process every single time, and redo and reserve that 10% for, you know, the welcome email to your client, like you have a template, but then you can modify it a little bit. And so it’s making sure that you are, I guess, in some ways, not automating, but templating, the work that you do, so that you’re just pulling it out, and then making you know, very small tweaks, like you’re changing the first name, you’re changing the welcome message, you’re changing, you know, the action items or those things. But otherwise, the you know, welcome email, for the sake of example, is the exact same thing every single time you have all the pieces, you don’t have to go hunting for them. They’re all living in one place. And so you know, you say, here’s the contract, here’s the action items. Here’s the next step, here’s the link to set up meetings, those four elements are always in the in the email, and then you just modify them based on the specific situation. And so in my world, that’s how I look at automation. And it’s not automation in the sense that you’re talking about, but it’s automation in the sense of the process is repeatable, and you reduce the amount of time it takes to complete the task. Christopher Penn 14:09 It makes sense. The other thing I think, that we forget about with scaling is getting, I guess, squeezing all the juice out of what we’ve got, you know, one of the things that we hear Scott Brinker and friends talk about a lot is, you know, the explosion of martec apps. And there’s so many of these single purpose apps and stuff like that out there. And everyone’s asking for 49 bucks a month. Even, you know us, we’re talking about, like, we want this to do this look at this feature and things. And then we forget, for example, that the marketing automation software we have actually does a fair number of things that are kind of on our wish list. It’s just we have not had the time to dig into it go, Oh, well, I can, I can use, you know, the Mautic package to do this, like oh, that would be kind of good to make use that functionality. And I think that a lot of the time we have a lot of capabilities in the site. We’re in the systems we already buy. But we don’t read the manual. And we don’t make the time to learn these features and go, Oh, we need better workflows. Turns out our software does support that may not be the nicest, it may not have the flashiest interface, it may not be, you know, what is being seen on the the vendor booths at the at the conference, but he’ll get the job done. Katie Robbert 15:24 Well, and I think you bring up a really good point of, you know, taking the time to investigate what you already have and what you’re working with, versus just slapping more things on top of an existing problem. That doesn’t fix anything at all, if anything, that just makes it quite a bit more complicated. And so, you know, we were talking about user experience, for example, last week on our live stream, which you can catch on our YouTube channel, if you’re looking for back episodes. And one of the things that strikes me about what you just said, Chris, and about user experience is, well, some of these things aren’t the flashiest, but they get the job done. Consumers again, they’re so exhausted by everything that they’re getting thrown at them. That my assumption my unscientifically proven point is that people would rather just have something that works rather than something that looks nice. I know, I certainly would. And I’m at the point now where I don’t care how it looks, just give me the information and make sure it works. And I would rather have that over flash any day. And so bring that to your marketing bring that to these issues that you have moving into next year of Do we have things that are good enough. And so, you know, Google Data Studio, for example, can automate a lot of your reporting. There are flashy er tools out there that make like, you know, prettier charts and you know, 3d looking pie graphs and whatnot. Do you need that? Or do you just need the data? And those are the types of decisions that you have to make in order to continue to scale what you’re doing in a really thoughtful way. And if your first thought is, well, it doesn’t look nice. Okay, you need to reevaluate Is that really the most important thing? I remember, Christopher Penn 17:06 we were talking to one client in the automotive sector and you know, a vendor and put together this dashboard of looks like, you know, the, literally the dashboard of a car and it was, you know, so fancy. And we looked at and said, this still doesn’t tell you anything, like you still can’t make any decisions from this, like, here’s the ugly dashboard that has two numbers on it with a green hour and a red arrow like that tells you what to do pretty easily. So to wrap up, it’s AUC lead gen, which is always perennial, is the concern, and then scaling and we get scaled by stopping doing things that don’t work by automating things that provide minimal value, and devoting the time to squeeze more value and more benefit out of the stuff that we already have. If you have questions about what we’ve been talking about this episode, you want to discuss it or you want to share your tips for how you’re going to scale in 2021. hop on over to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. It’s our free slack community. There were 1400 members, all of whom want to scale just as much as you do. Come on over. share your tips for what you’re thinking about what things you’re going to try. We’d love to hear from you. If you’re watching the show, wherever it is that you are, please pop on over to Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and you can even subscribe to the show catch all the back episodes. And while you’re there, grab our email marketing newsletter at TrustInsights.ai AI slash newsletter every week, we feature fresh new data. Stay tuned. Beginning later this week. This is the week of December 7, we are beginning our 12 days of data series on our blog over TrustInsights.ai AI so make sure that you are popping by we’re looking at things like Facebook and Instagram and Reddit press releases, news stories, all sorts of stuff that happened in 2020 and what it means for your market so stay tuned for that. Thanks for watching the show. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris talk about the devil that is viewthrough conversions. What are they? Why do advertising networks rely on them so heavily? Do they have a place in your marketing analytics? Learn why viewthrough conversions can be greatly misleading and what alternatives exist for robust, real measurement of marketing campaigns. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-thedevilofimpressions.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to use AI in your marketing but you’re not sure where to start? Take a class with Trust Insights and the marketing AI Institute. The AI Academy offers more than 25 classes and certification courses to start you on your AI journey, including our intelligent attribution modeling for marketers certification. One membership gets you access to all 25 classes, visit Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to learn more and enroll today. That’s Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to enroll today. Are you struggling to reach the right audiences? Trust Insights offers sponsorships in our newsletters, podcasts and media properties to help your brand be seen and heard by the right people, our media properties with almost 100,000 people every week from the In-Ear Insights podcast to the most timely and in the headlights newsletters. Reach out to us today at Trust insights.ai slash contact to learn more, again, that’s Trust insights.ai slash contact. In this week’s in ear insights, let’s talk about conversion tracking, specifically, view through versus click through conversion. So these are two measurements, you’ll hear a lot especially when it comes to advertising. And the big difference between them is that a click through conversion is within the space of a session, right? So you see an ad, you click on it, you go to the website, you convert that’s a click through conversion of view through conversion is you see an ad, and then you go off do something else. And you come back later to that clients website. And you convert. And because of ubiquitous surveillance and tracking. companies like Facebook and Google Ads know, hey, you did see the ad and Lady you converted. So we’re going to treat that sort of as an assisted conversion, if you will. And as a result, we’ll call that a view through conversion, you view the ad and eventually you convert it. So Katie, you had some questions about this lovely tangle of of metrics and analytics. But what’s what’s on your mind? Katie Robbert 2:06 Well, I guess a couple of things. And as you’re describing how a view through conversion works, the first one of many questions, the first question that comes up is, you know, is this a metric that we should be, you know, staking our businesses on staking our KPIs and our jobs, you know, on? And I guess the second question, and we can answer these in whatever order you think makes the most sense, is, isn’t a view through only as good as the tracking pixels that you have set up? So yes, Facebook can track you. But if the company does not have a Facebook tracking pixels set up correctly, therefore, the company will never know that you saw the ad Facebook will know but they’re not going to willingly just tell you, right? Christopher Penn 2:51 So if, yeah, we can go in reverse order. It presumably, if you’re running Facebook ads, you should have set up a Facebook tracking pixel on your website if you hadn’t. That’s, Unknown Speaker 3:02 that’s a failure. That’s why when you assume Christopher Penn 3:08 and so yes, assuming that you’ve set up tracking pixels correctly, which by the way, if you haven’t, you’ve probably noticed your ads are spending an awful lot of money and you have no results. That would be something to fix. But on the first part about whether this is important. So view through conversions are very important to advertising networks, right? It’s how Facebook and Google and all these different companies say hey, we’re valuable, keep paying us money, because we can say all these conversions were assisted by them. The problem is abuse view through conversion benefits the advertising network, it doesn’t necessarily benefit you the marketer, because everybody can double dip. Facebook has no idea what Google’s doing. Google has no idea what Twitter’s doing. Twitter has no idea what YouTube is doing. And so everybody’s gonna say, Oh, yeah, you saw my ad. And then the tracking pixel picked up that a conversion happened. So one conversion, may have had three different touchpoints. All three, Facebook, Google and Twitter in this example, will claim that one conversion as a view through conversion, even though we know from attribution analysis, you should be assigning fractional portions of that conversion to each one. But because Facebook can only see Facebook stuff, and Google can only see Google stuff there, it’s going to claim the full value of conversion. Katie Robbert 4:21 Well, and you know, it’s, that’s a helpful explanation, because I feel like I’ve been hearing the term view through conversion a lot. And to me, my first thought, and of course, I had to do a little bit of research to figure out what it was it sounds more to me like an impression. So it’s, somebody saw something so you know, Facebook, for example, can show you ads based on other videos that you’ve watched and so you know, I was telling you Christmas morning that one of the things that I will do is go through and see why am I seeing this ad because Facebook will give you some level of information, you know, a little bit of the targeting and then it’ll you’ll see things like, it’s looking for customers who have watched this video before or something like that. And of course, my first thought is, well, I’ve never seen this video. So okay. And so to me, it’s a bit of a janky metric in the sense of it’s not a true conversion, you didn’t really interact with the thing, per se, like you didn’t click on it, or take an action or fill out a form. And, you know, perhaps I’m old school in that way. But to me a view through is more akin to a billboard, whereas a click through conversion is probably a more accurate way to measure. But you know, tell me where I’m going wrong here. Christopher Penn 5:40 It’s not just an impression, it is an impression that was served up to somebody who eventually did convert. So there is there is that anchor that says, Yes, this person eventually did convert. So Katie, if you’re out on, you know, on the web, and you see an ad for say, I don’t know. But you know, Bed, Bath and Beyond. And then three weeks later, you go on a Bed, Bath and God’s website, you buy something, Bed Bath and Beyond, as the advertiser will say, Ah, that view helped the conversion, and therefore that is a view through conversion. So it is more than just an impression, because the impression would count whether or not you bought anything. In this case, it’s a an impression linked in some way to a conversion. Now, where this goes wrong for advertisers, for companies like ours that are advertising, is that that credit apportionment, that’s the heart and soul of attribution analysis. Only the company and its tracking systems has the full view of the customer has the full view of where did that person come in? Did they come in through Facebook? Did they see a YouTube ad? Did they open an email? Did they come to a webinar, whatever, and eventually convert? And that’s why attribution modeling techniques like Markov chain modeling, for example, are so effective, because they can take all of those interactions, wait them appropriately, and then say, okay, yes, Facebook, you’re the traffic that you sent, or the view that you sent for that ad was valuable, but it wasn’t as valuable as you think it was, you that you’re claiming the full value, the conversion, and we’re saying you should really be claiming about, you know, a 10th of a conversion for that. Now, where this gets challenging for marketers, is when it is purely a view through meaning there wasn’t an action taken. So if you see the ad, Katie, it served up to you. And you don’t click on it, you just scroll by it in your timeline. But then you go and buy something later, only Facebook has that data about whether the impression was served or not. And so, it is trickier in that case for a marketer to say, okay, the value of that Facebook impression would did lead to a conversion. Again, this of strongly benefits the advertising network, Facebook, it does not benefit us as the marketer, but it is there is it’s not say is without value, because yeah, if you see the same ad 100 times as you’re swiping through Facebook, eventually you’re like, Oh, my God, I can’t stop seeing this ad like it won’t go away, you’ll at least remember the company even if you hate them. Katie Robbert 8:09 Well, and I guess that’s my whole point slash question is, you know, it is sort of like an impression in that sense of you don’t have to take, you know, any sort of action for it to claim credit. You know, I could, theoretically, I could send out like, $100,000 worth of ads for Trust Insights. And, you know, put them across all the different networks and put up billboards, and never have anybody have to take an action with it, I just have to annoy them with this ad so that they see us. And then, you know, six months down the line, somebody comes to us and says, Hey, I want to work with you. Well, great, I’m gonna say that my ads were the thing that brought you win. And really, they’re going to end the customer might say, Actually, it was because I saw Chris say something intelligent at a conference one time. And so it’s like, I don’t know, it, just to me, it’s a poor way of measuring your ad campaigns. Because to your point, Chris, these ad networks are so hungry to take credit so that you keep pumping money into them. It just it. It seems like a false metric to me, like, I understand what you’re saying, like it’s a valid metric. But there are better metrics out there to be measuring your campaigns on and if you want to do purely an awareness campaign, then great view through impressions, whatever you want to call them is probably a good way to go. But if you’re looking for someone to convert and take action, just to me a view through metric does not seem like the right way to go. Christopher Penn 9:50 It’s half of a metric. And that’s where ad networks really don’t want you to talk about this part, but we will because we’re not an ad company. The second half of any kind of impression based technology, whether it’s view through conversions, brand, whatever, is that you have to establish whether or not you’ve actually got share of mind. That means doing things like on your forums, asking how did you hear about us and having, you know, different campaigns, things listed there running surveys in your target market saying, Are you aware of Trust Insights? What is your intent to purchase from TrustInsights.ai in the next 90 days, and then of course, looking at things like branded organic search, if you run that hundred thousand dollar campaign, Katie, and we don’t see searches for Trust Insights go up at all that we know they just wasted a whole bunch of money right now we should have just got done, you know, you know, drugs and people in illegal professions. The second half that measurement is so important of did this achieve our goal of getting into somebody’s head? And the only way we find that out? Is by those activity based metrics that indicate Yes, I’m searching for you and thinking about you. I’ve heard of you. And you will never ever ever see Facebook say yes, run a survey to verify that our impressions are actually having an impact on the consumer. Because what you’ll find out more often than not, is people like what I think about a Katy beside clients, and ourselves. What’s the last digital advertiser you remember? Katie Robbert 11:30 I couldn’t tell you, it was probably something Amazon or pet related, given like the last few things that I may have done. But even then I couldn’t tell you outright that that was like, if I had to bet my life on it, I would not Christopher Penn 11:47 write exactly the last Adam any kind that ever call by name and the brand was Ryan Reynolds doing stuff for his MIT mobile stuff. And it wasn’t an ad, I went to his YouTube channel and watch the ads that he has on his YouTube channel. Because damn funny. They’re worth watching. Even you know, and they’re unpaid impressions, because I, you know, he’s just, he’s just enormously funny and very talented to come at at relentlessly Schilling in hilarious ways, the products and services he makes. And so I know for a fact that companies are spending exorbitant sums of money to have me scroll through their stuff on Facebook, on Instagram on Google on YouTube. And I can’t remember any of them, not a single one. So if we if they were doing an unaided recall survey, which by the way, is sort of the gold standard for this anything impression based. They’ve all failed, they’ve all wasted their money, because I can’t remember any of them. If you asked me, hey, was the last brand of gaming hardware that because I watch a lot of gaming stuff with let’s let’s brand a gaming hardware. I like I don’t remember. I mean, I know the brands that I like, but I don’t think I saw ads for them. And so, for marketers, you know, this kind of flips nicely to something that we were talking about earlier as well, I was just Oh, he was asking us like, you know, how do you What advice do you give marketers who are trying to do less tracking and tracing and surveillance and stuff, but the reality is, the tracking is really important. But so is understanding what’s actually working. So view through conversions are not a great metric without being paired with the other half, which is the the actively asking people questions. So you don’t need surveillance and tracking for that you can just ask people, in fact, should always be asking people, have you heard of us? How did you hear about us? What made you come in today? Katie Robbert 13:34 Well, and let me ask you this question. This is more of the technical side of things. So how long does someone have to be viewing an ad in their social media stream in order for it to be counted? As a view through like, Is it one of those like, I’m scrolling, I’m scrolling and scrolling. And somehow it managed to fly by while I was doing scrolling? Or do I actually have to sit and watch this video? It doesn’t have to be a video. You know it? Can it just be a static image that I happen to like pass by for two seconds? Yeah, so Christopher Penn 14:08 it depends on the network. Facebook, for example, if the ad is rendered, meaning it shows up at all, it counts as an impression. If it’s a video, you have to watch it for three seconds for it to count. So those are sort of the two things. So yeah. If you’re scrolling and an ad, physically renders on your device, it counts as an impression. Even if you went by so fast. You have no idea what it was the fact that Facebook software had to pull the ad from the ad server and serve it up to you, then tells advertisers Yes, we served you that that we serve that impression. And if you did accidentally happen to convert later on. Facebook could say yes, we did our job. You get the view. We got the view through compression, even though you’re like I went by so fast. I have no idea what it was. Katie Robbert 14:52 See, and you’re I guess you’re just further reiterating my concern about view through being A metric, I’m not going to say it’s not a valid metric. But it being a metric that you should, you know, base your success of your campaign around. Everything you’re describing to me just continues to reiterate that a view through metric is problematic. Now, so let’s say, you know, we had a client who said, I’m gonna stake my whole reputation on view through campaigns. And we said, that’s a terrible idea, do this instead, what would be the this instead? Christopher Penn 15:32 That would say the same thing we say often, which is for every 25, for every dollar, you’re going to spend on ads, bucket, 25 cents of it for measurement. And so we can run those measurement campaigns to go with it and say, Are you having an impression? Did you see let’s make up a client, a coffee shop? Well, you know, did you see a Oh, Katie’s coffee shop? advertising in the last seven days? In fact, Twitter does this a lot. You’ll see this in your Twitter feed. If you’re looking in just your home feed, they’ll have these little brand series a pop up that say, Have you seen an ad for X ray Katie’s coffee shop in the last seven days? Yes or no? And it’s a you there’s short surveys, like one or two questions. And everyone’s like, I have no idea if I have or not. But at least that’s an advertiser, which is doing the right thing of saying, okay, we’re running the ads, we’re also running the verification metric say, Mm hmm. People at least remember seeing our ads, even though yes or no, at, you know, with, I forget what the last count was, but something insane, like, people see between five and 10,000 advertising impressions a day. You know, from simple stuff, like a one t shirt, am I wearing to you know, actual ads being served on devices? Of course, people aren’t going to remember unless something they already have an affinity with. Katie Robbert 16:50 So well, who’s running those? Did you see those ad? Like, is that something that me the owner of Katie’s coffee shop can ask Facebook to run or Twitter to run on my behalf? To see if people are not only seeing my ads, but remembering or is that something that the ad network runs and that I the business owner, or whoever never get the data? Christopher Penn 17:14 It depends a twitter at least on Twitter. Twitter’s are run by Twitter itself, I think to calibrate their advertising. To my knowledge, I don’t believe any of these networks share that information unless you run a campaign specifically designed for that, you know, Google consumer surveys, for example, would be an example of where you have to commission a an additional campaign in order to measure the effectiveness your other campaigns. Katie Robbert 17:36 But can you run a Google consumer survey within a social network? Christopher Penn 17:41 No, you have to do it within the social networks themselves. Katie Robbert 17:45 So like, so there’s also another disconnect there, because you may not be reaching the same audience. You know, people who are searching for your brand might not be the same people who are seeing the ads on their Facebook feed. And you know, it just again, it’s concerning when I hear that view through, or similar type metrics are the things that people are staking their reputation on. And so I guess the whole point of this conversation is to deconstruct what goes into a view through metric and why it’s, yes, it is a metric. But it may not be the best metric, if your goal is conversions, because there’s flaws with it. There’s flaws with any metric, and there’s flaws with setups, but this one to me, just sort of struck a chord of, ah, let’s not use that as the basis for your success in this campaign. Christopher Penn 18:39 I want to throw an additional wrench into it. Sure, having on the ad blocking technology, some ad blockers will intercept at, at the at the server level, meaning that the ad blocker will prevent the browser from even asking for the code for an ad say, Nope, we’re not even going to, we’re going to block that request from going outbound. So the never reaches the advertiser. Other ad blockers, let all the data come in from the source and then just cut the ads out. It’s like imagine get a newspaper and saying just give us a pair of scissors just cutting out the actual ads. And we’ve been throwing them away. In that second scenario, the advertiser has paid for the ad. And then that because the network says I rendered it, even though the consumer never ever saw it, because the ad blocking code rewrote the web page that the consumer saw. And so at that second category of ad blockers can actually be even more problematic, because the network is saying, Yeah, we serve the ad, the customer got a view through conversions valid and the consumers like and see any ads. And you don’t know and there’s no way to tell, except that you know that you’re paying, you know, through the nose for no cost per impression advertising. And nobody’s seeing even those networks are saying that they have. So one of the things we tell people when it comes to analytics and metrics is do not use any of the impression basically You cannot rely on the impressions being served. Focus on traffic, focus on conversions. You know, even if nobody converts on the site in that session, if they at least got to your site, then Markov chain modeling can detect that traffic the footprints in your site, and then eventually attribute that later on. It’s like, yeah, you can’t see what’s happening outside your coffee shop. But at least once somebody sets foot inside the door of your shop, you can watch them and see what they do. And yeah, maybe they walk over to the scones display casing Oh, I don’t know about garlic and kale scones, and they walk out at least, you know, at least you know that you got them in the door, and you can figure out where they came from. So that would be our counsel for any kind of impression measurement is instead focus on the traffic and focus on where’s the traffic coming from even if they didn’t convert, because eventually, if you’re doing attribution analysis with modern methods like Markov chain Monte, it will be taken into account later on. Katie Robbert 20:59 So it sounds like the takeaway is, number one, have a plan because you want to know what the heck the goal of your campaign is, figure out what kinds of metrics you want to be trusting, and how you want to put your analysis together, make sure that your infrastructure is set up in such a way that you can track people across these different networks that includes those tracking pixels, that you set up through Tag Manager, or whatever your system is, be aware of ad blocking system. So basically, think of like a giant goalie net, catching all of those ads, and they never get to you in the stands. It’s that big net in front of you and like, yes, somebody’s seeing them. But it’s just a bot and the bot doesn’t care. And so it sounds like there’s a lot that goes into measuring campaigns and just picking a metric, because it’s what the ad network tells you you should be looking at is probably not the most accurate way to be measuring because it’s not in your best interest. It’s in the ad networks best interest. And if the ad network is saying, yes, you’re doing great, give me more money. That’s probably something fishy about it. Christopher Penn 22:05 Exactly. And to circle back on Oz’s question about the advice we would give to marketers, this, that also answers a lot of these questions about advertising effectiveness. It’s really straightforward. Talk to your customers, talk to them as real people, person to person pick up the phone shoot, to text them, whatever, and say, Hey, Tim, what you’re looking for? What brought you in today? How can you How can we better serve you, you’ll be amazed at the quality of information, you can get people to volunteer, as long as you know, you’re not a jerk about it. And you will get a really good sense of what’s actually working and what’s not. So please just talk to people don’t rely on technology to do a human’s job. And I know that sounds absolutely crazy having me say that, but it’s Katie Robbert 22:48 well, and you know, if you’ve seen any versions of our customer journey or customer experience, you know that evangelism is that last phase, because then you have that loyalty of the customer, they’re telling you exactly what they want. And then they’re also helping you do the selling because someone is, you know, a consumer is likely to trust someone else who is just like them in their experience, versus a company saying you must buy my thing, you need this thing. And so definitely be you know, use your customers in a smart way. Ask them what they want, have them do word of mouth marketing for you, you know, pumping lots and lots of money into an ad network is okay. It depends on what your goal is. But nothing replaces actually talking to your customers and finding out what they want. Christopher Penn 23:39 And speaking of talking to customers, if you’d like to talk to other folks in the analytics space, about the challenges you’re having with measurement and talking to customers, pop it over to our free slack group go to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers and join over 1400 other marketers about talking about analytics and and all things related to measurement. Thanks for listening to today’s show. If you’ve got questions about it, pop on over to Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast where you can find this episode many others and find all your favorite ways to subscribe. Thanks for watching and listening. We’ll talk to you soon take care. One helps solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris tackle an unusual situation. What happens when data doesn’t have answers? What happens when data simply doesn’t provide any useful insights beyond confirmation of what you already knew? We review what your options are, and what might have gone wrong that led to the situation. If you’ve ever been stuck in this situation, listen to this episode for ways to think about solving this problem. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-nodatafordecisions.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to use AI in your marketing but you’re not sure where to start? Take a class with Trust Insights and the marketing AI Institute. The AI Academy offers more than 25 classes and certification courses. To start you on your AI journey, including our intelligent attribution modeling for marketers certification. One membership gets you access to all 25 classes, visit Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to learn more and enroll today. That’s Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to enroll today. Are you struggling to reach the right audiences? Trust Insights offers sponsorships in our newsletters, podcasts and media properties to help your brand be seen and heard by the right people, our media properties with almost 100,000 people every week from the In-Ear Insights podcast to the most timely and in the headlights newsletters. Reach out to us today at Trust insights.ai slash contact to learn more, again, that’s Trust insights.ai slash contact. In this week’s in ear insights we are talking about what to do when your data doesn’t tell you what to do. Many times we talked about how you have to be using data to make decisions. And if you’re not making data decisions with your data, it really is kind of a distraction. We want to focus on what actions can we take but sometimes, especially with some clients that have very, very steady even, you know, businesses that have no major disruptions, which is astonishing, you know, in the current pandemic times, you have data says, Yeah, there’s nothing to do except stay the course maybe. So Katie, what do we do when the data doesn’t tell us what to do? Katie Robbert 1:46 We panic and cry under our desks. That’s it? Unknown Speaker 1:50 No, no. Katie Robbert 1:51 Okay. All right, what do we do know. So this is actually a very common issue. So, you know, if you’re looking at your data every day, like in an automated report, like Data Studio, or if you’re looking at it every few weeks, and you’re not seeing a lot of change, that could be the indication of a good thing that things are working. But the risk that you run is that if things completely stay static, or they’re just very slowly growing, or just you know, plateauing, then it’s sort of that like bare minimum of like, okay, so we don’t touch anything, things will just keep rolling along. But couldn’t we be doing better? We ran into this recently, when we were pulling an analysis and a notch in attribution analysis for one of our clients. And, Chris, your first reaction was, myth doesn’t really tell us a whole lot. And what we ended up doing in that instance, was we really, you know, for lack of a better term, we stepped outside of the box of the way that we usually look at these analyses. And we thought, what are some of the questions that we can continue that we can start to ask? So instead of saying, This is what the data says, and this is the action, we took a different tack and said, let’s just start asking questions of, is this the best thing to be doing? Is this the way you want your data to be looking? Are these the results you’re hoping to get? And so instead of just like throwing our hands up and saying, well, this isn’t useful, we really tried to think about it from a different perspective of just questioning everything. What do you think, Chris? I mean, you’ve been doing data longer than I’ve been doing data. What do you what do you do when you run into this? Christopher Penn 3:33 For it depends on whether it’s a strategic or mathematical problem. In the math side of things, one of the things that happens, like when you run, say, a simple correlation, and you get something that doesn’t really provide any illumination, one of the first questions you have to ask is, is there some piece of data that’s missing? Right? Is there some metric or variable that isn’t accounted for that you then have to say, Okay, if we had this, then we might get some kind of relations? Because we know, some we know, we’re trying to find something we know there’s a there there. The question is, is, do we have the appropriate type of data to to make that analysis and there actually are statistical tests you can run on data? is specifically time series data to say, Okay, these are the things that could hint at a problem. There’s techniques like principal component analysis, factor analysis, certain types of regression analysis can hint that Yeah, you might not have all the ingredients that you’re trying to find. But I think for most marketers, it is the strategic problem more than anything, the one that you alluded to, which is if things just kind of plugging along, what’s missing, why aren’t things you know, the typical growth hacker created, why and things just going up into the right, you know, are there channels you’re not considering? Are there tactics you haven’t used? Are there audiences you haven’t reached? And so it’s a question of what is omitted from the analysis, when we do an attribution analysis, for example, there are things that in digital marketing are omitted, right, you cannot see things you don’t have information for. If you’re looking at Google Analytics, for example, one of the channels that shows up all the time is called direct, which is a misnomer, it should say unknown, because Google has literally no idea what to do with that data. It just calls it direct. And sometimes, depending on your website, and your Google Analytics configuration, that can be 20 3050 60% of your data. When 60% of your data is unknown, you kind of have a problem. And so the question then is, what do we do? How do we unpack that box? Because there may be things in there that could drastically change our analysis, maybe email isn’t holding steady, right? Maybe email is actually going up. But because you didn’t use UTM tags and your emails, for example, the you are missing a whole bunch of traffic, we had that problem with a client where email is showing up for like, 2% of their attribution analysis. And they were like, Oh, you know, we, we don’t actually put UTM tags in our email. It’s like, great, but we tried fixing that for a month. And then the next month, we ran the same report, oh, look, 70% of conversions are from email. It turns out, the data was missing. So when we’re talking about is the data, you know, math is the data that tells us what to do. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got all the data. Katie Robbert 6:25 Well, you know, and it’s interesting, because you’re focusing a lot on the quantitative side of the data, which is often what we look at. So we looked at our KPIs, our goals, you know, did we get the traffic did people convert? The other side of it is it’s you can’t know the full story without the qualitative side of it. Why did that happen? Why did you make that decision? Why are you doing things this way? And so really digging into that behavioral side of the data, asking your customers talking with the rest of your team? Why are we doing it this way? asking your, you know, C suite, why are these the goals, just really digging in. So if your data is just flat, if your data is just like, rolling along, there’s no peaks, there’s no valleys, you know, you may say, Oh, this is a great thing, you run the risk of if something changes, all of that disappeared. So you really need to understand why things are the way they are, you know, if your data is flat and plateaued, it’s a great opportunity to run a customer survey or a small focus group, or do some A B testing and say, Is this what we want it to be doing? You know, are we growing fast enough? Are we doing enough? And Chris, you had mentioned, you know, the different digital channels? Like is email doing what we want it to do? Yes, it’s bringing in traffic, but is it bringing in the right traffic? And those are some of the questions that we really decided to dig into when we ran into this recently of like, Yeah, it looks like SEO is doing well. But are you ranking for the right terms? And so it, we needed to do that additional analysis? And, you know, are you too reliant on any one channel? So there’s really a lot of opportunity, when, even if you think your data isn’t telling you anything useful? It’s actually an opportunity to dig in even deeper and see why, what’s going on? Christopher Penn 8:25 Exactly. I was doing some homeschool science with my kids this weekend, what things we were looking at was calculating momentum. momentum in physics is a simple form. That’s mass times velocity. And when we think about momentum in the bigger picture context of, you know, is our marketing growing as our results growing, are they staying flat? Are they declining? That in, in a sense, is momentum? Are we growing? Are we staying flat? Well, you look at your data and the data is kind of flat, that means your momentum is pretty stable. Well, momentum is a formula mass times velocity. In the context of marketing, that means things like your audience, your conversions, your traffic and stuff, and then the speed at which you’re able to get people to do stuff. So even if your conversions or your audience is growing, if you’re slowing down, in your ability to convert people, you will have consistent momentum. So it may be a question of which of those two things is the problem that you’re not growing? And once you can diagnose that, you can say, Okay, what do I have control over? That could increase either mass or velocity to make momentum increase? For a lot of marketers? velocity is easier to fix than mass, right? You may not have a ton of money to throw at ads. You may not have a ton of people on your mailing list to mail appealing, but you absolutely can do things like looking at the most valuable pages on your website and say, How can we tune these pages up? How can we accelerate the process to conversion? How can we remove obstacles From, but what’s getting in people’s way to convert? How could we have a website that doesn’t suck. And that’s how those the easier things for marketers to tinker with to increase velocity. And if you increase velocity while your mass remains the same, your momentum still goes up. Now the best case scenario is you can get both to go up the same time, and then you have acceleration, then you’re talking about force, which is a totally different, totally different, slightly different formula. But from this perspective, if the data is flat, there are these two fundamental reasons why that data could be flat. And you need to diagnose that first. Katie Robbert 10:40 One could argue that, you know, given everything that’s going on this year, the goal was to keep things status quo and keep things as flat as possible. So there’s definitely a good argument for having your data look that way. However, we are now nine months past the start of the pandemic, and you know, 2020 is coming to a close. So then I would also say, Yep, great, you kept everything status quo for the year. Now it’s time to turn those knobs and increase that mass and increase that velocity, and figure out because now everyone, you know, not to undermine it. But everyone has kind of settled into this new normal routine. And so there’s really no excuse at this point, to really sort of say, Okay, I’m just going to throw my hands up and keep everything status quo. Obviously, you know, that doesn’t apply to every industry. But when we’re talking about marketing, especially digital marketing, the internet is more important now than ever, because it’s how people are staying connected. It’s where they spend their time. You know, online, shopping, e commerce, all of those things are peaked at this point, especially now with the holiday season. So to say, Oh, no, we just want to make sure that everything stays flat is actually a really poor excuse. So this is the time to start doing that testing to do that. Additional customer research, you know, to figure out, are we doing the right things? Are we doing things that the right times? And you know, Chris, to your point, you know, tuning up the website? What pages are leading to conversions, what channels? and in what order are assisting to conversions? Are we really meeting our goals? Or are we just complacent? Christopher Penn 12:20 Exactly. And when we think about velocity, it’s emotion, right? It’s, it’s the distance you go over a period of time. To your point, if you can have speed and movement in a direction, until you hit a wall, if, for example, like your Guitar Center, which just declared bankruptcy this morning, they were unable to change directions. So there’s they weren’t going in a certain direction, they had the speed and they hit a wall called the pandemic. The way around that is, agility be able to change directions very, very quickly, depending on what’s happening in the data. And to your point, if you’re not watching the data, all the time, if here’s here’s a good test of your agility. Da, do you have a dashboard of KPIs? That’s number one. Number two, is it the start page in your browser, right? If it’s not the start page in your browser, when you open a new tab, whatever that means that you’re probably not keeping as close an eye on those KPIs as you could be, that doesn’t mean you have to, like live in it all the time. But it should be one of those things that you see every single day like, Oh, that’s what’s going on. You know, for example, I look at the COVID statistics every single day just to see what’s going on. Because I don’t want to be taken by surprise. I look at basic things like Google Analytics traffic, just make sure it’s not zero, because that would be a really nasty surprise. Every time I send an email newsletter, I look at the data to see Okay, did my newsletter perform, as well as has previously could have done a little bit better? Or did it like go down like by half like, Oh, that’s a big unpleasant surprise. And so we have to be very cognizant of keeping an eye on our speed and knowing when to change directions. And to point we’re nine months into this craziness. And there are still new changes every single day, you know, a bunch of restaurants or a bunch of locations have just gone to no more indoor dining because they’ve just issues with contagion. So we have to be really, really agile. And that comes from looking at the data. So if you have not got a dashboard, put together of your KPIs, and yet, making it something that’s in your face every single day. You have some room to to add some paying attention to your data. Katie Robbert 14:35 I would argue so you know, you just mentioned I believe you said the phrase like things are changing every day. I would argue that, yes, things are changing every day. But the outcomes themselves from a marketing perspective, are predictable in the sense of like, if you run you know, three or four scenarios like okay, let’s say you do the marketing for a restaurant chain, and the restaurant chain, you know, no longer offers indoor dining? Well, this is not new, like, this is a scenario that you’ve been through before. So you can already think through how do I, you know, market for now, you know, only outdoor under heater or you know, whatever the scenario is, or just take out or this that the other. And so, you know, with all of this time that we’ve had to see all of the different changes in the industries, you know, obviously, we can’t plan for every single scenario. But you know, the basics, you know, you know, people are stuck at home, people are going to start hoarding weird random items, people are going to be looking for outlets from, you know, the insanity of being of looking at the same four walls with the same four people all the time. And so these are scenarios that you can plan for. And so it’s a great time to test out some of those things within your own marketing so that your data doesn’t stay flat. Because we have a good sense of what, you know, the situation is around us now. There’s obviously there’s those black swans, those unpredictable things, the natural disasters, the, you know, I would argue even the behaviors by people who were in charge, at this point, are pretty predictable, in the sense that you can plan for things not working, or things not getting done or whatever, you know, without turning it into a political thing, whatever the situation might be. There is some predictability to it because it just it’s the same situation over and over and over again, with just a slightly different shade. Christopher Penn 16:41 Yeah, I agree. And given the familiarity of some of these situations, now, we’ve talked about some past episodes. This is an opportunity just to look at what you did say in March or April go, Well, what could we have done better? Right? We panicked, we scrambled? We we got through it? Maybe. But what didn’t we do? Like, ah, if only we had done that, I wish we could have done that. And again, this is where it pays to go back and look at your data from that period. And say, okay, you know, we had a 40% decline in traffic or whatever, what did we do to pull out of that? And what could we have done faster? What, what’s on the list of Oh, if only I had known at that time? Well, now, to your point, we do know. So it’s an opportunity to bring that stuff back that playbook back and say, Okay, what was on our wish list that now we know pretty much what’s going to happen? Katie Robbert 17:33 That’s a really good point. Um, you know, I, I don’t know that enough companies, or enough marketers are going back to that specific point in time to say, what decisions did we make? And what could we have done differently? I know that a lot are looking at what goals did we set for the year? And did we reach them? Did we not? But you really have to factor in that specific point in time? And how much should we panic? How much? How unprepared? Where are we? What decisions did we make? Why did we make those decisions versus different things? Because clearly, we’re not out of the thick of it yet. And therefore, it’s an opportunity to continue to do better and get out of that plateau that you might be in with your data. Christopher Penn 18:17 Yep. So to summarize, if your data doesn’t help you make decisions, it’s probably because something is missing, either mathematically or strategically. to figure that out, use the basic formula for momentum, mass times velocity, what stuff do you have budget resources, people, etc? And how quickly can you get your audience to move to change directions to to move with you, if you are stuck, it means one of those two things is probably not working and figure out which one’s not working. And start making changes as quickly as you can to get your momentum back on track and start getting your data moving in the right direction. If you got questions about this, or anything else that we’ve talked about, on today’s show, hop on over to our free slack group analytics from Marcus Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers where you can chat with up to 1400, other digital marketers every day about all your analytics and data questions. And as always, if you haven’t done this already, please go over to Trust insights.ai slash t AI podcast and subscribe to the show. Wherever it is, you’re listening to it. And we’ll talk to you soon take care want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss upcoming 2021 marketing trends. It’s that time of year when everyone’s pontificating on what’s next in marketing. Listen in as we discuss: – Analytics infrastructure – Agile marketing – Private social media communities – Customer data privacy and sales – Value exchange Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/inearinsights/tipodcast-2021trends.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 This is In-Ear Insights the Trust Insights podcast. Do you want to use AI in your marketing but you’re not sure where to start? Take a class with Trust Insights and the marketing AI Institute. The AI Academy offers more than 25 classes and certification courses to start you on your AI journey including our intelligent attribution modeling for marketers certification. One membership gets you access to all 25 classes. Visit Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to learn more and enroll today. That’s Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy to enroll today. Are you struggling to reach the right audiences? Trust Insights offers sponsorships in our newsletters, podcasts and media properties to help your brand be seen and heard by the right people. Our media properties with almost 100,000 people every week from the In-Ear Insights podcast to the most timely and in the headlights newsletters. Reach out to us today at Trust insights.ai slash contact to learn more. Again, that’s Trust insights.ai slash contact. In this week’s in In-Ear Insights it’s the most wonderful time of the year Katie? Actually, it’s not it’s the time of year when everybody in their cousin is sending us all pitches to podcasts or blogs to YouTube’s saying, hey, person, what are your 2021 predictions, advice, forecast all this stuff about you know, marketing and analytics and AI and machine learning and all this stuff. So I figured why don’t we talk about our 2021 prognostications with our best understanding of the landscape as it stands right now. And that way, when people ask us for our predictions, we have this wonderful episode of the podcast to direct them to being efficient. So Katie, what are your 2021 predictions? Katie Robbert 1:52 More dumpster fires and chaos? I think, you know, all joking aside, obviously, everybody knows that 2020 has been a very different kind of year. And something Chris, you and I have talked about quite a bit is that, you know, we use our data to make those predictions and those forecasts and right now the data is jacked up, because nothing has been normal, nothing has been repetitive or consistent. And that’s one of the challenges moving into next year. So I know that that’s why people are asking this question, even more than they were asking it at this time last year, because people just want to know, what can I expect? What can I rely on? And the answer is, nobody really knows anyone who’s telling you they know what’s going to happen in 2021, even if it’s like an industry trend is wrong, because there is no way right now, because the way the business is done at the moment has changed so rapidly, just in the past eight months, the business models that, you know, people started with have had to switch and change and adapt and evolve. So nothing is the same as it was. And you know, even for us, we had specific business goals going into 2020, those have all changed, we have had to also adapt our services, we’ve had to adapt the way that we do business now. You know, the basic nuts and bolts, we were always were a tool that never changed. But the things that our customers need have changed quite a bit. And sometimes just on the fly mid conversation, someone’s getting new information. And we have to be ready to pivot. So, you know, when I’m asked the question, What are my 2021 predictions, I think it’s less about those tangible it’s going to be this, it’s going to be that and more about actions of people are going to continue to need to be agile there are, should be spending their time now, you know, writing down all of their processes and their governance. So they have that ready, so that they can alter it and evolve it. What do you think, Chris? Christopher Penn 4:04 I completely agree with you. Um, in the past, marketers had the luxury I think of being able to ignore kind of the big picture. And you can’t do that in in these uncertain times. So we have to start with the big picture we do, here’s what we are reasonably sure of. We are reasonably sure of that. By mid 2021, one or more vaccine candidates will be available and that will start being rolled out. We can be reasonably certain by the end of 2021, you know, some stuff we’ll get back to quote normal. Until then not the case. The bigger problem, I think is we still do not have a grasp on the amount of business and economic damage that has occurred. It’s kind of like a hurricane comes through bad things happen. Everyone’s hunkered down appropriately. And then the hard part is always after the hurt. Can’t like you got to do all the cleanup, the flooding, the reconstruction stuff that takes a really long time. And we are still in the middle of this disaster. And we’re not out of it, and we won’t be able to come out of the bunker and, you know, look around. So Oh, look, this is all flooded for quite some time. And so for the next year, I think you’re absolutely right, there is no telling what’s going to happen, except that we know it’s not going to necessarily be great. It will still be, you know, businesses will all still be operating under constrained conditions. And the biggest thing that a company can do, I think, is implement your advice very specifically, and that is have your analytics infrastructure in really good order, and be looking at the data very, very frequently. because things change all the time, you know, it is November 16, as we’re recording this, and for a large part of the United States, you know, we’re kind of having to revert back to like March, April, business conditions and lock downs, because the pandemic has gotten so bad, so fast. And if you were trying to forecast out, like, oh, what’s the holiday season gonna be like? Well, yet, you don’t know. Because there’s now this massive wrench like you might not leave your house for the holidays. Katie Robbert 6:14 And so even large brands have sort of adapted have started adapting. So, you know, Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving is usually a very large shopping. But in order to keep people from lining up at the door, a lot of these larger brands like Target, WalMart, so on and so forth, have said it’s Black Friday, all month, don’t please don’t all show up on Friday. And so like things that we kind of take for granted that have been routine for years, have all changed. Christopher Penn 6:44 Exactly. So are our advice to the extent that we can give advice for an unknown year is have your finger on the pulse of your data so that when something changes and change will happen very quickly. You’re not caught unaware, in terms of other forecasts and predictions, and the other, the only things that you can count on to the things that don’t change. And we said this, back in March and April, when when things really started first changing, which was what’s not going to change, people still need to eat food, people still need a place to live, people still need to find work. Businesses still need to sell stuff. And so figuring out how are people continuing to adapt and implement and stuff? Yes, we’ve all had, you know, those wonderful zoom calls with various holidays, and things. And you know that that has definitely gotten old, but the alternative is worse. But we have started to see some interesting innovations. There’s interesting innovations in the conference space, you know, different companies have tried different virtual events to varying degrees of success. We have seen substantial growth in media creation. Everybody in their cousin, the last two years has started a podcast, right? Everybody, their cousin has a YouTube channel of some kind people have been, you know, doing all sorts of stuff on Tiktok and things and it’s for businesses, it really is figuring out where the audience is. The one thing I see as a total Miss for businesses the last year that they desperately need is you need a curated private community, you know, if, for example, ours, if you go over to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, that’s our private slack community. And, okay, do you want to talk just briefly about just how valuable that community is not only for the people in it, but also for us as a business. Katie Robbert 8:32 So for us as a business, you know, it’s an opportunity to have our audience, a captive audience, you know, with the right people who are interested in the things that we’re interested in. And so it’s an opportunity for us to, you know, do some market research, what are you interested in run a run a short poll, but also just to sort of sit back and listen, to see the types of conversations that people are having with each other, and helping them you know, helping one another solve their problems and seeing this is the type of issue that is most common, this is how people usually approach because what we want to do is make sure that we are meeting people where they are, versus asking them to come up to where we think they should be. And so the other benefit, obviously, is a dedicated space for, you know, professionals who are interested in these things so that they can network, they can share what they’re working on. They can see new job opportunities, all of the things that go along with being part of that type of community. It strikes me the reason. One of the reasons why I really try to focus on like your sort of what you can control is when I was working in pharmaceuticals, more regulatory field, we would go through disaster planning exercises, and I don’t think that that’s an extremely thing to be thinking about at this time. Now, disaster recovery disaster planning usually starts with things like it. But if you’re in the mahr tech space, then you have a foot in the door. And it reminds me of a more extreme example that we were going through of what if there’s a natural disaster? And what if we don’t have power for the next three weeks? What do we do with the company and we really started to think about the priorities of the company. And so, you know, the first thing we need to do is make sure that we can communicate with the employees what’s happening. So how do we do that? Do we, you know, find landlines? Do we get walkie talkies? And obviously, these are more extreme examples. But that it was like, okay, people probably want to get paid. So we need to make sure that accounting has a piece of paper and a pencil and a stack of checks that they can literally write out to people. And so while I don’t think that marketers need to go through that extreme planning, they should definitely think about, like, what happens if my analytics, you know, shut off for three days, or, you know, I can’t reach my audience, or Facebook changes their algorithm again, or becomes a completely, you know, paid platform or those kinds of things. And I think, instead of focusing on what are the trends and hot topics going to be, personally, I would focus my time more inward more internally in the company to see what do I currently have going on? What makes the most sense for my customers and my company, and my goals, versus what everybody else says is going to be important next year, because, again, it’s sort of a, like, I’m gonna stick my finger in the air and see which way the wind is blowing and make a guess. Christopher Penn 11:51 Yeah. And the focus on the things that you do know that haven’t happened yet. So real simple example of this, the California population voted a new law into effect cpra, that will take effect January 120 23. It supersedes ccpa. And one of the big changes for marketers is that instead of the previous law said companies above a certain size and in certain parameters can’t sell data over a certain amount to other companies, it’s not allowed. The new law says you can’t share. Right, so for everyone who’s used to buying and swapping lists and doing all these different kinds of things, it’s pretty big deal. Now you have three, two and a half years to to get ready for it. And as we know, with ccpa, and GDPR, people won’t they’ll wait till the last minute. And and it will have to go be messy. So if you have things in your calendar that you know are going to happen, year out two years out three years out, now is the time to plan for while things are in transition and chaos, it’s actually a really good opportunity to put new things into the mix. Because people as a try, just adapt to how things are working, we’ll just take these new changes in stride, because everything is changing. One of our big, big, big pieces of advice and again, this is one of those things that is a trend and you should be doing is you’ve got to own the right to contact your audience. And that means things like newsletters, because you don’t own your Facebook page, you don’t own your LinkedIn channel, you own none of these things you do own your email list. As long as you keep paying your bills, he will be able to send email to people make a priority for the next year to extract as many people from all these platforms you don’t own into a platform that you do own into, into your blog, into your website, into your your podcast, into your email newsletter, because you will at a certain point for sure, stop getting third party data, right? Cookies are already out of Safari and Firefox. Google has said as of 2022, that are going to support third party cookies and Chrome. So if you are relying on ad networks, and DSPs and dmps, to try and give you additional insights and your customers that you don’t have to ask them for, that’s getting harder and harder. The solution is create content that your customers actually want and that they value and exchange it. Think of think of customer data, like something that’s for sale. You can’t just take it from somebody, you have to trade with them if exchange with them. I want your data in exchange for this valuable thing. And right now, I don’t think hardly any markers have anything that I would say yeah, I want to buy that. Like, even if was just $1 could we could you convince a customer to buy your newsletter for $1? Oh, by a blog post for dollar, I would guarantee that 99% of marketers. Yeah. Like customers like, No, no, you pay us to read your craft. Katie Robbert 14:50 Well, and I think that there goes that goes back to your point about you know, building those communities. And so that’s one of the benefits on both sides is you can literally say to your community What do you want me to write about? What do you want to know more about? And they will tell you, because people in these communities are not shy, they love having a voice, because they get to be heard. And then you can say, okay, cool, I now have my punch list for the next two or three blog posts. And then you share that back with them. And it’s this reciprocal cycle of, I’m telling you what I want, and that I’m getting what I want. And then I continue to tell you what I want, and I continue to get what I want. And it’s that sort of feeds that machine of giving your audience content they want to read. You know, you were talking about these third party cookies. But Chris, also, can you talk a little bit about ad blockers, being able to even show the ads? Christopher Penn 15:44 Yep, yep. So ad blockers for if you’re not looking in your your data, you probably don’t know just how much data you’re missing a number of ad blocking services block even basic tracking mechanisms. For example, there’s one called ghostery, that can impair some installations of Google Analytics, right. So you have a certain percentage of visitors who you can’t track because it’s the data simply is not there. And so ad blockers, and, and AD, anti ad tech technology, are a growing concern, I forget what the stat was, but something like 30% of visitors on the web use some form of ad blocker. And now, in the new version of Mac OS ad blocking is built into the Safari browser, it’s it’s no longer you know, you don’t have to have an add on. There are, there are things I believe in Microsoft Edge that do similar. So you’re seeing the browser technologies themselves become more hostile to advertisers, which again, underscores the need for you to get the first party data from your customers by asking them for it and giving them something valuable in exchange for it. Because if a customer tells you, Hey, I’m the VP of Marketing at this company, like that’s, to me is a lot more valuable than trying to get it from some third party database based on you know, their, their what’s on their LinkedIn profile. know, somebody says, This is who I am, this is what I do. And this is how I like you to communicate with me. That seems like a win. Katie Robbert 17:06 Mm hmm. Absolutely. Because you have asked them, you’ve asked their permission, they’ve willingly given you this information, versus you finding out this information from a third party. And they’re like, Hey, I don’t remember signing up for this thing, I don’t want this. And so you are not only giving them what they want, but you’re giving them information in the way that they have asked for and given permission for. And that’s a big deal in building that customer relationship as well. And those are the things that you have control over is your relationship, one on one or with a community. And so, you know, when we’re talking about trends for next year, it’s that personal connection, it’s that community, it’s that personalized content. And it’s not to say every single individual person gets their own individual piece of content. But you can start to make sort of those segments within your own communities that you’re building to say, majority of my community is, you know, VP of Marketing. What does the VP of Marketing want? Well, ask the VP of Marketing, hey, if you’re a VP of Marketing, what kind of content are you interested in? Or what kinds of problems are you facing? So then you can deliver that content in the community, you can post it on social to try to bring more people in. And then you also have that email newsletter, and the newsletter is something that is completely within your control. Maybe you send one out every day, maybe you send one out once a week, maybe once a month, it’s something that you have control over and again, ask the community, if I was to send you a newsletter, how often would you want to receive it? You know, what kinds of information should be in there? Do you want curated content, you want original content, you want a mix of both? You really have that flexibility? Because these are all things within your control. And so, you know, if someone asked me, What are your 2021 trends, I’d say it’s things you can control, things that you have ownership of. Christopher Penn 19:06 I completely agree. I would say to add on to that. 2021 is the year that you probably should implement the best practices that you’ve been told the last 10 years. It’s always funny to listen to all the people talking about trends, like oh, this is you know, this is the trend Yeah, but you’re not going to do anything about it. So it’s like reading a Fitness magazine instead of working out like no, no, you actually need to go work out in order to see any benefit whatsoever. But so recap is better than nothing works back as Moses except water. So for those who have asked, hey, Trust Insights, Hey, folks, what are your 2021 treads number one, your analytics infrastructure has to be an order because you will need it to make decisions based on data in a rapidly changing environment. Number two, change is going to be rapid and extremely unexpected. You don’t know what’s going to happen for the most part beyond the things that won’t change number Three, make sure you have a private community, a curated community that is essentially an unpaid focus group that you provide value for. Number four, make sure that you are providing value in exchange for customer data, cuz you’ve got to own your first party data, you’ve got to bring all that data in and get customers to give it to you. Because you cannot rely on third parties to give it to you, it will, that is just going away so rapidly. And number five, do the things do all the best practices that you’ve been told to do for the last 10 years right in business and everything else people have been saying for ever pay. If you want to get more fit, eat less and exercise more, eat less bad stuff anyway, if you want to get wealthy buy low and sell high, right? Because these are not arcane concepts that are difficult to grasp. These are just the hard work that we all have to put in. Do it. Any other trends, I forgot Katie. Katie Robbert 20:54 I mean, I think that’s it, you got to do the hard work, you got to take the time and do your own planning and look inward. And all of those things will start to fall into place. Christopher Penn 21:05 And the golden trend of all provide value to people. I provide value to people so that they have a reason to want to do business with you. There’s there’s just so much marketing out there that is that is taking trying to take before they give and it never works out for anyone. So if you’ve got a trend that you think we need to talk about that that or you want our opinion on, by all means please join our slack community over TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics, remarketing, artisan, we’ll speak up say, Hey, what do you think of this trend, we’re happy to have this conversations anytime of the day that we’re awake. And if you have not already subscribed to this episode of the show, or the show, wherever it is, you’re watching to go to Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast where you can subscribe to this and catch all the back episodes. And finally, if you miss chip, be sure to stop by our YouTube channel over TrustInsights.ai to AI slash YouTube and every Thursday at 1pm eastern time we do a live shows and if you’ve got a question about you know trends and things like that stop on by any Thursday and ask those questions during the q&a section as well as enjoying the rest of the show. Thanks for watching and we’ll talk to you soon take care want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss what to do with an analytics or data science project goes off the rails. How soon should you call a marketing analytics project a failure? What do you do once it’s clear a data research project isn’t going to meet its goals or produce anything useful? What’s the best strategy for averting such failures in the future? Listen in for what just happened to a bunch of social media data for a research project, and what the next steps would be in this case study. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-sunkcostsandprojects.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn 0:02 In this week’s in In-Ear Insights, sometimes things go sideways, sometimes things don’t work out the way we expected them to. I was working on a large data analysis of Reddit data last week. And there’s a certain point where like, you know, what, not only is not yielding good results, it’s not yielding much of anything except junk. And so the question I asked myself and the question I want to ask you, Katie is, at what point do we throw it all away? At what point should we be willing to say, you know what, we’re throwing good money after bad we’re throwing good time after bad. Let’s candidate versus let’s try and salvage it. How do you how do you balance it? How do you make that that judgment call when you’re running a project, particularly one that’s Uh, you know, a big investment where a lot of eyes are on what you’re doing. Katie Robbert 2:05 So, you know, easy questions on one day morning God. You know, it is it’s a tough call. And it’s usually, in my experience, it’s never been a decision that’s made lightly. And it’s never been a decision that’s made solely by one person. And so the project manager may be the person responsible for moving things forward. But the project manager is rarely solely responsible for making big business decisions, especially when they involve money. And so, you know, it, it. It really depends. It depends on how much we’re talking in terms of a sunk cost. It depends on whether or not you actually set that money aside for research and development. And when it’s not really a sunk cost. It depends on you know, how well planned out the project was and if there’s an opportunity to salvage it. So, you know, if we’re going down the road of, you know, it’s a small, you know, project. And you know, it’s only maybe a few thousand dollars, which is still a lot of money, especially to a small business. You know, you may just have to say this thing didn’t work out, we experimented. The thing that you salvage from there is you take your lessons learned of what didn’t work, what didn’t we do this time around, that we should do moving forward? Maybe it’s, you know, our hypothesis for the research wasn’t really that strong, or we just kind of started like digging around to see what we would find that’s almost always going to end up as a sunk cost. Because if you’re not thinking about what you’re going after, if you’re just sort of like, I don’t know, maybe this might work. Maybe this over here might work. You are likely always going to have some kind of a sunk cost and that’s what you want to avoid. And so unsurprisingly, it always comes back to how much of it have you planned out ahead of time now planning process itself can be a sunk cost because you could go down the road of, you know, planning requirements and starting to do the data gathering and then find out that there’s nothing there. But generally speaking, that planning costs a lot less than actually having a data scientist or an engineer or someone start to do the digging through the data itself. Christopher Penn 4:23 I feel like in the, in this particular example we’re using I think we did go about this backwards in the sense of we came up with a hypothesis of the plan first before doing the exploratory data analysis. And then as we got into the exploration realized, there’s not anything here is there’s nothing in this pile of stuff. It’s all chaff, no, no wheat which I guess is can be challenging because you also don’t want to have your you know, data data scientist at you know, how $500 an hour or whatever. Just digging around data for without a clear goal in mind, either So how do we balance the two? How do you bounce? Like, okay, we we should do the exploration, to see if there’s any idea before came for the hypothesis or we have a plan. And then we start to execute the plan and find out the plan. It goes off the rails very, you know, fairly soon on, how do you balance those two scenarios? Katie Robbert 5:18 So that’s where a lot of like, proof of concepts and beta tests and those sort of experiments come about. Very rarely is proof of concept or a beta test. Just sort of like, I don’t know, let’s just see what we want to get. There’s still a level of planning involved. And so, you know, we spent, you know, 30 minutes, maybe an hour over the past couple of weeks sort of sketching out the outline, putting together a plan for this research project that we wanted to do and then you spent a little bit of time digging around the data to find out is there something there and so we haven’t gone so far down the road, as we’ve fully committed to this is the data that we have to use. This is the structure of the paper, we’ve been promoting it like our sunk costs are very minimal because we were essentially working as if this your initial data exploration was a proof of concept. So I wouldn’t say we did it backwards. We actually did it the way that it’s supposed to happen, because you need to find out, am I going to get the kind of output that I’m after? And so when we talked earlier this morning about here’s what I’m finding, we were able to start to pivot the plan to say, What if we did this instead? So the data is salvageable is still usable, we’re just going to use it in a slightly different context, you know, and we’re in a fortunate position where we own the company and we can do that we can decide to change, you know, the research, we can change the hypothesis, we can change, you know, the topic of the paper, not all marketers are in that situation, and so they are scrambling to figure out well, I’ve already pitched out this concept To all of these other customers and, you know, articles and whatever, and now I have to stick with it. And that’s where you start to get into trouble is when you start to put the horse, the cart in front of the horse. Yes, I don’t know how horses and carts work. And I know that one of them does not belong in front of the other. Christopher Penn 7:19 Well, I mean, that brings up a really good point, because we’ve also had an experience with a client project where there was a very good plan, there was a, there was a survey plan that was rolled out, the survey got done differently, and then you ended up with something that, you know, the that that train had left the station, but it was filled with the newer instead of gold. And so at the end, and now, in this particular instance, it’s in the train is still full of maneuver, and is probably not going to be successful. So should every company should every organization have an r&d department that’s working on this sort of things so that you’re, you’re doing those rapid proofs of concepts all that Time and that you’re not ever left holding the bag of Well, what do we do with this thing, as opposed to being in a situation where we’ve invested $100,000 or $200,000, or whatever in this thing, and only when you’re 60% of the way through the project, you realize, wow, this thing is not going to go anywhere, we basically burned a quarter million dollars for no reason. Katie Robbert 8:18 They absolutely should. And that’s what falls into some of the Agile methodology is sort of those two week iterative sprints. You’re constantly building and iterating. And coming up, you know, at the end of two weeks, you should have some sort of a proof of concept that you can demonstrate to the rest of the team and stakeholders. They don’t, you know, it should be something tangible. It shouldn’t just be a theoretical, you know, for the past few weeks, we’ve been building a bunch of code and you can see it in six months. You need to have something that, you know, I as a non developer should be able to at least look at and go Okay, that kind of looks like the thing that we were talking about, you know, keep moving down this road. That’s not what we asked for, we need to change it. And that way, you’re not investing millions and millions of dollars, you’ve only sunk about two weeks worth of work to then pivot and you’re still at that early point where you can continue to pivot. And then two weeks later, you’re just building on top of the thing in a small, iterative way. And that’s exactly what agile methodology is meant to do. And so a lot of development teams, you know, ones that I’ve managed in the past have always fought for and pushed for that r&d time so that they can do that experimentation. It’s difficult to build into your budget, because it is going to be likely sunk costs, you know, not all of the, you know, research that you know, we do with data or we do with code is going to pan out to be anything to your point initially, Chris, but there needs to be some sort of a structure around it of like, what what am i researching? Am I researching if The new, shiny, you know, plug in on top of our studio does a better version of generating a chart than tableau. That’s a useful thing. And we might find out that no, it doesn’t or yes, it does like, then at least you can say, at the end of, you know, your two week sprint, I found out that I got pretty close. And I just need a little more time or this isn’t going to do what I ever want it to do. So I need to abandon it and move on. And I won’t keep wondering like, well, what if I just spent more time What if I just did this? You’ve already done the proof of concept. And so I do think that it makes sense for companies to build it in but there needs to be structure around it and there needs to be guidelines and guardrails. Even though r&d feels like it should sort of be like a playground. It should but it should have a fence around it. Christopher Penn 10:49 Yes, don’t let your your scientific cobblers run around unguarded. In that context, though, so there’s there’s two things that are really worth Pointing out one. When I look at the like amount of code and research and stuff that we do as an organization, I would say 95% of the research we do never sees the light of day, like it just kind of sits in a folder. And pieces of it definitely do get reused for other projects, like I was working on this one thing, we’re building a recommendation engine, and the prototype was a miserable failure. version two was moderate failure. version three is only slightly a failure. But all those will never see the light of day. So I think there it probably is worth pointing out to folks that Yeah, there is going to be a sizable amount of cost in research. And the second thing is what if you’re in organizations, we obviously have many clients, you know, and we know many folks like this, like in our analytics for marketers community, which if you haven’t joined, go to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers free slack group of over 1200 marketers talking about stuff like this and a lot of the organizations Don’t have an r&d department or if they do, it’s in product and it’s not in marketing. For the marketers out there, what do we do? What do they do? If they don’t have, you know, someone like me who’s just messing around on a Saturday with stuff for fun? Katie Robbert 12:14 Well, before I get into that, let me step back because you had mentioned your recommendation engine version one, version two, version three. My question to you is did you learn something between each version? Christopher Penn 12:29 No, definitely I wouldn’t. Well, how not to make a recommendation and ship it Katie Robbert 12:35 to me that means that it’s not completely a sunk cost because you were able to learn new skills and figure out new techniques and that so that in and of itself, makes it valuable because then you can take that and apply it forward. And so yes, version one, shit the bed version two, kind of crapped out version three. puttered along, it got incrementally better each time. And so I think that’s one of the things that, you know, companies, if they’re like, Oh, well, if I’m not going to get anything useful out of this, then I’m not going to do it. There, the usefulness needs to be in proper context. So you might not have like a widget or a thing at the end of it. But your team is likely going to feel a little bit more fulfilled, because they had a little bit more freedom to mess around. They’re going to learn some new things that they might not have had a chance to learn if they keep doing things the exact same way, every single time because this is how we’ve always done it. So I just want to like I wanted to point that piece of it out too, because I think it’s important, as companies are thinking about, you know, what am I getting out of letting my team do this kind of research and development and experimentation? Well, you’re getting a team that, you know, is being more creative is being more you know, using their critical thinking skills. to that problem solving, and really sort of thinking outside of those, you know, boundaries of this is how we’ve always done it. Now to your question about, you know, usually r&d lives within product, not within marketing. Don’t try to do it all at once we say that with a lot of like AI projects, for example, AI is one of those things that, you know, marketers are trying to experiment with, find a very small use case and do a small proof of concept, something that, you know, you could probably back to the envelope, figure out how much it’s likely going to cost in resource time, in your time in budget, and just sort of work in a small way and start to scale it up. Once you’ve been able to prove out whatever the thing is, you know, if you don’t have proper research and development, then you need to just make like, you need to keep it small and contained. And you need to be transparent about the thing that you’re doing. Hey, I thought that we might experiment with this other way of doing something. So I’ll do it this way too. But I might also try This way just to sort of do sort of like an A B test, and we talked about that a little bit last week when we were evaluating martex facts. Unknown Speaker 15:08 Okay, that makes total sense. Christopher Penn 15:11 I would also say that it’s probably not a bad idea to be a part of an analytics community or marketing community. So you can if even if you don’t have r&d of your own, at least be listening to what other people are doing, asking them what they’re doing, and seeing if there are any lessons they’ve learned that you can import to your organization. Even if you don’t have those capabilities yourself. You know, if you hear somebody like saying, I ran an AV test with Google Optimize, and I got no usable results, like good, that’s something that it broadens your knowledge. No. Oh, yeah. If I don’t have a good testing plan up front, then I’m going to test a bunch of things that don’t matter and end up with any conclusive results. Katie Robbert 15:49 I think that’s a really, really good pro tip for people is, you know, join a community and say, What were your lessons learned from doing this thing and that way You can sort of go into it saying, Okay, this person didn’t put a plan together, let me at least put a plan together and then see how far I can get. I think that that’s such a smart way in sort of what they call it like the hive mind or crowdsourcing like asking people. What did you do in this situation? Christopher Penn 16:17 Yep. So, Katie Robbert 16:19 to wrap up, Christopher Penn 16:21 when it comes to figuring out where something is a sunk cost, and when to bailout ideally, it’s sooner rather than later. And if you structure your plan to accommodate for things like exploratory data analysis things upfront, you will hopefully reduce the amount of sunk costs. And to Katie’s point. Even if something is a sunk cost, there may be salvageable lessons or pieces of code or analysis that you can reuse for more successful projects later. If you’ve got questions about this or any other topic about analytics, join our free slack community go to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers and join over 1200 other marketers talking about things just like this. And while you’re at it, Go to the Trust Insights website again TrustInsights.ai dot AI and sign up for our newsletter where you can learn about this and get fresh data every week. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you soon take care want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems, visit Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

Based on a question from our analytics community, in this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris tackle the challenges of new technology. When a new piece of technology makes a big splash, how do we evaluate it? How should we assess whether it’s right for us, whether it makes sense to pursue it? What are some of the things that can go wrong? Watch this episode to learn the answers, plus the specific AI technology that prompted this question, OpenAI’s GPT-3. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-evaluatingnewtech.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn This is In-Ear Insights the Trust Insights podcast. AI Academy for marketers is an online education platform designed to help marketers like you understand pilot and scale artificial intelligence. The AI Academy features deep dive certification courses of three to five hours, along with dozens of short courses 30 to 60 minutes each taught by leading AI and marketing experts. Jordan Katie Robbert, CEO of Trust Insights in me Christopher Penn chief data scientist of Trust Insights for three of our courses in the academy five use cases of AI for content marketing, intelligent attribution modeling for marketing, and detecting and mitigating bias in marketing AI. The Academy is designed for manager level and above marketers and largely caters to non technical audiences, meaning you don’t need a programming background or background in data science to understand and apply what you learn. One registration gives you unlimited access to all the courses and invitation to a members only slack instance, access to new courses every quarter. Join now and save $100 off registration when you go to Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy and use registration code pen 100 today that’s Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy and use registration code pen 100 today in this week’s In-Ear Insights, we’re going to start off with something totally different. A short poetry reading. The Rime of the Ancient Google, Google has gone to God you cannot conceive it or guess it all the sudden it has happened. Come Come whoever you are, oh, come now is pacing hasten. So you may be seeing what the world is going on what has happened to the data focus podcasts that we all love. The over the weekend, researchers at open AI have published the results of their the newest language model of music called GPT three Theirs was the original one a couple years ago. GPT two was last year, which is something that a lot of folks included, including TrustInsights.ai have used to generate credibly sounding natural language by machine and GPT three has come out and for all of the research and data published so far has is a substantial leap forward in terms of what computers can do to generate language. Here’s another example. This is the poem a future consensus forecasts by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. No one knows what will come forecast for teller rising power. That is probably not to be deficit of several lines. The Golden future has tourniquets, no one likes it. I love the I love the expression on your face, Katie. But more practically, this is a tool that given a prompt is able to generate more credible sounding data in natural language and so This follows on to a question that we were asked last week on Joseph Jaffe show by Bob Farnham saying, When something brand shiny new comes out, how do you evaluate it? How do you fit it into strategy? How do you know whether it’s it’s worth paying attention to or just another shiny object for the squirrel to chase after for the brain squirrels to go after? So when you think about a new technology, and obviously Katie, you’ve had to deal with me for more than five years now on this front. How do you differentiate between, like the technology being shiny and new and chasing after and Okay, well, where does this fit in? Katie Robbert Well, first, let me take a step back and say I was always terrible at deciphering poetry in high school in my English classes when that was like what we were working on. I was terrible at it. So it’s all abstract. nonsense words shoved together for me. So everything you just said. I definitely had Like the Macarena playing in my head while you were saying it, because I was like, I don’t get any of this. So that being said, when the first thing that I look for when new software or a new version or something comes out, and this might be the, you know, Product Manager in me is I’m looking for release notes, what’s new? And so if I can’t easily see what’s new in a new version, like there should be some sort of a bulleted list, like, what’s new, you know, fixed, you know, the widget bug, you know, changed from blue to green, like whatever the thing is, and also in this case, because it’s more complicated machine learning with natural language processing. I need to have an understanding at a glance of what does it do now that it didn’t do before? Why do I need this version versus the old version? So that’s one piece of it, the other piece of it and Chris, this is something that I always ask you is For the sake of the business, for our business for our clients, do they need whatever the shiny object thing is saying that it’s going to do? Give me a use case show me where we need to spend our time figuring out how this thing works, because I think the challenge with software is that there’s so much of it, and it updates so quickly, and it’s constantly changing. I think the thing that marketers and companies need to ask themselves is, what’s the problem that this thing is solving? And do I need it? Or is it just like cool and exciting and I want to play with it. If the ladder, do it on your own time, and former? Let’s figure out what problems that we currently have, that this thing will solve and then spend your time exploring it? Christopher Penn Yeah, yeah, this is still from a technology perspective. It is still early, it is still in the actual model itself is not publicly available yet. It is researchers who granting access to the private beta or publishing their findings now, but it is not generally available and I’m hopeful that in the next year or so, it will become available to the general public in ways that we can use it. To your point about the release notes it’s interesting because this when a new model is released, that does something substantially different it’s kind of like the original was a bicycle version two was a car and now there’s an airplane sitting in the driveway. And so it’s not necessarily a release notes so much as there’s a brand new thing that does something different that essentially still choose the overall goal of transportation but instead of it being you know, a car you drive it’s a plane you fly. And so there’s obviously a bit more of a learning curve to using it. Where I think it’s really important and like you said, is is understand what is the Unknown Speaker thing do? Christopher Penn Like it’s like it’s a puts a new appliance in your kitchen. Can you broadly tell, like, does it fry things? Does it bake things? Does it blend things like what what exactly is the thing If it’s not clear, then perhaps the the UI needs a bit of work with this model, the thing that fascinated me most of all that I think is has potential incredible both benefits and hazards for our industry is something called neural style transfer. So Katie, if I took your blog posts or the our conversations and embed them into the model as a, as priming as training data, and then I took Harry Potter, and I said, I want you to rewrite Harry Potter in the way that Katie robear speaks and writes, it will rewrite Harry Potter in as if you had written it as opposed to the way that the original author had written. When you think about that, that drastically changes how we think about content. Because what is content at that point, content is the idea that that is created in a certain way, but if you were to use this technology, you would be indistinguishable Theoretically, from your writing, but it also be unique, it would be something that would not be a copyright violation per se, but a derivative work. And so there are massive implications for content marketers, if you were to take, for example, a paper that McKinsey published and you were to do a neural style transfer on that you could create a McKenzie paper that was factually as correct. But in your own words. Katie Robbert It’s it’s an interesting dilemma in the sense of, you know, we go back to the question of do you need this thing? So, for organizations that are churning out large volumes of content, it sounds like perhaps it might be a worthwhile investment. You know, when we speak about and talk about in teach about artificial intelligence, one of the segments of the talks are is always build or buy. Well, how do I know if this is the right investor? For me, and so, you know, you’re talking about hardcore machine learning natural language processing. Let’s say we’re talking about something that’s a little bit more straightforward, like a social listening platform, for example, you know, choose any one of the dozens that are out there. If you’re evaluating whether or not you need this thing, you need to first know, do I have someone on my team who can use the thing? Do I just want to pay a third party company to do the thing for me? And do we have the money? Either way, and I think that those are some of the questions, you know, because what you’re describing with the natural language processing and having it right in my style, so that I never have to sit at my keyboard again, looking at a blank page sounds really enticing. But do we have someone on our team who can first figure out the model into So all of the, you know, learning information content, and then test it and then maintain it. And then you know, do everything with it. So do we have that resource? Do we have the time to do that? To do the r&d? And do we have the money? Because perhaps as an open source model, but you still have to pay someone to do the thing? Christopher Penn Yeah, I would say of, you know, people processing platform, I think your biggest limitation for something like this for any new technology really is the people and their skills because that’s, that is that is either the limiter or the enabler that you have to to leap forward on something. If you don’t have the skills in house. It doesn’t really matter what the technology is, you cannot use it, it’s like, again, if you cannot fly a plane, putting a plane in your driveway looks cool. And you can be proud that you own a plane now, but you still can’t go anywhere with it because you can’t fly. Katie Robbert I will say though, if you’re keeping your plane in your driveway, you clearly You’re doing it wrong, you probably shouldn’t own a plane in the first place. Christopher Penn It depends if you live in the middle and the Alaskan Bush, then you actually do because there’s no roads. But Katie Robbert let’s go with that one. Christopher Penn But so too. I think the other thing that we have to keep our minds open about that a hint is hinted at and Bob’s question is, does this have the potential to have a transformative effect as opposed to an iterative effect on our business? Meaning does this open up new revenue lines? Does this open up new brand new capabilities that not only do we not have, but the industry as a whole does not have something that our old buddy and friend Todd Jefferson used to say is, you know, there’s three things you could do that a newsworthy first best only you can do the first something the best is something that the only one that does something at some something and if you have a technology Do you like this and you have the people and the processes in place, you could achieve all three very, very quickly. And as we all know, from other machine learning and AI projects, there is a substantial advantage to you if you are first mover because the sooner you get going, the sooner you’re collecting data that you can use, and the more of a disadvantage competitors are at. Because they have to not play catch up on the technology has to catch up on the data collection as well. Katie Robbert Mm hmm. Well, and so, you know, it’s tricky, because part of my brain is like, Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. But the other part of my brain is, what is the likelihood that a marketing team has a skilled data scientist on their staff in order to be experimenting with these new models, that to your point, Chris aren’t even fully available to the public yet are still in their testing phase, in order to be first out of the gate with something that’s easy. A unique position for a team to be in. And so it’s, you know, I sort of struggled with, you know, having the conversation about these, you know, natural language processing models, when I know that a lot of teams are still struggling with some of the basics. Christopher Penn When you deal with a situation like that it like you were saying earlier, it goes back to build or buy, right? If you cannot build you have to buy, right, you know, simply is, is no alternative. And that may mean by an agency like Trust Insights to say like, Hey, we need to engage you as a, as a client to offer this capability because we simply cannot do it. It’s just not in the cards, and there’s not going to be a budget to do that. So for those folks who are on the agency side, the challenge then is are you willing to make a big enough bet in your own agency, to create this capability that you can then sell and potentially offer as a substantial multiplier to your clients? Something that, again, first best only if you’re if you cannot find this capability anywhere else, and it’s valuable, and you know, it’s and it’s worth paying for. Do you? Do you take that bet? Katie Robbert So, you know, it goes. So this is sort of all circling around the question of how do you evaluate something that’s brand new, you know, to the market to the industry, as to whether or not it’s a shiny object or something of value to you. Because for every, you know, 10 people that call something a shiny object, one person is going to say, but I need that. And so the question is really coming down to how do you evaluate, I need that versus that shiny object. And so Chris, a lot of what you’re talking about, is really evaluating. You know, especially if it’s a brand new technology like, you know, what are your business models? What are your clients or customers need? You know, is there something like this already in the industry that would make it a worthwhile investment to you to be first out of the gate, does it solve an existing problem? Or are you looking for a problem to solve with this solution? And and can you make the investment? So those are those are not small questions for someone to ask their company and their team when evaluating something like this. Christopher Penn It reminds me a lot actually have a clinical trial right now phase one, does it cause harm? phase two, does it do anything? And phase three, does it do better than the existing standard of care? And I think that’s not a bad framework for looking at a piece of technology, right does is it something that’s going to actively cause harm to our systems? Does it work at all like, is it hype and vaporware? Or is there they’re there and then three, if there’s a there there, is it better than what we can currently offer? Because to your point GPT three and its cousins. In this language transform a family requires a massive investment in technology. And in brainpower and skills, you, this is not a piece of software like Microsoft Word that you download off the internet and put on your computer. This is and it’s like, literally the engine of a car, like there’s no it doesn’t come with the rest of the car, you have to build the rest of the car. It just you put you’ve got a bigger, bigger, bigger, faster engine. And so that phase three is it may turn out that for your company. It’s not better than the existing standard, because you can’t use it well. And how, when, when in the pharma world, how do they decide what drugs to invest in, like, you know, knowing that something’s gonna be a big better potential dud. You know, I’m looking at the clinical trials process. Katie Robbert I mean, that’s a heavy question. For a Monday morning, you know, it’s well, so a clinical trial depending on the type of trial so I worked primarily in the SP cir world, so small business innovative research. And so those trials, the phase one was six months, the phase two was 18 to 18 to 24 months. And phase three was commercialization. And, but so that right there, you’re already talking about a three year commitment to testing this thing. And that’s for, you know, software, when you’re talking about pharmaceutical drugs, you know, you’re talking about a longer, you know, typically a multi year thing, when we’re talking about software that may or may not intervene with, you know, people’s, you know, medical decisions, that kind of thing. It’s a little less of a time investment, but you should be treating it just as seriously because this is your this is your business. And so the first thing that you should really be thinking about, you know, Chris, to your point is that testing that proof of concept and so the way that I would approach that is the first thing I would do is run numbers, I would find the data both financial and otherwise. Because what I would want to know is if we take the example, this natural language processing software is going to start to write blogs for me, in my voice in my style. Okay. First and foremost, how long does it take me typically to write a blog, and what’s my hourly rate? So that’s one piece of data. How many blogs do I write per week, per month per year? That’s my second piece of data. You know, what, kind of, you know, return on investment do I get from these blog posts that I put out there? That’s my third piece of data. So I now have three hard data points to compare against my investment in this natural language processing software, where I need to know what is it going to cost me to set it up? What is it going to cost me to train it and how long is it going to take before I can replace my own physical writing, with the machine doing my writing and then how much time do I then as the human need to spend editing and publishing this content. And so there’s a lot of different variables that I would want to explore. And that would help me at least in this specific example, understand, is it worth the investment to go down this road? And so perhaps the software can do it better than I can, but it may not be cost effective. So it may not be a better option for me. Christopher Penn Yep. So that fits the it may not exceed the existing standard because using standard is the right balance of efficiency and effectiveness. Right. Okay, so if you’d like to chat about the model itself and things like that, and it’s of interest to you pop on over to our free slack group TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics for marketers will be a topic of discussion. I’m sure that will come up multiple times over the next year. So as tools like this, or models like this or have tools built around them is going to be fascinating and it is absolutely a great water cooler for your other ordinary Regular non crazy far out there analytics questions as well so we have over 1200 folks who are enjoying the occasional conversation on marketing analytics and your follow up questions on this episode please drop a comment over the wherever it is that you’re consuming this or over on our website TrustInsights.ai dot AI and we will talk to you soon will help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. Visit Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss unnecessary reporting. Why does this happen? What can we do to streamline our reporting processes and make sure we’re focused on the most valuable reporting and analytics first? Listen to this episode to learn about change management, KPI identification, and reporting as a security blanket. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-reportingnecessities.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn In this week’s In-Ear Insights we are talking about reporting specifically, what do we do when we’re creating reporting? We are the reporting vending machines as it were in our organizations. But we’re not sure anyone’s actually reading them. So way back in the day, we work for this very large telecom company that the CEO had these 680 page reports that were you know, these gigantic things. We had to print them out at one point we had to print them out every hour on the hour for this company. And the question was that we always just who’s reading this and in the end, it turned out that it really get read. I think we’ve seen it. Many different organizations, people saying, look, we need this report, we need this report. Two weeks a month go by later. Hey, did you read that report? No. So Katie, what do we do? When we have executives and stakeholders, we’re asking for reporting, and then just not reading it not doing anything with it. Katie Robbert We cry and set things on fire. No. So, you know, it’s, it’s a very common issue that we all have run into, at some point. We’ve either been on the delivery side of all of the reports, or we’ve been on the receiving side and just like, Oh, yeah, I meant to get to that I never got to it. You know, and so ultimately, it sort of starts with that conversation of what decisions are you trying to make with this now? In the course of your career, Chris, I’m sure you’ve run into this a lot because I have as well. A lot of it comes down to the person on the receiving end. It’s almost like a security blanket like the more data that they’re given, the more confident they feel, even if they don’t understand it, but they just sort of feel like they’re in that power seat of give me all of the data, I want all of the data, I just want to know that we can pull the data collect the data, even if I don’t understand the data, I want to see that the chart is going up into the right even if it is meaningless, because then it’s like something that if someone questions like no look, data, look, we’re doing the thing. You know, and so I feel like a lot of it is it’s sort of like working out and exercising, it’s actually more of a mental game than it is a physical game. So the physical act of pulling the reports is not nearly as intense as the mental exercise of trying to get someone to understand. You don’t need to drown yourself in data in order to see that things are working. Christopher Penn I’ve never heard reported discuss the talk about as a security blanket, but that is is a really good analogy because yeah, it doesn’t actually serve any function like you don’t need it for warmth, you don’t need it for shelter. It’s literally just a, a emotional support object. So reporting as emotional support objects. Katie Robbert I, you know, I really do think that’s a lot of what it is because it’s this is this might be a little bit of a tangent, and you know, we’ll make sure that I pull it back into the recording and how we audit them. But, you know, a lot of times as people move up through the ranks in their professional career, they’re not often trained properly, it’s just sort of like you’ve been sitting in the seat. Therefore, now you get to move on to the next seat, but there’s no proper training in terms of what that next hire thing looks like. And a lot of times there’s not someone to teach them. Here’s what it’s supposed to look like, here’s what you’re actually responsible for. And so they pull those security blankets with them in the In the context of lots of reporting, because at least if you’re surrounding yourself by reporting and data and busy work and those things, then you look busy, you appear busy and, you know, data and data makes people feel better, even if it’s not doing something Christopher Penn that that makes sense. I mean, if that is really as long as more perception than it is the actual reality, because if you were, if you’re good at something, it actually doesn’t look like much like when you watch someone who’s like a master craftsman, like oh, yeah, bang, bang, done. Like, how did you do that? Is that took you 30 seconds, it would take me like five hours like that’s because you know, I’m an expert, and you’re not. But it’s interesting, because that then conflicts with the perception we have in our culture, have you got to look busy to look important, as opposed to being masterful in your techniques. So when it comes to reporting then what is masterful reporting look like? Because to me In that analogy, masterful reporting looks like two or three simple metrics on a dashboard, like, Hey, here’s the things that you’re actually gonna make decisions on. You need to know more, you know where to go get it. But it doesn’t look like someone’s cartoonish attempt at understanding a drawing like you know, us a spacecraft control panel, which, even that when you look at, like the control module of the SpaceX Dragon rocket, there’s not a lot out there. And by design, it’s only the essentials that you actually need to make decisions on there’s nothing superfluous because don’t cannot afford distractions. Katie Robbert Well, and that’s exactly it. So I don’t know what the dragon x dashboard thing is. But I can only imagine because we’ve all seen those reports that have like, you know, the half rainbow chart and then a pie chart and then a graph that goes up and then numbers and colors and Blinky keys and arrows and all kinds of things. But they don’t tell you anything and so Chris, to your point, a proper helpful report probably only has a couple of metrics on it. But then that then ask the question of, well, if I’m only pulling two metrics, what the heck am I doing with the rest of my time? And that’s sort of that’s where I’m trying to get into with the psychology of it. Because, you know, if you’re a masterful, it shouldn’t take you that long. Therefore, you can do other things. If you don’t know what else to do. That’s a whole separate issue. So, you know, this is something that you know, I always joke about with my friends, it’s like, I can get a lot of my job done in an hour, one hour a day, if I really buckle down and focus but I procrastinate, I get distracted. I work from home, my dogs need stuff, whatever. So it does take me you know, more like five or six hours. But if I really buckle down, it only takes me the one hour and then I’m like, Oh crap, what do I do with the other seven hours? Have my workday? Well, we’ve built a culture where, once you get your work done, you’re good. Just move on with yourself, like move on with your life. A lot of companies don’t operate that way. So I think that reporting becomes that default busywork thing will go pull more numbers, go pull more data, and really good efficient reports. You don’t have multiple pages, and you don’t have to look at everything. six ways to Sunday, because you have that one number that says, it’s working or it’s not. Christopher Penn Right. So how do we start tackling this problem? How do we start figuring out because there’s two aspects, there’s the reporting itself, which reporting is necessary and which isn’t. And then there’s the psychological aspects for the stakeholder. I need my security blanket. And for the producer, if the producer as you were saying with with level of competence that the proof producer isn’t super competent, if they’re not masterful, they may be creating reporting just to look busy. So So where do we Start. Katie Robbert So we start with, I know this will come as a huge surprise to you, we start with, what’s the question you’re trying to answer, we start with a plan. Because what we’ve seen over and over again, is that a lot of times an organization or a team will start with one report, and then someone somewhere else will say, Oh, can you add on this metric? And then someone somewhere else will say, Oh, can you add on this metric as well, and it’s sort of snowballs into, you know, months later, you’re then doing 10 versions of the same report. But you’re so buried in the day to day that you aren’t even aware that that’s what’s happening. And so it really takes a disciplined concerted effort to step back and say, What is the question that we are trying to answer with all of these reports? And are all of these reports absolutely necessary? And are there redundancies in those reports where I can create it once and then send it to multiple people? Or I can create it once and do different versions of the insights depending on the outcome? But I spend more of my time with the actions versus pulling the data. And that’s just something that I don’t think enough organizations and teams are doing is actually stopping. And taking a step back to say, what the heck are we trying to accomplish with all this data? Christopher Penn So what you’re saying is we need the vanilla ice approached, stop, collaborate and listen. Katie Robbert You know, I quote, you know, ice a lot. Because it’s, if you got a problem, yo, I’ll solve it. But no, I mean, but that’s exactly. You have to stop, collaborate, and listen. And the stopping part is the part that I think that scares people the most. Because, well, if I stopped doing this, then I’m not getting my job done. Or I’m missing something or I’m not collecting data. I can’t stop. I’m too busy. I can’t stop this is going on. I can’t stop whatever. And so it’s the actual stopping part that I think a lot of people struggle with, Christopher Penn is when we think about existing webinar on Friday with the folks over at marketingprofs. And one of the questions I was asked was, you know, in the realm of marketing technology, now, how do we evaluate dashboarding and reporting problems, such as I have these problems communicating these things, and I was like, you don’t have a technology problem that’s, you know, you have either sounds like either a people or a process problem. Which is a greater problem in this case to, to deal with, because the stopping problem is both a people and a process problem. How do you how do you cut out that? Katie Robbert Nine times out of 10, fixing a people problem is more challenging than fixing a process problem. You know, the sort of the benchmark that I always use for reporting is if I can’t figure out what this thing is saying in 10 seconds, it’s too complicated. If I can’t make a decision with this immediately, it’s too complicated. And that takes a lot of self awareness on my part of do I even understand what the problem is that we’re trying to solve and Am I over? And so there’s a lot of internal work that I had to do first to be able to get to that place where I said, You know what, what I’m doing isn’t good enough. It’s not efficient enough. Let me try it again. That’s a people problem. The process problem, once you identify should be fairly straightforward of how are we collecting this data? How are we reporting on this data? What is the output look like? What is the frequency and consistency of it? Those are things that you should be able to tweak along the way. It’s the people, it’s a little bit more challenging, because again, you’re talking about the psychology of it. And changing behaviors is a really difficult thing. So if you have executives who are used to getting, you know, 80 page reports, even if they don’t read the whole thing, you’re going to be you’re gonna have a really challenging time saying, we’re no longer going to deliver these 80 page reports. We’re going to send you a single page and it’s going to have all of the information you need. So then they’re going to say, Well, what do I do with the other 79 pages? Where’s that? The rest of that information, how can I make a decision? And so it’s the change management, that’s really going to be the most challenging part. Christopher Penn How do you get the executive to that level of awareness stuff? Because that sounds like Nirvana to be able to say, yeah, here’s, here’s what you need to make a decision based on conversations. And not only will it save you time, because you want to read 80 pages of fluff, you will make better decisions and you’ll make more money. In theory, the the executive should be like done, I’m all in. I know, in reality, like, but where’s my security blanket? Katie Robbert You know, I hate to say it, but I’m, I’m going to, I think it will get worse before it gets better. One of the approaches, this is not the only approach, but one of the approaches that I would take is actually showing them both versions. So you have the 80 page report. So you’ve already pulled the data, it should be fairly straightforward to distill it down to one page. And then you literally have to sort of handhold and walk them through, this is what it says here. But also, if you look at this one page report, you get all of the same information in a streamlined way. And it’s sort of that retraining of it’s okay to only have one page to make decisions on, because you have all of the information here. You know, that’s one approach. The other is, if sometimes working depends on the person is the cold turkey approach where you just say, I’m not doing the 80 pages anymore, here’s your one page report, good luck, you’re probably going to get a lot of resistance because you’re ripping off the band aid really quickly, and it’s painful and people don’t like that approach. So you probably have to take the longer route to get there. But if you go the longer route, the benefits will come long term. Christopher Penn Okay. And then on for the person who’s just trying to look busy, what do we do with them, particularly if they’re not very good at their job? Katie Robbert You know, I think that you start to really challenge them to, you know, document your process. What are you doing? We want to have full transparency into everything that you’re creating, or you give them an opportunity to step up and say, I want you to evaluate all of the different reports that you’re doing, I want you to present them to me as if I’m each different audience member so that I can get a sense of the value of all of these different reports. And that really gives that person the opportunity go, you know, what, you’re not really getting anything out of this report. Or you can sort of see if they’re kind of de essing their way through any of the insights, but really give them the opportunity to evaluate it on their own. And if they can’t, then that’s a different decision. Christopher Penn Yeah, because I, I can definitely see, there are folks that we’ve interacted with who they spend so much time and I’m guilty of this too. They spend more time on the methodology and a whole lot less time on the actual outcome when the stakeholder really doesn’t care how you got the number as long as it’s right. Katie Robbert Mm hmm. I mean, Chris, how many times have you handed me a report? And I’ve made it back to you and said, so what? Christopher Penn Only days I think and why. Katie Robbert So I guess a question for you, Chris, as someone who does generate a lot of reports, what is your what it how do you think about it? Like when you hand off a report? In your mind, Okay, I’m done. Here you go. Like Where? So where is that disconnect of the insights? Christopher Penn It depends, I think, reports feel a lot like farming right? In the sense of you. You have this initial draft, you have this first cut, but it’s not mature. It hasn’t hasn’t grown up yet hasn’t fully matured. And it takes cycles to get to that point of saying, Well, actually, no, we don’t need this part. Well, actually, no, we don’t need this part. It’s kind of like, what’s the old? The old quote that from Michelangelo? Like? Yeah. When asked, you know, how do you create sculptures from a block of marble so I just chip away everything that isn’t the sculpture. Which is not super helpful for the beginning artist, but clearly from his perspective, that’s what he’s doing. And I feel like reports are in some ways the same thing. Here’s the block, is that data, right? And you have to start chipping away at it until you figure out, Okay, these are the essential parts that are left. And that takes lots of feedback loops. Lots of how about this? Well, how about this? How about this until you get to a point where it’s, it’s good enough. And one of the challenges is that if the person you’re working with doesn’t have domain expertise, or or is operates at a certain level, then you and that person will interact in a way that will get to what that person needs. But if you’re trying to create something that is a higher level than either the two of you are capable operating at you’ll you won’t get there because it’s simply beyond your reach. And that’s one things I find myself challenged with when I’m writing code is I can write code to a certain level When building a report, but then if there are challenges after that it’s very difficult to figure out okay, well, what would be the even better way of doing this would be even better way of doing this? That’s, I think the part that, to your point about self awareness is lacking in a lot of reporting, is, you’re not asking the question often enough, well, what’s Is there a better way of doing this? Can I make this faster? Can I make this cleaner? Can I have fewer steps? Or can I make the code more efficient? And it’s hard? It’s really hard to do that. Because you have to know you have to know what you know, and you have to know what you don’t know. And that second bucket is the biggest obstacle I find for me personally, is I? I don’t know what I don’t know. Katie Robbert Well, and so you’re hitting upon one of the challenges is that you know, you’re confident in what you’re doing to say, I want to do these things faster so I can move on to something else. But for a lot of other marketers, there’s that insecurity of if I’m not doing this What else am I doing? And so there’s a resistance. And I’ve talked about this on other podcasts, there’s a resistance to do things faster and better and more efficiently, because then your job is automated away, and what else am I doing? I don’t have any other skills or I don’t have any other responsibilities. And am I automating myself out of a job? And so I think that, you know, one of the ways to sort of combat this analysis paralysis, where you have so many reports around you, and you doing so many reports is really challenge yourself to say, Can I take action with every single one of these data points that I’m putting on a PowerPoint slide? And that’s going to take a little bit time you know, you, you won’t necessarily get it all at once the first time it will, Chris, to your point, take a lot of feedback. But that’s one of the best ways to start with is this report efficient. But it’s also training you to really be thinking how those critters Thinking skills versus just, you know, punching in numbers and typing things and putting charts on a PowerPoint, like it’s giving you the opportunity to level up your thinking. And so when I look at a report, I’m always thinking, what can I do with this information? Can I take action on this? Or is this just awareness for me? So, you know, we know at Trust Insights, yeah, social media is great. But it’s not, it’s not something that we necessarily focus on. So if I’m looking at total number of followers, one of the metrics that I collect every month is, are the social media channels growing. And so you could argue, I don’t do a whole lot with that information. It’s more of an awareness. And so in my mind, it’s a are we growing? are we reaching a wider audience? But I don’t actively take steps with that data so I could stop collecting it. And so that’s the way that I would challenge someone to start thinking about that. tricks that they are collecting and sharing is, am I going to do anything with this information? So Chris, one of the analogies that you give a lot, which, you know, we should probably come up with a better one is it? Well, if you’re not going to, you know, change your behaviors, why are you going to step on the scale and look at how much you weigh? You know, so if you’re not going to start exercising more, or change your diet, why are you looking at the number because you’re just, you know, upsetting yourself or, you know, defeating yourself or whatever the thing is, if you’re not going to change the behavior with the number Why are you looking at it in the first place? Christopher Penn Yeah, I mean, we say it off often. data without decision is distraction. It’s the thing that also comes to mind is that, particularly for the report producers, there’s this mistaken belief that complexity indicates sophistication. And the opposite is true, Einstein said is a great quote, you know, the definition of genius is taking something complex and making it simple. You, as you level up your reporting skills, that’s, that’s what we aspire to, that’s where we want to go is to be able to have report that, yeah, your teenage kid could look at and go, Oh, I know what’s going on. As opposed to having something that is too complex, I get, you know, in an environment where you’re concerned about your job security, making something unnecessarily complex and fragile benefits you by making the organization dependent on you. But is that an organization you then want to work for? As opposed to if you can make something simple and then innovate something new, where you’re continually providing new value to the organization that in the long term makes you a much more valuable employee than somebody who is just, you know, one part in a machine that is easily broken? Katie Robbert Well, and again, you’re hitting upon the psychology of it. And so, you know, I think that we see a lot is people make things unnecessarily complicated to make them feel smarter, make them feel more valuable, make it harder for them to be replaced or automated away. And if you could, in a perfect world shed that insecurity, you could find that you could probably make your reporting a lot more efficient. And then you could spend your time doing other more valuable things, such as taking action on the data. But it’s the psychology piece, it’s the people part of the puzzle that makes it the most difficult. I couldn’t think of another p word for alliteration. Christopher Penn That’s okay. People always the problem anyway. So to wrap up, do an audit of what reports you have and what decisions you make from them. And if the answer is none, you have an opportunity to reduce that reports, production and its workload and be on the lookout for where the problem is in your organization. Is it a process problem, or is it a people problem that you’ve got with too much and too complex reporting, and make your decisions appropriately. If you have follow up questions about this or anything else we’ve talked about in this podcast, please drop into our free slack group go to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, you can join over 1200 other analytics professionals for free just a chat through all the different questions you have about analytics reporting data and find like that and as always stop by the Trust Insights website over TrustInsights.ai dot AI for things like our newsletter and blog and other fun stuff. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon take care want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss companies and individuals stuck in reporting nightmares. Why do we keep behaving like reporting vending machines, cranking out report after report, instead of focusing on building reporting systems that let our stakeholders get what they want, when they want it? Why are marketers resistant to automation, and what are some first steps towards embracing automation you can take to free yourself from reporting nightmares? Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-reportingautomation.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn Today, in this week’s in In-Ear Insights, we’re talking fundamentally about automation. So we’re having, doing some work last week with a client and looking at this massive spreadsheet of all these reports and spreadsheets and things like that. And in reviewing this, one of the things I thought was, Why are we Why is this this organization creating, you know, one off reports for every single ask, it’s so time consuming, and really not the best use of talent when you look at the collection of requests and say You could just put this in a dashboard, you could put this in like Google Data Studio, or Tableau or Domo, or the dashboarding system of your choice and hand it to the users. As long as it’s well designed, they should be able to figure out what it is with minimal explanation. But then they can self serve. They can get their data whenever they want it as often as they need it. And most importantly, for the analyst, you don’t have to essentially be the report machine. You know, the report then machine people come in and put it on, put a coin in pull, push some buttons, and you spit out a report. So Katie, why is it that organizations and people and and analysts are stuck in this space of I got to be the report vending machine, I got to spit the thing out, I got to do the thing. Instead of taking a step back and going, how can I make a system that will solve these requests forever, which will make everybody happy because I see analysts won’t be spitting out reports like a like a little, you know, crank box toy, and the users won’t have to wait, you know, hours. days maybe to get the information they need so they can make decisions faster. Katie Robbert There’s definitely a couple of different reasons. So one is, you know, depending on how large your team is, you may not realize that that’s what’s happening at all. It may be a, I’m constantly behind the eight ball, I just need to get the thing done. I don’t have time to think about the historical work that I’ve already done to say, I’ve done this report six times over, why do I have to do it again? So that’s one scenario. Another scenario is maybe use the analyst say, Hey, I already did this report for the sales team. Do you want to just use that report? And the marketing team says, No, I have a unique set of needs. I need to know exactly how this affects me personally, do this uniquely for me. And so there’s sort of the that’s the second reason and then the third reason, probably the most common reason is will I automate myself out of a job? And I think that there’s a lot of psychology that comes into this kind of a conversation because You’re talking about basically automating away the thing that you’re getting paid to do. Therefore, if it’s automated and you’re not doing it, what are you doing instead? And I think that that is probably the most common followed by, there is not enough time to step back and see that you already have this wide library of reporting. You know, not everybody knows how to automate, not everybody knows how to pull it into Google Data Studio, tell the story, oh, I can just spin up a dashboard, and it automatically works for me. Not everybody has the right systems in place to do that. So there’s a lot of different factors as to why these things aren’t being done. And once you can understand why, then you can start to solve for how do I fix it moving forward? Do I even want to fix it? So from where we sit? We always you know, we come at it from a different perspective. We always say yes, you do want to fix it, because the more you automate, the more time you have to do other valuable things. tasks, but we’re coming at it from an outside perspective, internally, there may be some hesitation, well, I don’t know if there are other valuable tasks for me to be doing. I used to work with a very large data team. And it was a struggle for years, myself and the director of engineering would approach them probably about once a quarter and say we have some ideas for automation, for how you’re reporting, which takes 60 days from start to finish, for one report, to be automated, and I got constant pushback from the team. And, you know, over time, we finally realized that they didn’t want to automate any of it because then they didn’t have the leg to stand on to say we need more money. We’re doing some very, you know, special, unique snowflake work, whatever the thing was, if we had automated it, the rest of the company would have been able to see that they didn’t need 10 people on the team that they probably only need about two or three. Christopher Penn So let’s let’s unpack that because I think I can see that both ways. When I was in high school, I worked as a summer admin at at&t and one of my jobs there, which was awful was to take 700 pages of printed paper every day, tally up the number of people who had rejoined at&t from like MCI or sprint back at the time on post it notes and then put that together into a spreadsheet that then got email that got printed out and handed off to the my next command. That took seven and a half hours a day. I said, this is really stupid. You’re printing out a spreadsheet, walking it two floors down so that I can rekey in the information. Can you just email me the spreadsheet and this was in the early 1990s. And person was like, what’s email like it’s this in draft coming up. But what ended up happening was I got to the point where this person emailed me the spreadsheet, I built a Visual Basic macro, super simple. Back then the just did the thing for me. And so within five minutes of my workday, I was essentially done with the day’s worth of work, I spent the rest of the day wandering around the building aimlessly, which is great for as a summer intern, obviously, they no longer need that position, because five minutes to work with one push of a button. But the other side is if you stop being the system and you create the system, someone has to maintain the system and the more automation you create, the more complex the system gets until you reach a point where the system cannot function without you as the maintainer and operator of it. And so increases at least from my perspective, increases your job security because now nobody knows how the heck the thing works. Except you and and you’ve clearly demonstrated it’s indispensable. And so I don’t I don’t understand the mindset of if I do this out of my myself out of a job and stuff. If I do this, I’ll be even more indispensable. How do you how do you resolve that? That brain space? Katie Robbert Well, I guess I want to take a step back for a second. And not everybody knows where to start how to automate. So you know, you’re talking about creating macros in my brain, like, do I even know how to create a macro? I don’t know that I do. Or if I do, it’s buried deep within the recesses of my brain. And so, you know, you, Chris are unique in the fact that you approach everything with, I can solve this with code, because you know how to code or that’s just how your brain is sort of wired to think about solving a problem. A lot of marketers aren’t wired that way, or they’ve never had an opportunity to think about it that way. And so that’s where I think the hesitation is, is perhaps they see that automation might be a solution, but they don’t even know where to start. You know, and so we’ve talked with a lot of clients and a lot of other marketers where, yes, they’re aware of Google Data Studio, but they don’t know how to start with a system like that. Whereas to you and I, it’s a very simple system. But we’ve been working with it for a long time. So I think before we can get into how do we, you know, sort of the psychology, where does someone even start? If they know nothing about automation? I mean, Christopher Penn to me, you start with curiosity, you have to have that, that impulse to say, How can I do this better? You know, the rule encoding is you should never copy and paste more than twice, right? If you copy and paste more than twice, twice, you should be writing, you know, a routine before it. But the very beginning of your journey starts with that curiosity of Is there a better way to do this? One of the perennial cliches is there’s an app for that, right. There’s an app for everything. There’s a reason why the MAR tech landscape has an 8000 solutions on it because there literally is an app for that whatever that is. And so, I would say the for the knowledge technical person, the first step on the journey is just to ask the question, is there an app for that? Is there a way to do this in an automated fashion and start googling, you know, even if it’s something as simple as when I do my month, my morning blog post, I have a keyboard shortcut because there’s an app that just lets you store essentially templates, right? And instead of having to copy and paste from a an Evernote notebook or whatever, just hit two keys on my keyboard, it spits out my blog template, okay, that’s not fully automated, but it’s, it saves me 510 15 minutes a day. And if folks start thinking, Oh, what are the things I just do over and over and over again, is there a way to at least automate some of it to start trimming away not, you know, just open up our studio or Jupiter notebook and start writing code? that’s unrealistic. But could I create a keyboard shortcut that just copies and pastes my email signature, I created a keyboard shortcut that would put up a blog post templates. I don’t have to do this. You’ve been doing a tremendous amount with Asana. task management software in terms of like, Here’s just the templates for how we do this sort of thing so that it’s not a machine doing all of it. But it’s a defined process. And there are ways they’re compressed some of the tasks into easily copy paste of things. So I would say that’s the start of it. How do you think about when you’re building a system of processes, making it efficient and, and repeatable Katie Robbert documentation? That’s where I always start. And so because I am someone where I can’t just abstractly visualize something, I can’t start googling for a question. I need to start to write out what the heck am I even doing? And so for me, it always starts with, Alright, let me literally write out step by step. What I am doing in this thing to see, you know, do I do the same stuff more than once and I, you know, we get you and I get to the same conclusion, we just approach it a bit. Because I need to see okay, step one, open your browser. Step two, find this application. Step three, click on this button. And so that’s the way that my brain needs to process it. But once I get that system, you know, set up those steps right now, then I can start to see Oh, okay, now, I’m going to highlight this step here, because this is where I might be able to save myself some time. This is where I maybe might be doing it the long way. It makes me think back to when I was running the development team. You know, we also had QA under us and one of the quote unquote, newer things to the team, not to the industry, in general was automated testing. And so we would struggle with our release dates because the way that the software was built, we had to test it on a variety of different operating systems and browser combination. All the way from like Windows 95, windows, you know, 10, I think we were on or Windows XP, which was a horrendous thing. But we forget about that now. But the point being is that we also had to been tested on Firefox and Internet Explorer and Chrome. And so all those different combinations. And so we had two people in our QA department, testing all of those different combinations plus trying to juggle the priorities of other product teams around the company. And so one day we were talking and somebody said, Did you know that we could build automated test scripts, and we all just sort of took an audible gasp and said, What? And it became this debate of like, Well, you know, can we trust the automation and what does that mean? And so eventually, we were able to come to a consensus that we could automate some of the testing, the very routine testing where you basically go in a straight line through the website and the product, and that the QA engineers would test the new stuff. Because you always need to make sure you’re testing the original stuff to make sure it doesn’t break. And it was an interesting process to go through. Because I learned a lot about the psychology of the team, the insecurities of the team. What happens if I’m automating, but once they sort of got over that hump of automation wasn’t the enemy. It freed up so much more time of the QA team and the development team to do more and more things. And they kept saying, what else can we automate? What else can we automate? And so we almost kind of created this automation monster. But it took a lot of documenting what’s happening, making sure there was a lot of transparency and it wasn’t something that happened overnight. It took quite a few months for us to get up and running with this automation. And I think that’s sort of the other thing I think about when approaching automation is it’s not an instantaneous solution is something that does take planning is something that does take maintenance. You can’t just, you know, declare automation and suddenly everything is working on its own like little, you know, magical machine cogs. Like you have to put a lot of thought into it. Christopher Penn I think it’s a really good example because it speaks to that very binary mindset. A lot of people operate in either you’re not automated or you’re fully automated and you’re out of a job immediately, right. And it’s much more like cooking like you don’t walk into the kitchen as somebody who’s untrained and immediately make a five course meal, right? You start with making toast or boiling some water for for pasta, and you know, yes, there are some people who do manage to burn boiling water, but for the most part, you start small you start in little phases and you work your way up to eventually be able to cook a large dinner or for dinner party, things like that. And automation i think is no different where if you’re trying to go from zero to using Watson Studio, yeah, you’re gonna fail, right there’s you’re not going to succeed because it’s it’s too big a jump But if you go from no automation to, let’s just start copying and pasting our templates instead of manually typing everything. And then you move to one of there’s a app that I can use as a keyboard shortcut to paste my template for me. And then you go to, I wonder if there’s an app that will schedule that for me. So I don’t even have to remember to do that. And you like you said, You ladder your way up. I think there’s two different sorts of personalities, maybe more than two. But I think we, we sort of embody that, well, there’s the process person who can write out the thing, and then diagnose and say, like, here’s where these things go, are clearly repetitive. And then there’s sort of like the technology and tools person who goes, Well, I have a tool for that I have a tool that can do that. I have a tool that can do that. And you kind of need both. Where I think a lot of marketers fall down is that the non technical marketer doesn’t have that buddy in it or marketing technology that they have beers with on a Friday and say, hey, how would How would you tackle this? Right? How would you do this thing Hey, have you ever run across a tool that does this? And I think that’s a great place to get started. is having that person go? Oh, well, yeah, you could just write, you know, a three line macro would do that for you. And then and now you’re starting to have the language you need to be able to say, okay, there’s a thing called macros. How do I start googling for what is a macro? How do I use macros? And that I think will help people start their journeys? Katie Robbert Well, you just hit upon two specific things that I want to talk about. So one, you mentioned templates. Templates are probably the easiest baby step into automation. And so, you know, if you’re creating the same report month over month, and what you’re finding after a few months is the only thing changing is a couple of numbers. Stop recreating it from scratch. And I know that, you know, a lot of marketers might be rolling your eyes like Yeah, no kidding. But it’s amazing where what you know, versus what Do are two very different things and it is a discipline. And so knowing that you should create a template and having an using a template, you know, that’s a really easy step into automation. And you’ll find like, okay, the narrative never changes. The executive summary never changes, the intro never changes. So why am I recreating it every single time trying to, you know, wordsmith it to make it sound new and fun and interesting, when I know my executives don’t even read it. That’s a whole separate issue. That’s a separate thing. You know, so start with a template start with an email template. This is actually something I was talking about with one of our contractors, she said, Well, if you just have an email template, then I can send out the email on your behalf. And I’ll just use the template and I was like, Oh, yeah, I guess I don’t have to rewrite it every single time and then, you know, and it was just one of those like, aha moments. If that will save me, not a lot of time, but it will save me some time. And eventually, these things, these tiny little small moments of automation add up to a bigger amount of time. You know, the other thing, I guess there’s two other things, Chris, that you had mentioned was starting too big. And I think that that’s where a lot of those automation projects or those attempts fail, is trying to automate everything all at once, when really start small and pick those little moments that you feel very comfortable with. Like if I just automate this one thing. That will save me a little bit of time, if I decide to make these two things that will save me some time. The third thing I just wanted to touch upon, Chris, that you had mentioned was, you know, marketers having that friend, that technical minded friend, I think the trap that a lot of us fall into is we think we need to know, all of it solely ourselves. And so if I’m a more traditional offline marketer, and I don’t know a lot about digital, I immediately assume what I know To You know, learn everything I can about digital, I need to learn everything I can about tech in it and solve this problem myself when to your point, Chris, that’s really not true. There are a lot of other people out there who are willing to help and collaborate. And automation a lot of times is a collaborative effort. And so don’t be afraid to ask around. Have Has anyone done this? Or do you know of any tools? Or, you know, whatever the question is, I guess the fourth thing is when I go out for beers on a Friday night, I’m not talking about work. Christopher Penn That’s fair. Well, if we’re just paying for it, you could talk about talk America. How’s that? Fair enough. I think that’s a great point to wrap up on, which is, you know, use the power of the community who have access to and if you don’t have access to a community, I’ll put in a quick plug here. Go join the Trust Insights analytics for marketers Slack, go to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers is over 1000 marketers and they’re asking all kinds of tech To go and non technical questions about marketing analytics, I had a question this morning about how do how do you benchmark a company for Acquisition compared to its peers? Lots of questions. So if you have these technical questions like hey, has anyone ever done x stop on by and asked totally free to join? That’s TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics for marketers. If you have questions about this episode or any other over to the website, TrustInsights.ai dot AI, drop us a line and say hi and we’ll talk to you soon take care want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, take the audio version of Trust Insights Competitive Social Media Analytics class, taught by Christopher Penn. Want to watch the full version? Click here to access it. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/competitivesocialmedianalytics.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Hi, my name is Christopher Penn chief data scientist at Trust insights.ai. And welcome to this masterclass on competitive social media analytics strategy. Well, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? today what we’re going to be going through is the what the why and the how of using data, data driven competitive social media analytics, for your strategy to figure out how to get more out of your social media. So let’s get started. We’re going to switch things around here. This class is rated, well, it’s not rated but the theory the ideas, the concepts appropriate for everybody. The application, the some of the techniques we’re going to show are really appropriate for the most advanced practitioners of social media marketing, data driven social media marketing. So if you feel like things suddenly get really intense It’s okay, you can go back and watch this as many times as you want while while this is available, and if you have questions, my contact information is available at the end. So let’s talk about competitive social media analytics and just competitive social media strategy. What What do people want? What does what did the executives want? In the 2019 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of CEOs? They were asked what data do they want? And what are they getting three of these categories data about your brand and reputation, data about risks to which the business is exposed, and benchmarking data on the performance of your industry. peers are all competitive data points, right? These are all competitive data sets. CEOs are saying, you know, 90% 93% 85% of CEOs want this information and see it as critical or important to their work. Of course, how many of them are getting it? 2422 and 18% this is not good news for marketers, right? Because we’re, we’re not delivering what the C suite really desperately wants us to be giving them. And it’s too bad because in so many ways if we had that competitive data that analytics that shed some light on what our competitors were up to, we could be transforming our marketing, even more impactfully then social media from the 2019. The August 2019, cmo survey Chief Marketing Officer survey, CEO CMOS were asked what degree does the use of marketing analytics contribute your company’s performance? And it is rated higher than mobile marketing and social media marketing. So analytics, the use of data and unlocking its secrets is vitally important. When CMOS were asked, what quality knowledge assets do you have that you think a highest competitive intelligence, rated third out of six which is really quite shocking, you know, this is on a scale of one to seven CMOS don’t have the data either or they do. They don’t think it’s great quality. So let’s talk about why this is what is it we’re struggling with as marketers. As social media marketers, we’re having a real hard time proving the value of what we do. Right social media. Again cmo survey makes no headway on contributions to company performance, none. In terms of No, no changes for the better. CMOS believe that social media contributes not really to company performance. This is bad news. If we are the social media managers, right, if we are trying to make a case for increased budgets, more adventurous experiments, we’re not showing that we’re making good headway here. And this is the one that personally drives a stick through my heart. The use of analytics to make decisions has been up and down, it’s kind of going in the right direction. But still, six out of 10 companies are not using data to make decisions. And when we think about a competition, if we’re in that six out of 10 group and our competitions in the four out of 10. And we know that marketing analytics delivers higher impact than social media, we could be in a whole lot of trouble. What’s the impact? Well, no surprise, if our competitors are using analytics to make decisions and watching us and we’re not watching them, we’re going to lose, we’re going to lose money, we’re going to lose opportunity. And worst case scenario might even lose our employment if our if our company goes under. Now, I’m not saying social media analytics alone would would drive us out of business, but it would be symptomatic of greater problems within the organization. So why are we talking about competitive analytics? Don’t we have enough to worry about with our own data? Yes. We do and that’s a topic for another class. But competitive data matters for three major reasons. Number one, we want to understand the conversations, the context, the landscape of what’s happening in our industry. And we can watch ourselves and our audiences is that’s great. But there’s a bias there, right? people interact with us, because they like us, or they like us enough to interact with us anyway. Or they want to have some sort of meaningful interactions with us, whether it’s customer service complaints, or what have you. But it’s all biased towards us. If we don’t offer certain product service. If we don’t think in a certain way, if we don’t appeal to a certain kind of audience. We may never know that the market opportunity is greater. Competitive analytics gives us the ability to see that bigger picture. Maybe, you know, the coffee shop down the street has got lattes, and we don’t we don’t know that that’s missing from our repertoire. Because if we just monitor our conversations, unless a customer says Hey, why don’t you have lattes? We might never Know that Oh, actually, that’s something people want. But if we were monitoring our competitor, and all of them are saying off their customers saying, I love the cinnamon Spice Latte. Well, now we know that something’s missing. So that’s the first reason. The second reason we want to see what’s working. Social media. Marketing is difficult. It is difficult, and it’s getting more and more difficult every day unless you’re just swiping the credit card repeatedly. And you know, putting more dollars into Mark Zuckerberg pockets. So we want to know what’s out there. We want to see the best of the best what’s working, what can we be doing to improve our social media? And one of the best ways to do that is to look at our competitors and to see what’s working for them. Are they doing some things that we could conceptually do ourselves? Are we doing some things that they’re not doing, we need to know what’s working. And third, especially in the process of content creation for social media. Sometimes you get stuck in a rut and you want Find those ideas for inspiration, get a sense of what’s, what’s out there? what’s possible, what are some creative ideas that we could use to maybe add a little pizzazz to the work that we’re doing? So we go as I say, let’s do some competitive analysis. And then we go and do it wrong. And what do I mean by doing it wrong? We treat competitive analysis like we’re spending time on Tinder, right? Just start browsing through profiles, swipe left, swipe right, it looks cool. And doing it very unscientifically, we just kind of fumble around Bumble around I guess, if you want to extend the analogy. And we don’t approach it from a scientific logical perspective to understand what works, what doesn’t and why we should be paying some attention to some things and not other things. It’s super easy. Just look at someone’s profile and, you know, read a few posts and call that competitive analysis. And I suppose it is, but it’s not scientific and we’re talking about data driven, competitive social media analytics. data driven means we make decisions with data. We don’t rely on gut. We don’t rely on instinct. Those can be important later on. But when we’re approaching a problem from a data driven perspective, we want to look at data and then make decisions from it. Remember, only four out of 10 companies are using data to make decisions. So there’s a lot of opportunity in every industry, for you to be the one making decisions with data and getting those extra benefits that we solve because again, market analytics contributes more to company performance, and social or mobile by themselves. So what are we going to need? How do we get started with this can’t just go swipe their profiles, apparently, we’re going to need different kinds of data and as ideally as much as is available about our competitors. So we will need things like what content they’re posting. If we have the opportunity to look at some of the rich media that they’re creating. Link They’re sharing audiences that they’re appealing to engagement metrics, ads and sponsorships, all sorts of information, anything that’s available that’s publicly available without doing anything unethical. We want that data and we want to be able to analyze to understand what is out there. Now, here’s where almost every competitive social media analysis goes wrong. People start gathering all this data, and then they immediately

What data should you look at to decide marketing strategy? How do you use that data with a shoestring budget during leaner times? In this episode, Katie and Chris walk through common Google Analytics metrics that lend themselves well to marketing strategy decisions, and a KPI decision framework. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-shoestringstrategy.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn This is In-Ear Insights the Trust Insights podcast. AI Academy for marketers is an online education platform designed to help marketers like you understand pilot and scale artificial intelligence. The AI Academy features deep dive certification courses have three to five hours, along with dozens of short courses 30 to 60 minutes each taught by leading AI and marketing experts. Join Katie robear, CEO of TrustInsights.ai in me Christopher Penn chief data scientist to Trust Insights for three of our courses in the academy five use cases of AI for content marketing intelligence, intelligent attribution modeling for marketing, and detecting and mitigating bias in marketing AI. The Academy is designed for manager level and above marketers and largely caters to non technical audiences, meaning you don’t need a programming background or background in data science to understand and apply what you learn. One registration gives you unlimited access to all the courses and invitation to a members only slack instance, access to new courses every quarter. Join now and save $100 off registration when you go to Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy and use registration code pen 100. Today, that’s Trust insights.ai slash AI Academy and use registration code pen 100. Today, in this week’s In-Ear Insights, we’re talking strategy data and what to do when you don’t have Oh, I don’t know, a million dollars worth of talent and hardware and software and code and all that stuff. So, Katie, what’s going on? What is the strategy on a shoestring? Katie Robbert Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about, you know, the current situation that a lot of us find ourselves in where businesses slowed down. Maybe it’s because it’s seasonal, maybe because there’s other things going on in the economy. But that doesn’t mean that businesses don’t still need to move forward and figure out their next moves. And so a lot of questions that we’ve been seeing is How do I know what to do? You know, when the world opens up? You know, we’re, as we’re recording this, we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic. And a lot of questions have been like, how do we know what our next moves are? Or what do I do next? And so it really started to make me think well, what resources do people already have or should already have, that will help them reset their strategy without having to spend a million dollars? And my go to and I think Chris, your go to is always will start with the data that you do have. And for us, that’s primarily Google Analytics data, and Google Analytics, you can have a free account tied into your website, it captures a lot of information about your prospects and your customers that can help you understand, here’s what I should do next. And Google Analytics doesn’t cost you anything other than your time. Christopher Penn True There is the minor challenge, though that it is, it’s kind of like a frying pan, right? In that if you don’t know how to cook, and you don’t know what you’re doing with it and things, it has limited utility it is it’s good. And you know, if someone gave me a nice cast iron pan for free, I would not say no to us. But if I didn’t know how to cook, I might, you know, duct tape to the front of the car something as you know, as a very small piece of armor, as opposed to using it for its intended purpose. So when something goes wrong, particularly with Google Analytics, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity for people to misinterpret the data. So when you’re thinking about marketing on a shoestring now, we like to say if you have time, but no money, you have to learn it if you have money, but no time you have to buy it. What’s the balance? When you look at the average business, where’s the balance, acknowledging the fact that we are biased towards a heavier use of data than most? Katie Robbert Well, if you’re talking about balance, You know, we started this conversation saying like things have slowed down, that then makes the assumption that you have time. Google Analytics a lot along with a lot of other software systems have a lot of really good free training resources. There’s the Google Analytics Academy. So if you’re finding yourself with time, this is a great time to learn how to use Google Analytics properly, how to set up your accounts properly, how to set up Tag Manager properly, this is a great opportunity to do that. So that when you’re collecting data that kind of makes you scratch your head. You have a starting place to say, okay, that doesn’t look right. Let me try to troubleshoot it myself, because I’ve done a lot of this training on my own. You know that there’s a lot of communities where if you just drop in a question, somebody is more than willing to talk at you for hours on end about everything that you’re doing wrong, but within that, you may get some useful information. Not that I’ve had that experience myself. Christopher Penn Well, what I would say, well, in terms of communities, do you want to join analytics? Can you go to analytics for marketers go to Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, and join our free slack community where, if you’d like, we will talk to you for hours. That’s true. Katie Robbert But you know, the question about balance is you should as a company, you should have some data that tells you something about the health of your website, your digital properties, assuming you have digital properties. If you don’t, then you probably have financial data, customer data, transactional data, you should have some of that in some place. And I think that that’s really the starting point is, you know, trying to figure out what do you have? Christopher Penn I’m actually going to pull a you and say, actually, that’s it. That’s not the best starting point. The best starting point is To have a plan and a strategy that that looks at, what is the goal you’re trying to achieve? If there’s no actual gold, and you know, for example, if you run a roadside coffee shop stand in the middle of nowhere. And all the other people who come in are the locals who live in the town. And, you know, there’s no internet access, whatever, you don’t really need to Google Analytics, right? You just you need to be putting out flyers on trees to remind people you exist. But more importantly, and I think this is important, because what goes along with what you said, If you make a list of those metrics from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel operations wise, ask yourself at each stage, you could just just do this on a sheet of paper. Can I measure this in Google Analytics? Can I measure this in Google Analytics? Can I measure close sales? Can I measure you know shopping carts filled whatever it is in your business, and you have to work until you get to a point where you say yes, so like for us, we’re a b2b business. We can’t measure sale in Google Analytics of like our consulting services, we can actually measure a lead that’s been generated from someone downloading a white paper. So for us, we have to figure out what are the things we can measure? And then what are the things that are beyond that measurement, we have to do inference. And if you don’t have that map, you run the risk of trying to try to measure things you can’t measure, which we’ve had a lot of conversations with, you know, prospective customers saying, Well, how do I measure this? Well, you can’t, or you measure too much of the wrong stuff. And you’re like, here’s my dashboard with 500 widgets and dials and, and things and your stakeholders go, I don’t see why this is important. Katie Robbert So Chris, from your perspective, how do you solve that problem? Christopher Penn It really is like the gap, that sheet of paper and you start mapping, you know, from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, here’s the data I have, like you said, here’s what we have. Here’s what we know. Can I measure this in Google Analytics? If this is the tool that you’re going to use? Can I measure this in Google Analytics? Yes or no? To your point about learning, the things you can measure, you say yes, the things you can’t measure, you say no, but it’s a good chance. For many marketers, there’s gonna be a bunch of I don’t know if I can. And I think that’s the best place to start your learning journey from a professional development perspective is there’s gonna be a whole bunch of I don’t know, is filling those I don’t know it was go learn that specific thing. Go to Stack Overflow, go to Google Analytics forums, go to analytics for markers and ask, Is this something that you could measure in Google Analytics? And if it is great, if it’s not, how could I start to pick away at that? Katie Robbert So to bring it back to the original topic of strategy on a shoestring. One of the reasons w

In this episode of In-Ear Insights (the @TrustInsights podcast), Katie and Chris discuss generation gaps, audience demographics, and what to do when your analytics indicates you’ve got the wrong audience. How do you conduct market research and then pivot based on the results? Tune in now to find out. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-audiencemarketresearch.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn In this week’s in ear insights we are talking about the generational gaps and 10 changes in audience data. How do you understand what a group of people that you’re marketing to is thinking? If you are not in that group of people? Katie, you want to set the stage for how we came about this? Katie Robbert Yeah, absolutely. So we were asked by one of our clients last week about they’re starting to think about their 2021 planning, and they’re trying to figure out how to propose certain initiatives and within that comes from research and They are a company that you know is business to consumer. So they’re trying to reach younger generations, the you know, 18 to 30 year old, the 30 to 40 year old, and trying to understand those behaviors and where those particular sets of consumers get their information and how they behave online. And it started to go down this conversation of they have a desktop website that’s a little bit old and clunky, and no real mobile experience, no real app or anything. And so we started doing that research. And we very quickly realized that the younger generations they’re trying to target are 100% on mobile. And so that comes up with a really interesting question of, you know, how do you pivot to reach that audience? Or will you even because is your product something they even want or are interested in and so, it just started, you know, making me think As someone who I’m personally not great on social media, it’s just not my thing. I don’t really, really enjoy it. But there’s all these new social media apps, you know, you have Tick Tock and I mean, Lord knows, I’ll probably name a bunch of things that aren’t even real things. And so it just sort of got the wheel spinning of like, how do you reach those audiences in an authentic way where they’re not looking at it going, Grandpa cut it out? Like this is my thing. Christopher Penn Well, what do you do this? How do you how do you develop empathy for a group that is not you? So you know, obviously, there’s some things for example it with with all the different current events, I will never and you and I will never know what it is truly like to be a black American, right? It’s just simply because we are not that thing, but we can develop empathy. So how do you develop empathy in a repeatable, almost scientific way? Katie Robbert It’s a lot of fun. listening. And it’s listening to actual conversations, not just reading what people have posted online, because there’s a lot of missing, you know, inflection in the terms, there might be sarcasm, there might be sadness, there might be different emotions that you can’t get necessarily from just reading something. So you actually have to take the time and put in the effort to stop and talk to these audiences that you’re trying to target. And so if I was the client, and I said, I want to bring on the 18 to 25 year old, you know, audience segment, I need to find a bunch of 18 to 25 year olds and talk to them and learn their behaviors. Because I might be targeting them and trying to learn how they behave online. But ultimately, they might say, I’m not even interested in your product. Why are you Why are you bothering with me? This is not how we are operate. Um, one of the reasons why this came up for me was I saw, you know, a friend of mine was selling his car and he has two teenagers and someone had made the comment. Why don’t you just hold on to the car for them as a first car? And he said, Oh, well, they don’t see a reason to drive. They have Uber. They think driving is for old people. And it was one of those moments where it just sort of, I filed it away for later because it was Oh, okay. The younger generation really does do things so drastically differently from even my generation. And I’m what like Gen Y don’t really know. But like, you know, I don’t feel like I’m that far off from that age group. But yet somehow we’re, you know, millions of miles apart. I don’t know. I mean, Christopher Penn I don’t feel like you are millions of miles apart in. One of the things that always I keep in the back of my head for situations like this is what you know, Jeff Bezos built Amazon. Which is focus on the things that don’t change, like the how you get around has changed for that generation, for example. But the fact that they still need to get around has not changed, right? So they still need to get from point A to point B. So if your market is people who drive cars, then yes, that that 18 year old Tiktok sensation may not be the person but their driver sure is because they need the services to keep their their car in good running order. But I think it it’s when you step back, there’s the market research aspect, which is super important, but I think you’re right. There’s also the the persona level research where you maybe, you know, so some of the higher end market research firms do this. They have people who just shadow your subject audience for a day, you know, they sit in your house, and you obviously get paid to show up today, but just observing how this Done. Edison research, did a phenomenal piece on smart speakers watching people how use how they use them, and had people in you know, of people’s homes and stuff and discovered like for a certain segment of the audience, predominantly elderly people, those smart speakers are actually conversation companions like they they do something to, you know, hold off loneliness and stuff. And this was just fascinating to see that behavior again, focusing on something that doesn’t change, you still want some kind of interaction with your environment. So, when we look at something like a tick tock, for example, when you look at that, what do you see that is consistent with human behavior? Katie Robbert So first off, disclaimer, I have never opened tik tok in my life. I don’t have it as an app on my phone. And it was only recently I’m still like, Is it like vine? Is it Instagram? I don’t know. So you know, but the The commonality is that sense of community that sense of? Well, part of it is the look at me look at me generation wear, look what I can do. I tied my shoes, I have to put it online. That’s something I’ll never understand. And that makes me an old fuddy duddy. But like, it is it’s that sense of connection and community. That is the common thread through all social media. Christopher Penn is there’s a lot of self validation. Yeah. And to your question, it is an awful lot like mine. Good. So then as a marketer, if people are still looking for validation, if people are still looking for the approval of their peers, if they are still, some of them are aspiring to be the next Kardashians or whatever. How do you then work with that if you’re if you are trying to essentially recruit these people to your audience and your product or services important but seen as not essential by that bad group of folks. How do you connect the bridge? How do you use empathy to connect that bridge? Katie Robbert Well, it sounds like you’re starting to go down the road, a little bit of influencer marketing and using Tiktok as your source of influencers versus, you know, Instagram or Facebook. But, you know, it’s, again, I think it all comes down to having that conversation of do we even have anything that you and your peers would be interested in? You know, what can we do differently? And I think that that’s a question that a lot of companies Well, first of all, I don’t know that a lot of companies are reaching out directly to talk to those folks. I mean, we know that there’s still a large portion of companies that aren’t even using data to make decisions. So I would be surprised if they were also then creating focus groups of different audience segments to figure out you know, your thoughts and opinions and behaviors, but in the event that they are, I think it’s asking the question of We even have anything that you’re interested in. You know, you mentioned Edison research, another great company that focuses on user behavior is IDEO. And they’re out of Boston. And they spend an enormous amount of time shadowing people, and just watching how they go about their daily, you know, tasks and where they struggle and where there’s room for improvement. And that is the kind of user research that a lot of companies don’t do. They really sort of put this controlled little website in front of you and say, hit this button, okay. Everybody could find the button good. We checked the box on user research, we’re done. We can launch our website. But that’s not really the kind of user research that’s needed. In the case, like the one that we’re talking about where you’re trying to break into a whole different demographic, and you know nothing about their behaviors. You just have a lot of assumptions. Christopher Penn Yeah, it’s basically anthropology. You have to go in and study the Though the the Unknown Speaker needles in while? Yeah, Katie Robbert that’s exactly it. It’s a lot like anthropology and I think that that is a huge skill set needed for marketers. Christopher Penn And it’s something that for good or ill machines cannot do reliably yet we are getting there with some things like facial recognition and stuff, which of course brings a whole other entirely different discussion topic for another episode. But the other thing that I think of companies are missing is there’s no overall strategy to your point. Is this the market for us? You know, or do we need a product marketing campaign for us to build a product that does serve that audience’s needs and I think there’s there is a massive gap there where Yeah, if you have, say, a brand new grill cleaning spray for your your charcoal grill there’s a certain audience that that uses that product or service and trying to market it to apartment dwellers who aren’t even allowed to have any kind of grill seems like a bit of a mess. So there’s there’s some aspect of that. So the question would be for that company, what else can you make for this? We did some work a while ago for food and beverage company, where they were trawling through their customer inboxes. And we’ve identified there were two new products on the market that they were being asked, Do you have a formulation to help stabilize these things? And they’re like, we don’t even know what these things I didn’t know what they were either. I’d never heard of him. But to your point, there’s a lot of listening that could go into that. Even if it’s just looking at your customer service inbox, where else should people be listening? Katie Robbert I mean, social media is a good place to start. But I would definitely caution you that that is not the only source of data that you should be using because there is, you know, social media is a tough place to get really true. Good opinions, social media tends to be a very emotional place where people leave their remarks, you might do better in more private or targeted forums, like specific Reddit forums or sub forums, you know, reviews of similar companies. So Yelp reviews, Google reviews, just to start to get the lexicon of how people talk about things to start to get their language. So at the very least, you can repeat back to them things that they are comfortable hearing like words and terms and phrases, but you know, there you can’t, you’re absolutely right AI cannot have that conversation with someone and get that insight. So I would say, you know, the thing that’s the missing step is that either a focus group or a one on one interview with you know, your target customer base, because you need to understand sort of those like nuances of body language and the nuances tone and certain word choices. And, you know, sometimes the things that aren’t said are just as powerful as the things that are said and the pauses and the silences. Christopher Penn The challenge for some companies is that market research is, as our friend Tom Webster says reassuringly expensive to do all How do you tackle that when you do not have reassuringly large budgets? Katie Robbert You know, there are smaller ways to start. I mean, obviously, you’ve done your data collection with your social listening and your customer complaint office, but, you know, maybe it’s a small Gen pop survey, you know, just to start to get a little bit more color into opinions and behaviors. Or maybe it’s, you know, starting a free community for certain interests and then asking questions there. It’s, it’s a lighter weight, ask. You know, it’s not that in depth big market research project, but at least that You’re getting the right kinds of people that you want to be attracting into your audience base. You know, once you’ve done some of those things, maybe you can say, Hey, I don’t have a huge budget, but perhaps I could talk to one or two people for 20 minutes and just sort of ask them more in more questions to get information that will help further my research. So I think there’s it doesn’t have to be a big blown out. But I don’t know that you can completely skip over the talking to people, regardless of your budget. Christopher Penn Okay. How do you get around though, confirmation bias because a lot of things companies do wrong really wrong with researches. A silly example is how much you like our product a lot. Really a lot of super love your product, right? Katie Robbert Oh, yeah, that’s a tough one. Designing any kind of research. It is. It’s a different skill set. And it’s not something that marketers inherently have. It doesn’t unless you take a market research course you’re not going to be taught how to properly, you know, do survey construction and, you know, develop unbiased questions. So, you know, do a little research on your own. You know, it might be sort of googling around for best practices for creating an unbiased market research survey. I’m sure those resources exist. Again, joining a community like the one that we have. It’s TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics for marketers. It’s a free slack community, you can ask those questions in a community to say, Hey, I have a list of survey questions. Can someone eyeball these to see if they they look biased or not? And so it’s getting that gut check against the work that you’re creating, don’t create it in a vacuum. You know, it’s it’s tough because budgets are really small right now, but you want to do the best work, you want to continue to grow and scale and so it’s really trying to think differently around the resources that you have at your disposal. Maybe using them in a way that you didn’t think you could. Christopher Penn For a product marketing perspective, how do we pivot? If we know we have something that our desired target audience doesn’t want, right? At what point? Do we say we need to start r&d? Like right now? Or do we try to adapt something? How do we tackle that? Katie Robbert Well, I think first and foremost, if you know, you have something that your target audience doesn’t want, don’t continue to try to shove it down their throats and say, buy this thing. I know, eventually, I’m going to wear you down, you’re gonna want it, which unfortunately, I do see a lot of companies do they’re not willing to pivot because it can be costly. And so again, it starts with collecting that information from that target audience of what do you want? And then really taking a hard look at the services that you have or the products and saying, Is there something that we can pivot to, you know, be adaptable to create something for this audience? Maybe maybe we don’t. I think r&d is something that should be done all of the time. Even if it’s done in like very small doses. You should always have something kind of like, you know, stewing in the background. What do you think Chris? Christopher Penn I’m of two minds of this. I, I loved the, you know, the tinkering around and stuff like that. And, you know, certainly we do a ton of it. But also, it’s one of those things with that as, as priorities change as companies scale your r&d does have to at some point, get a little more focused than just, you know, pure academic research, because otherwise you can burn a lot of time for for no good reason. When it comes to, like, how do you build something new again, goes back to that anthropology. When you look at the way somebody does something. What are the obstacles, and the challenge for a lot of companies is going to be you will, in some ways be competing with the problem you’re trying to solve is suffering. So let’s use Uber as an example. If Uber is a problem. There’s some aspects of the Uber experience, it’s a problem and you’re trying to find a way to insert yourself into the conversation, you are actually competing theoretically with Uber itself, because hopefully Ubers own product marketing managers are doing the same kind of research and going, Oh, this part of the app is problematic, right? Where this part of the experience is problematic, how to resolve that. Getting around that requires you to have some level of insight into what your competitors capabilities are. And that is yet again, an entirely different research area. Because, you know, let’s say you’re trying to deal with the issue of safety. You know, some people rightfully feel that they don’t feel safe. And if it were, well, how do you? How do you work around that? Uber is already working on autonomous vehicles, so there’s no other driver in the car. There’s no way for you to have an unpleasant interaction with a driver who isn’t there. So how do you work around that? That’s those are the challenges that are I think a lot of market researchers also forget about when they’re doing product marketing research. Katie Robbert I would agree with that. And so it sounds like what we’re coming around to is, you can’t get around doing some level of research, if you’re trying to break into a new audience segment or just, you know, create marketing plans in general, if you want to continue to move forward and, you know, not be the product from the 1990s that hasn’t changed and evolved at all. Yeah, companies need to start using some data, any data to make these decisions to find out what does my audience want, the worst possible thing that you can do is sit there, you know, in your office chair and go, I know what I want. Therefore, it must be what my audience wants. That is the absolute wrong thing to do, and I’ve seen it happen in action, and I have Seen it tank products, because the stakeholders, the decision makers are what we call an N of one. I know best. I want to move this button over here, I want it to be blue. I want it to, you know, wake me up at six o’clock in the morning, whatever the thing is, but that doesn’t mean that you speak for the majority of your audience. And I think that that is such a huge mistake. That is so common. It happens all the time. Christopher Penn Yep. As always, we will recommend starting with, as you mentioned with Facebook example and 100% mobile users use the data to figure out how bad the problem is first. In this case, in this example, the problem is 100% of this customer segment does not like the the way the Unknown Speaker desktop. Christopher Penn Exactly. So if you got more questions about this and market research in general, stop by our slack group, as Katie mentioned, over at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, and bring your questions. This is a fun topic to discuss. And it’s great to get the question Have over 1000 other markers there. As always, we’ll find this episode and many others over at the website TrustInsights.ai dot AI We look forward to hearing from you there Take care and stay safe want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is Trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss math. Specifically, what are the math skills that marketers of all stripes, but especially those who have an interest in marketing analytics, marketing data science, and machine learning/AI applied to marketing need to know. Do you need a Ph.D.? Do you need to spend a year in a data science bootcamp? The answers might surprise you. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-mathskillsformarketing.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn In this week’s in In-Ear Insights, we’re talking about required math skills in our analytics for marketers Slack, which by the way, if you’re not a member of please come on over to TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash analytics for market was Bill asked when we spoken Social Media Marketing World I asked a rather pointed question what if I’m bad at math I respond to drum that you may not have had the best teachers because math is a language. You can learn other languages, you can learn math, and he had a follow on question. What mathematical skills do you believe are required to work with marketing analytics effectively? So Katie, do you want to know which of those you want to tackle first, like, are you bad at math? And also, what math skills do you think are necessary to be good at analytics? Katie Robbert So I’ll tackle the first part of it. I am self admittedly bad at math. I always have been. I understand the concepts of it, but I definitely transpose numbers. So I was always really good at geometry and proofs and those kinds of things. So there’s a side of math that is very logical to me. You know, I think I had decent math teachers, I have not been able to learn more than one language I, you know, at best speak broken English on a good day. So, you know, I don’t know that saying that you had bad teachers is necessarily the way some people are just not wired to be good at math, and I happen to be one of those people. That said, I don’t think you have to be have a PhD in math in order to be good at analytics. I think that you need to understand the fundamental concepts, you know, basic addition, subtraction, division multiplication, to get where it is you need to go because ultimately what you’re doing is you’re trying to answer a question. And so you know, maybe you rely on someone like a Chris pen to help you get to that. Answer. But ultimately, you need to understand what question you’re trying to answer first, because just looking at a spreadsheet of numbers is going to make your eyes go crossed and blurry. And it’s going to be really difficult to do. So I guess the first is to answer the first question. You don’t necessarily have to be a wizard in math, in order to be able to do analytics and reporting. And so the second question is, what math skills should I have? Well, again, have the fundamentals, understanding the concepts of how numbers go together, you know, you don’t have to be able to necessarily master things like regression analysis, but understanding what it is, is going to be really helpful. What do I mean, Chris, you’re gonna feel a little bit differently than I do about this. Christopher Penn Yes, and no. It may amuse you to find out that I was a straight c student in math for most of my life, except for Statistics and Probability which I failed. So that’s Certainly, there is I have no shortage of understanding the frustration people have. And my comment about bad teachers is exactly that. Because of those experiences I had. I didn’t have the best teachers, I had people who were extremely good practitioners of the field. But we’re not good communicators, and explainers of what it was that they were teaching. You’re absolutely right that the basics are essential. There’s, you have to develop also the mindset. And I think this is what you’re getting at as well in the minds of how do you think about the numbers when you have a row of numbers in a spreadsheet? What do you see a lot of people see the numbers, and then they try to look at them, and somebody is trying to do the math in their heads. And that’s a really bad idea because your brain is just not equipped for that. There are very few people who can do complex mathematics in their heads without any assistance. But when you start thinking about Okay, what do I want to know? The number one thing that people should focus on in analytics is change. What has changed when you look at your website traffic, your email opens, etc. A number by itself means nothing, right? The open rate for this week’s TrustInsights.ai newsletter was 21%. Cool. So what is that good? Is that bad? Does it change from the previous week for the previous month? How does it compare versus other industry publications, knowing that gives context to the number? And that’s what I think a lot of marketers are actually looking for is the context. What does this mean? So that we can decide what we should do? And to your point, that doesn’t require much more than basic division, or you know, and some very simple formulas. The other area that I think is essential, and it’s an interesting thing to talk about is statistics and probability. Our friend and colleague Tom Webster over at Edison research has a very interesting perspective on this. He says that statistics and probability are not mathematics. They are it is a separate It discipline entirely. The fact that they both use numbers is true. But it’s like the difference between writing a white paper and writing poetry. They’re not the same thing. They both use letters and words, but they’re completely different in their, in their intense and outcomes. And there is a lot to statistics and probability that are I think are essential to mathematics essential to analytics. The first one being, even just knowing statistical validity is something statistically significant. We see this a ton, especially in email marketing. Our A B test here says that this email got 540 opens and this one got 539. Version A is the winner, huh? Nope. failed, you failed statistical significance. There’s no way you can attribute that with that small sample size. To say that a one and B did not if the likelihood of it being random chance is as high or higher than that outcome. So being able to do that type of math to even understand are is what my data is telling me valid is an essential skill. And again, if it’s not valid, you have no business making decisions on it. If you do, you’re going to end up shooting yourself in the foot. Katie Robbert So, would you say that most people know to even start with is my is my pile of data? valid? statistically valid? Christopher Penn That’s one of the starting points. Yes, I think Katie Robbert understanding Yes, yes. They do know, to start there. Christopher Penn I say that’s where you should start. Do people know that? No, absolutely not. Katie Robbert Yeah, that was my question is Do people know that that’s even where they should start. So for example, you know, let’s say I’m looking at the open rate of my newsletter. And, you know, I’m seeing a, you know, point 01 percent change week over week. In my brain, I’m like, oh, okay, it’s going up, therefore good. Yeah. Do I need to then worry about the statistical validity of that point? 01 percent? Or do I just care that it’s going up? Christopher Penn It depends. The key question is, is that happening because of something you’re doing? Or is it happening because of random chance of noise? Right? If it’s point 01 percent? If it’s point 01 percent, it’s almost certainly gonna be noise. Right? And so the thing to do there might be to look at a different timeframe. So week over week, month over month is, are you seeing greater aggregated change there and again, you can run a chi square test or a T test or a two tailed test, or whatever the stats thing you want to do to assess that, whether that’s the case or not, but ultimately, you want to know, is an action you are taking, having an actual impact or is what you’re seeing in the data noise? This is like, this is brain bending for a lot of people if you look in your Google Analytics, right? It says Yo, your users were down, you know, 1% for last week, it’s got that red our down, no, the bad things have happened. Are you sure? Or is that noise? Do you know whether that is a an important enough distinction? If your addressable audience is the entire United States, for example, and your traffic is down, you know, 1% that may not mean anything. On the other hand, if it’s, you know, if you have 10 users who doubt Well, you can have 1% of 10 users 100 users and you’re down one user, is that is that statistically significant? It might be, depending on your population. So there’s a lot of things you have to unpack it to figure out. is this important? Is this worth paying attention to? Is this worth worrying about? There are other cases where once you get into bigger effects, like we have a client that you know, less sick run over the last six weeks, while 70% of the traffic, guess what, that’s not Okay, there’s something clearly went off the rails there. And you should know the difference between those two different scenarios, you may not necessarily have to run a formal chi squared test to determine that. But you can clearly tell there’s a big enough effect like,

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss the importance of transparency and disclosure in research and data. These are troubled, uncertain times – not for the macro situation, but for our willingness to collectively accept statements of fact without verifying those facts or inspecting the methodology behind a piece of data. They also look more deeply into the new Trust Insights report, Social Media Audience Trends During The Pandemic. Tune in now to hear about the research and what went into it. Watch the video here: Listen to the audio here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-methodology.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher Penn In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we’re talking about social media audience. And for those who may have missed it, we released a paper about this recently on the Trust Insights website, you can hop on over there and get it. And by the time this, this episode airs, we’ll done a webinar with our friends over at Talkwalker. So I want to talk about two things. This paper number one, I actually got some interesting, constructive criticism or just criticism, I guess, from a few folks who said, it took too long to get to the point they were 10 pages up front of like charts and things like that, and not enough like action up front just like hit people with the conclusion. And one of the things I’ve responded to a few of these folks about was, I feel like there’s so much information right now, especially this is being dumped on people’s heads that has no source, no methodology, no explanation. People just present data as as unassailable fact. And my whole logic for putting the methodology and the data Up front was to say, like, Look, we’re not pulling things out of places where the sun doesn’t shine, we’re actually pulling things out from real data and research. So Katie, what’s your thought about? Do you just go straight into the hard hitting stuff, put the methodology in the back and hope people sort it out and figure out or do you walk people through the method by which you draw the conclusions so that they can understand the conclusions have validity? How do you feel about that? Katie Robbert You know, I, I can see it from both sides. So in terms of writing, you know, any kind of research, I was trained academically, and so a lot of the methodology has to be put up front because you have to demonstrate the validity of the thing that you’re doing. But it’s a little bit different in the marketing world where, unfortunately, methodology just doesn’t exist. And so I think that the approach that we’ve taken is a little bit more academic and it’s something that It’s unfamiliar to people who are not accustomed to reading academic style research papers. And so I think the bottom line is that the methodology belongs in the research that we’re doing, we feel very strongly that, you know, we want to demonstrate that we’re not just making it up. You know, however, I can definitely see the argument for a little bit more of the executive summary, the so what up front, even if it’s just like, a couple of bullet points to say, in this paper, you will learn the following three things and then go into methodology. I mean, that’s the other thing is people can skip over the methodology and go straight to the conclusion. There is nothing. It’s sort of that same thing of like, if you don’t like something you see on social media, just keep scrolling. Then, in this sense, it’s a digital paper, just keep scrolling. But I do think that having the methodology, clear and put right out there They’re in people’s faces is important. And you know whether or not they choose to read it, totally a personal preference. But then we know at the end of the day that we have done our due diligence to say, this is validated research, we’re not just putting numbers on a pretty slide and saying, Here you go, here it is. Christopher Penn Yeah, that was my feeling as well is having it be a little bit longer to the conclusions is, to me, okay, I know, it’s not as interesting particularly for folks who don’t want to do the methodology review or, you know, maybe don’t have the, the statistical background to dig through it. But I feel like from a values perspective, you know, we one of our core values is we are we are transparent and open like, Hey, here’s how the, here’s how we did the thing. So that if somebody says, Yeah, I don’t agree with you, we can say great, explain how you would have done it differently with this same data because we want to learn to we know for Sure, we’re not using the best of the best out there, there’s always something better. There’s always something more thorough, there’s always something to be learned. And I feel like having that transparency and openness helps us communicate to people, we are open to learning more. Katie Robbert Well, you know, it’s interesting too, because while methodology and research is very objective, the way in which we individually think about it and approach it is very subjective in the sense that, you know, you and I might look at the exact same data and come up with a slightly different interpretation of it. And so, having the methodology of how all of the numbers came together is important, but we’re never going to be able to detail the methodology of how we actually individually thought about it. And I think that’s what makes it a little bit more unique. And so, you know, if I recall that another piece of the feedback that you got was why aren’t Are you putting it all out there for people to see how you did the thing and I, I’m in the same camp as you, Chris, were number one, our values, you know, promote transparency. But number two, just because we tell you how we got the numbers doesn’t mean that you can replicate how we thought about it. Because that then comes from our own personal and professional experience of doing this for many years and our training both formal and informal. And so I have zero issue with putting out the methodology because someone else who’s trying to replicate it will not necessarily come to the same conclusions and if they do, that’s great, then that means that we have helped taught people how to fish instead of giving them the fish. Christopher Penn As Jay Baer likes to say having the recipe doesn’t make you a chef. This is something I don’t have as much background. As you do. Can you talk through briefly what it means for something to be peer reviewed in the academic world obviously, it means that other people qualified people have looked at it and your conclusions and said, well, doesn’t look like you did anything obviously wrong. Katie Robbert I mean, that’s essentially what it is. And so, you know, let’s say you are a prominent, you know, researcher and child behavioral issues. If you are doing, you know, an academic study or a clinical trial, then when you submit your paper for peer review, then other people who have similar backgrounds, similar credentials, maybe even slightly more experienced, and have also had peer reviewed, peer reviewed published, academic papers will then read your paper, and sort of what they’re trying to do is make sure that anything that goes out is as validated and foolproof as possible. So they’re looking for, you know, does this methodology check out, do the numbers add up, and so it’s an academic version of A QA process essentially. And so in our instance, if, you know we at Trust Insights are doing this research paper, it’s one of the reasons why we partner with a company like Talkwalker, because they are the experts in their own data. But they’re also the experts in the data that it polls in this instance, social media platforms. And so they are the ones who are peer reviewing our information for us to say, you know, what, we’re in our data every day, this doesn’t make sense, or this is really interesting insight. I didn’t even know we could pull this out. Let me see if I can work backwards and get to the same thing. And that’s how we’re peer reviewing. And it’s one of the things that we find really important for the way that we work, because we’re so close to the work that we do. And we really value those outside opinions and peers and feedback to make sure that the work that we’re putting out is as good as it can be. Unknown Speaker Yeah, now, Christopher Penn at least you’re consistent. We just spent the first eight minutes of the show talking about the methodology. Let’s talk about. So the big thing that we’ve noticed and and there’s a lot, the approach to this is looking at search data. And the reason why is people will type things into Google, that they wouldn’t necessarily say aloud. This is not in the paper by this is a podcast exclusive. I was actually in a discussion group of markers over the weekend. And one of them was saying, I bet there’s gonna be a huge baby boom, you know, after this whole pandemic. And when you look at all the search terms around things like birth control, or supplies for personal intimacy, those actually dropped by about 20% across the board at the start of the pandemic, because people in many cases isolating by themselves, so I’m like, I don’t know that that baby booms actually going to happen. It will be interesting to se