#032: Questions and Answers with Tom Miller

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[00:00:43] Welcome to the digital age 6 0 3 and only takes place and the occasional guests discussing digital issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook dot com slash only six now. And now the digital analytics power.

[00:01:04] Hi everyone. Welcome to the digital analytics power hour.

[00:01:08] This is Episode 32 why are we here. Where did we come from. Where are we going. Sometimes you just have questions. Well this episode is not about those questions. Get a hold of yourself. It’s about analytics questions specifically questions from the analytics community that we have not seen in advance who could advocate this as a team of digital analytics IQ. Well that’s our guest Tom Miller he’s the analytics practice leading digital surgeons and recently started his own podcast called measured directions.

[00:01:49] He’s been gathering questions from the community and fissiparous certainly putting us to the test.

[00:01:55] Obviously I’m joined by my two cohosts Tim Wilson.

[00:02:01] That’s it just just Tim Wilson.

[00:02:03] Sometimes you say and sometimes it’s good. I am I’m here.

[00:02:07] I’m here and trying to find the mute button on that sniffling over your intro and then Jim came into being the CEO of napkin.

[00:02:15] Yeah. Give me the intro.

[00:02:18] I’m like a blank. All right guys this is exciting. Tom welcome.

[00:02:25] Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

[00:02:28] We’re excited to have you on the show and excited to see what questions you’re bringing with you. We literally have not seen this in advance and to be really honest I think Tim is the most scared.

[00:02:43] Well I’ve got a set of questions here that I think might put you guys on your heels a little bit.

[00:02:47] You know the idea of me coming on your show is to bring to you guys the format of the measure direction podcast which is a podcast that myself and my cohost just started. And what we’re trying to do is do a question and answer audience driven format for the digital analytics and digital marketing community. You know I started the podcast because I hate to blog. I think you know I’ve heard you guys separately say that you sort of started this podcast because you hate blogging. You want to be a resource for the community that you’re part of that you care so much about. You know I have my entire career to the support of other people within the Detroit community. And I wanted to discover a way to give back to it. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with the podcast it’s audience driven question me answer. You know we pick a few questions each week. We try to get in the weeds with the questions and that’s it. So taking that format to you guys and I’m ready to get started. Are you guys ready to get started.

[00:03:50] I just like the fact that this is the first time that I’m not the only one who’s totally unprepared. They really couldn’t prepare this time. Yeah. Are flying blind. Yeah. I’m excited. Let’s get it going. All right Tom Miller.

[00:04:04] The phone is yours.

[00:04:06] Also part of the deal with the measured direction podcast is if you submit a question and you want us to. We will give you a shout out. So give a shout out right now to my friend blogger analytics grandfather of analytics as he calls himself Kevin hillstrom. You guys heard of Kevin hillstrom. Kevin has not responded to my e-mail.

[00:04:31] Password.

[00:04:32] So wait there’s no data at that date on Twitter. He’s got a favorite to join the lyrics blogs of all time. He’s got a podcast himself which is always entertaining. And here’s this question.

[00:04:46] Why do you guys keep emailing me trying to get me to come on your podcast. Last question. You to make you stop emailing me. OK.

[00:04:55] He’s on your podcast. So here we go. This is it. This is a little bit long so bear with me or bear with him.

[00:05:03] I would like it we need it in a five part tweet and proper Kevin Hill fashion show.

[00:05:11] All right here we go. You’re presenting information to a team of executives after presenting for about 15 minutes your results are being aggressively challenged by the executive team. They are offering you a dizzying array of confusing comments you cannot easily discern. The core reason behind the comments it might be that the executive team thinks your analysis is just plain wrong. It might be that the executive team is not capable of understanding the level of analytical genius you possess. It might be that the executive team is frightened by the course of action you’re prescribing to them.

[00:05:46] It might be that the executive team or a group of disagreeable insufferable business leaders describe what you would do in real time during your presentation to die. There is what is happening and then describe how you might modify your presentation style and or core message. Given your real time diagnosis of the situation sorry just to be clear Tom your 15 minutes in and you’ve lost the room right.

[00:06:14] Are you talking about me on this podcast right now. I don’t know I feel pretty good about it. I think it was quite a question resenting your 15 minutes in 50 minutes.

[00:06:23] And you’ve got a cold room and their executives. So this has happened to me before.

[00:06:29] And frankly when you’ve lost the room and the room is senior executive you’re not getting it back because they probably talked about it before you came in. There’s probably a significant amount of perceived bias against the work and you can’t sell something no one wants to buy. So when that has happened to me in the past I basically just put down the mouse I state in my experience it seems like I’m in a place where I’m not adding the right kind of value and figure out what it takes to earn the right to present analysis that will be listened to because it doesn’t mean anyone stupid and it doesn’t mean anyone’s wrong because when you’re dealing with a group of executives you’re dealing with politics and bias and budgets and watercoolers and things that you can’t control. So I just put a fork in it at that 15 minute mark and I say I tried to do this to allow you to do that and we’re not running in parallel. So where did it break so I can go back and try again. And you know normally those kinds of meetings are scheduled for 90 minutes and at that 15 minute mark. I need to have about 15 or 20 minute additional meeting. So I don’t go we’re going to stay in here for the next remaining time I go for the next 15 or 20 minutes you’re going to tell me why you stopped listening. I’m going to go back to the well we’re going to come back again.

[00:07:48] You guys get a free hour and your day to play racquetball or look at Bloomberg or whatever the hell it is you do and we try and win again. Because if you don’t acknowledge that you’re not adding value and learn what you need to learn for the Reset you’re just going to spend five months of work for zero minutes of value you know.

[00:08:04] Yeah I thought I was I was thinking the same thing like the last thing to do is just to plow through like that that I’ve watched the none at all let me just keep going through my slides and that’s it that’s absolutely not it’s my one. Add to that. So I think the same thing standing up saying this isn’t working. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone. Well yeah not getting defensive but acknowledging that this is clearly a misalignment here and then that next 15 minutes the key is you’ve got to walk out knowing with what really understanding what your next steps are because in some cases you might not get another shot but if you are going to get another shot you’d damn well better be crystal clear what it was that that went awry and how to follow up. So I think that’s immediately going into the mode of I need to have an action item coming out of this. And I need to make sure that my action item is the right one and that in this entire room everyone is clear on what I’m going to do next and then apologized for the situation and let them get on with their day.

[00:09:10] I said follow up Tim’s follow up with a double follow up follow up squared and that’s the other thing that you need to accomplish is to because you may have lost and you need to regain a phrase I use a lot which is a trusted adviser. So if you walk out of that room and they go well nerd failed. I guess we have to have another meeting like you need to walk out of there with the people in the room acknowledging you didn’t kick it through the posts this time. But that person is an expert. And they will come back properly next time or else you will lose the room and you probably won’t get back into it.

[00:09:44] So the trusted adviser idea you know I think that if you’re walking into a room and you’re challenging someone’s position then you’ve already failed right. It’s like you’ve you’ve lost the meeting before you begun it. And in order to be an effective communicator especially to executives within the meeting you need to preme prepared meeting skills you know Kevin talks here about some meeting skills reading the room diagnosing what’s happening modifying your presentation. That’s great. Those are good skills to have but preceding skills are also important when you have a preview but that’s the.

[00:10:18] I was thinking and we’re not going to go into code and say you know how you solve that you hop in a time machine and go fix it because that’s all you like don’t like don’t get to that spot in the first place like usually if you get to that spot. I guess that’s true right. Hey there Chris. Don’t go stealing my answer. That’s exactly what I was going to say.

[00:10:36] Because there’s two things that were happening before the meeting. They’re going to hopefully save you from that situation. One is you’re going to walk through that analysis with other people on your team and they’re going to shoot it full of holes before you ever go in there so you can identify all the gaps and fix them. The second is and depending on how important the recommendation is you prefer lying along every executive chain you can find. Let everybody know what recommendations about to be made and everyone’s feedback has already been incorporated and you just blaze through it and get the decision made. The executive meeting is probably not the place to spring brand new ideas on executives.

[00:11:17] The phrase don’t shoot the messenger is a cliche but the reason why it’s cliche is because messengers get shot all the time right.

[00:11:26] It’s easy to say well the easiest thing to do is not get in that situation by doing your upfront work first.

[00:11:32] So let’s say it happens. So then you just you pause you jail your inner Kevin Hellstrom and then you look around and you’re like OK and then you probably do it Tim and Jim just said to do. Which is like OK what should we be doing instead of this because this obviously is not the right direction.

[00:11:50] The other point I’d add by the way and I have seen very good analysis turned to shit at speed by people that don’t know how to run a meeting and I’m sure everyone listening today has been to meetings today that were an epic waste of time and an analyst needs to know how to run a meeting and if you get in a room and the combined salary time for that room it’s like a sixty five hundred dollar hour for the business and you don’t have an agenda. You don’t have structure you don’t have priest trucks your deliverables you’re going to piss them all off they’re not going to listen anyways and that that’s part of that trusted adviser thing. But you know learning to run a meeting is as important as learning PowerPoint as far as I’m concerned.

[00:12:33] There you go. Awesome. All right. Question to Jim Stern I think you guys might know him. Jim Stern of the Matrix summit author agent provocateur. All right. Yeah. Jim Stern on Twitter asks What’s the most exciting over the horizon method or technology that you’re keeping an eye on when you can pass if you want.

[00:13:00] I mean I think it’s a really great question. I did too.

[00:13:04] I think real doll analytics is really going to change the way people look at intimacy.

[00:13:14] So I will sound a little bit like a suspect the drum I’ll be beating throughout this year and it’s a little weird to refer to a technology that’s 20 plus years old as over the horizon. But I think our call it the broader genre and Tom you could probably add more eloquently stated.

[00:13:31] I think I was listening to an episode of the data stories podcast with Pavley Wykeham and he was commenting on the explosive growth of use of our.

[00:13:42] And you know he’s saying there used to be this tiny little group of people and now it just seems like people all over the place are using it and looking around our industry.

[00:13:51] I see a lot of people using it talking to actually Jim Stern when he was on and commenting about the kind of got me thinking how something that might be mislabeled machine learning could actually be you know getting out of the web analytics interface getting out of Excel getting out of Tablo and saying let’s put some some math on this stuff and not rely on the web analytics tools to do much more than stitching together the sessions and collecting the data and using more powerful tools and kind of.

[00:14:23] So to me I think that’s where I’m excited that we can start to say oh I found a bunch of correlations and as an analyst I looked at him and 80 percent of them didn’t surprise me or I could do anything with that the other 20 percent sent me down a path of meaningful actionable analysis.

[00:14:41] So that’s that’s to me and I look around how much in that the chatter in our industry how many people are talking about it for an emerging technology are certainly is very old and that is great it’s finally getting its due. A category more over the horizon is the adoption within our is the adoption. So talking about new stuff now analysis the workspace in Adobe analytics has been out for about 6 9 months or whatever but it’s gotten is getting better. They’re updating it pretty regularly and I think it’s becoming more and more central way of using Adobe analytics to do analysis. So I think that’s one for digital analog analytics people.

[00:15:23] First time ever read business users like really getting in and dig in in the data and Adobe is with the analysis workspace.

[00:15:30] Yeah it’s pretty slick stuff. The other one that I’m pretty bullish on is domo. I think there’s a real opportunity for that tool to become something very special and it’s for a couple reasons. One really dumb and one really solid the dumb reason is is because it’s a company run by Josh James and he just does a great job of getting people to buy his products. And so Domos gonna be everywhere and there’s going to be a lot of companies who don’t know why they have it. But there’s hidden inside of dumbell some amazing capabilities that as companies learned unlock them they’re going to get a lot of value out of. So that’s what I’m excited about.

[00:16:07] So I’m not excited about any technology really and actually go back to Mr. Hellstrom question. I think there’s more than enough tech and there has been for quite some time.

[00:16:18] And while you’re going I think you’re going to start seeing an amalgamation of techs you could start seeing analytics and content management tools start to merge together you are going to see tools and digital analytics will start to merge together.

[00:16:29] But the big thing for me is actually again per Mr. Hillstrom question. You’re going to start to see analytics be a first class item in the boardroom. So people are going to stop buying crap in the next 10 months and start having people at the CMO CIO CTO level say this junk we’ve bought over the last 10 years.

[00:16:53] How do I win with it. I actually think you’re going to see a slowdown I’m purchasing at least on the shiny edge of the technology space is doing and more of an emphasis on tactical practical. We’re certainly seeing it a lot in our practice. What about you Mr. Miller. You

[00:17:07] know where I see. I think the biggest thing that I think might surprise a lot of people is automated user segmentation based on supervised machine learning. I think that’s going to happen. I think that your discussion of our might facilitate some of that. I think there’s probably someone around the corner that’s going to pop up and say you think you know how your audience is segmenting how your audience is segmenting on say intent let’s dump your audience segments into a giant bucket Firesign supervised machine learning algorithms at it. It’s not really how it works but you get the idea and come up with a predictive model for every user that visits your site. What audience segment there to be in. So it makes sense.

[00:17:57] Yeah I mean I think I think we talk about segmentation but it’s always when it’s driven 100 percent from our instincts and experience which is good. I mean like I like to say supervise machine learning. You’ve got to give us some direction. But when you you. Oh I mean go look at what the tool gives me easily new versus returning what channel did they come from.

[00:18:16] Recently a visit if you actually said I can take a much broader set of collected data and see which of these kind of cluster and then have defined outcomes and say which of these segments you know kind of ultimately get to the same spot and have some similar characteristics that I quit and then it takes a human being to say what can I do with that.

[00:18:38] How can I treat them differently supervised machine learning sounds like a dbl cover band just a little side note.

[00:18:45] So the demo front you know I think that there’s something there too to use a cliche that’s going to crash a podcast. David democratization. I really do think there’s something to that product that in a lot of ways that has not existed before can bring analytical functions to not analytical jobs. And yeah I agree. I mean I agree with your assessment there. I think they will sell it and it will have an impact on the enterprise of the future. I’ll just add it that out.

[00:19:17] Yeah. Yeah. If you should just before keep out like a swear word data democratization I think it brings.

[00:19:29] It up. Yes.

[00:19:33] I’m scared. Expensive skeptical. I mean I’m almost always a good cut sucks. I’ll get back. I’ll get I’ll try to start winning you over.

[00:19:44] Tim Wilson after I get through my current clients that are used to get wader urbanising it or have a license for it.

[00:19:54] I just want to clarify one for the other.

[00:19:58] No you buy the Brooklyn Bridge because I could sell you that well if you can explain how it helps me transport data in a meaningful way across seamlessly bridges the gap between stuff. Same as Dalmau.

[00:20:12] So we move on let’s do question let’s do the third question we may only get the three questions tonight but honestly we only get to 3.

[00:20:21] We have a backlog. Let’s just put it that way. Do it. All right well this one is more of a question that you would you might hear on the measured direction podcast but I think it’s a really good question just because it’s you know we will have some theoretical and some practical advice hopefully this comes from a focus of data licious at No. M kiss on Twitter.

[00:20:45] Our international audience there.

[00:20:47] See ya. Corrected. Was that your Australian accent was terrible. That was that was old man on porn on XM.

[00:20:58] You enjoy your day.

[00:20:59] I think my visa for my next trip there just got revoked and I haven’t even applied for it yet.

[00:21:04] Okay so this is. This question is. It’s a good one. I would love to hear an answer on best practice tips for attributing the effect of TV to online behavior. This has been asked in the measure channel but a detailed response would be amazing.

[00:21:21] First you hire a social media company then make shit up charge a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:21:27] No one will know any better.

[00:21:30] All right Tim what’s the real answer.

[00:21:32] Go ahead.

[00:21:35] We’ve done something so you can’t do it very well with the available tools that most companies have. You can’t do it easily at a national level. What you can do is do it at the metro level. So what you do is you get a metro area that is similar to the metro area that you’re doing the TV and radio and print and stuff then and then you pick certain things that those types of media will influence in terms of web traffic specifically direct traffic and branded organic and paid. So you take those and then you can build a baseline on historically how much do we get during this period in both of the metro areas that we’re comparing. And then what happened when the offline media was in play. Now you can use vanity or else but their bullshit they never work but you can use those to get kind of a little sample as well. But again at the metro level but it’s all inference right. Like the thing I like about digital analytics is that if you plan properly a one is a one is a one and you can speak to it with a high level of accuracy. When you start doing inference Level Measurement like maybe kind disorder the banner ads that we bought on the side of the highway what do they call them billboards billboards too much digital. I’ll go home. Out-of-home you know those things probably lead to people who most likely came to the website. I hate that kind of work. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong but there’s no inference analytics because I’m hopeful.

[00:23:03] Yeah and I think that’s why everybody punts on this question is because it’s real. There’s not a good formula for oh yeah here’s how you find out specifically it kind of goes back to OK what data can I actually connect and what data can actually get and then combine in a meaningful way when it gets us in trouble.

[00:23:24] Right. I mean so this is against certain things are 100 percent accurate and certain things are educated guesses and if you’re not an experienced web analyst you don’t know the difference between those two things.

[00:23:36] So the question was kind of what’s the impact of TV on digital. Right. Just to be clear because erm what does the absolute impact of TV.

[00:23:44] Now the question is what’s the best practice for measurement or measuring a traditional you’re measuring TV to digital so I’ll give a couple.

[00:23:51] This will be a little bit like the very first question that one planning for the creative. I mean the number of times that ads that I worked for an agency that it was just we could sit at the Super Bowl and just watch ads and see how often the TV creative had no thought of how can we extend the relationship using digital. So if your creative doesn’t have to say vanity you Well that’s one thing but if you go a little bit farther and say you want to have an integrated marketing campaign when you have the oh and go onto our site to watch the end of this or go onto our site to configure your own. So I think that’s that’s like 1 level steps way back and says if you if you want these to be related you need to design them to be related which means you probably need to have a digital experience that was still a tiny little minuscule fraction of an investment compared to what you spent on TV. But how are you paying off the commercial and giving people like giving them a call to action that right now or at some point they’ll want to go to doesn’t work for all products but if you do that then then you’re partway there because you can say hey I’ve sent people to do this thing and I may or may not know exactly where the ads are running so that’s kind of one half of an answer.

[00:25:07] Another half I was really intrigued by what this company called Collera voy a little there will start a little attribution management company here in Columbus and going back a couple of years what they were doing which was super intriguing to me was they were using quick quick quick whatever how we pronounce it right. Open source Web analytics where you have a lot more configure ability they could get down to the minute or down to the second Web analytic granularity and then they went and had partnerships with the data on the TV spots. And so then they would say this almost was more of kind of a TV optimization than necessarily a TV attribution. The more I kind of thought about it was they knew exactly what spots were running on what shows on what channels and where and at what times they would then look at the lift in traffic to their site in very very small like within a minute or two of the ad running. And that didn’t necessarily say here’s guaranteeing the value. But would be even if an ad didn’t have a explicit call to action. You could say gee when this ad ran on the CW at 10 o’clock at night we saw you know this kind of lift in traffic to our site when it ran on ABC at this other time we saw much bigger lift. And what are we paying for those spots. So that was actually to me more of just hey you’re going to spin on TV why don’t you spend it in places it seems like it’s more likely to be hitting a market that wants to go find something out.

[00:26:35] Still to get totally to the attribution so I don’t think it’s impossible. I just think it takes not a hey we ran this TV now. Now go measure it kind of. It takes a little more deliberate thought.

[00:26:46] Right. And there’s also there’s new stuff that’s coming. So there’s a recent merger between comScore and Rentrak which I think will all turn into I think a really cool product offering although tellingly comScore divested its digital analytics tool prior to that merger. So they got out of the actual website measurement space directly. I mean there’s probably a comScore picture you still put on your page but they’re mostly doing panel measurement anyway.

[00:27:14] It’s its interest.

[00:27:15] It’s an interesting space that is morphing into video right that’s the others. Well the video on demand and consumption via the Internet is a huge deal and that’s actually increasing the need to be able to watch something because you can force pretty role and you’ve got much better data. So agric away.

[00:27:34] Yeah exactly the ways track right. Yeah. Yeah I mean my comment to this question is if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands and you know exactly what metros are showing what and at what time you could conceivably with you know all the big digital analytics tools programmatically look at like Jim said direct in branded search term lift for a brief amount of time post ad view it would be an extraordinary amount of work to do that. I think the easiest option and one of the most obvious ones is voice the customer research so you know using your voice the customer leveraging your voice the customer system. However it’s configured to say how did you come to the site how did you why did you come to the site. Did you come via TV. Right. Asking that question explicitly. Have you seen our TV commercials. Even would be a good enough proxy. Now to Jim’s point it’s it’s influential right. It’s not direct. You’re asking people a question which is always fraught with peril but it’s better than nothing.

[00:28:40] Well and I’ll say it was kind of nice there is they’re already on your side. So if you’re doing addresses a threat when you do when they just do testing of creative and say oh our ad recall was amazing. It’s like whoa. So what. You know if I if I put a very memorable image whether or not it can associated with the brand whereas if you’re using voice a customer and if you get ad recall and they’re on your site then that says oh the action happened and the ad recall is there I can infer that there’s some sort of link there. Not just I made a memorable ad but nobody remembers what brand it was for.

[00:29:13] Yeah I mean I guess the other point I would make is if you’re doing TV you presume we have a pretty big budget and you probably also have a TV agency a media agency doing the TV for you and they’re going to be able to leverage those tools that Michael mentioned or an ad on a tree from Google or something like that. Again it’s not it’s not going be a perfect measure but they’re going to want to use something like that to prove their left to prove frankly prove their worth and definitely make sure the data says what the executives you’re presenting to want it to say otherwise you end up a question number one.

[00:29:50] To choose your own adventure. That’s right. All right. All right.

[00:29:56] How about this. We got you. I got one more. Let’s do one more. But let’s add an epic twist.

[00:30:02] We could only respond with one word.

[00:30:06] OK.

[00:30:06] So is that impossible my words going to be so gross.

[00:30:14] Compacter in one sentence.

[00:30:16] I’m out of what I got.

[00:30:17] Are you actually really worried that you guys can answer with one word. And it’s great.

[00:30:21] OK perfect. All right. I didn’t do it.

[00:30:24] So this was submitted anonymously. Why is the conversation around digital analytics so centered around marketing activities. In truth digital analytics is a discipline that encompasses I.T. marketing and other business disciplines.

[00:30:39] It’s a challenge of siloing a self-inflicted wound in my one word responses money budget inertia though we get to elaborate a little bit.

[00:30:52] Although I feel like we should now explain why we said those things. That’s a really good question actually.

[00:30:58] No obvious question why is it that people are always concerned about where the money comes from and how money is made. Why can’t we worry about things that aren’t tied to money. Because money there.

[00:31:10] That’s why I don’t know. See I get annoyed anytime somebody says there’s a certain podcast that I really like the podcast that always says and this is how you advance your career. And to me like that. Yes. I personally want to make money but I feel like when you’re just chasing budget I don’t know maybe I’m still just Pollyanna that every manager is chasing chasing growing their budget and we’re in a death spiral and ever get out of it as opposed to people actually want the company to do well.

[00:31:42] If you’re not focused on what we spend what happened. How do we get more to spend less. There’s still a lot of runway with that type of question before we start talking about customer journey and empowerment.

[00:31:57] Don’t worry about where the money is just try to get some of it.

[00:32:01] Dollar dollar bills. Mo money mo problems.

[00:32:05] Well actually I will say if we go back and we talked to Gary Angell and he was making the point that the startup’s kind of the Silicon Valley high growth in a lot of cases seemed to be a little more digitally transformed whereas the older companies maybe that’s really where my nurse is coming from.

[00:32:23] That if you design from scratch knowing how today is you may design an organization and communication great for today but guaranteed that it’s not going to be the best thing for 20 years from now but now you’ve built up all of the structure and processes and organizational hindrances. And that’s tough to get past that.

[00:32:44] So I’ll give you a troll. This one I love on so many different levels. Here we go. Why is it that every customer analytics job listing that involves the web or apps is seeking someone with a degree in computer science. Google Analytics isn’t hard. That will most definitely Vyse.

[00:33:08] You. That’s it. Thing I don’t know. I think that’s a troll question. I think somebody no legit somebody is like you don’t need a computer science degree to do a Google Analytics. But what they don’t know is you do need a computer science degree to do Google tech manager.

[00:33:24] So but it’s really easy to start with your science degree you know because you’re using GA and something’s busted and then you need to do root cause because I.T. will give you the time of day.

[00:33:39] Yeah I would say probably somebody is straight up comp PSI isn’t necessarily my first choice to go after art philosophy. Now that’s interesting.

[00:33:51] Right. And he’s wearing a wolf shirt covered in cheeto dust is probably not going to be a world class analyst.

[00:33:58] Oh they’re going to run that number one question more often. Are you a virgin. No I think I think some of the Kevin Hallström question on Ellen.

[00:34:07] I think some of it goes back to two questions ago the inertia of what is this. Oh the web analyst is in our I.T. department and they’re the ones who manage the tags and the last person we had wasn’t very technical so this time we need to get smart with a computer science degree. I mean I think job descriptions in general I mean it’s not just for digital analytics. Every job description is too broad with too much of a search for a unicorn and you want somebody who’s got SACEUR SPSS and computer science and a masters in statistics and you know experience with one or more web analytics platforms. So they’re kind of casting about.

[00:34:43] And that’s probably all the analytics platforms. Yeah. So

[00:34:48] the fact is there are a lot of companies that are desperate to get somebody hired because they either had somebody who was fantastic who moved on to greener pastures and that haven’t been able to find anybody to backfill that are they’ve got ridiculous amount of work to be done and they can’t get anyone in. And I think it’s just kind of a spiraling cycle of we’ve got to get the perfect candidate because it’s taking us a year and a half to get somebody in the door who might who might fit.

[00:35:18] Yeah I mean that’s that’s sort of where I see the weakness of that mindset is you’re taking a set of people that buy their you know buy their endorsement by their degree or in high demand and you’re further narrowing them to a very high demand position. Right. And it shows a lack of I mean I guess it depends on the position right now depends on the person but you’re not casting a wide enough net you know you’re looking for finding a good digital analyst is nearly impossible and to limit the scope of your search to somebody with a computer science degree. I would say is almost in every case a mistake.

[00:36:03] So the real issue is that organizations don’t have the guts to realize and then again I think we’re going to spend the whole year quoting Gary.

[00:36:10] I mean he was like a gold mine of stolen one liners. But like the cross-functional team internally. Every company has the ability to have a world class web analytics practice right now with an executive sponsor part of someone from I.T. part of someone from marketing part of someone from finance. And if they took the gap of the remaining qualifications and hired that they’d kick the shit out of analytics for the rest of the year. But no one’s got the wherewithal to do that properly and on purpose.

[00:36:40] Well put.

[00:36:41] Yeah see what I do is I don’t I don’t quote Gary I just plagiarizer and are nice. Yeah that’s good.

[00:36:52] Well as you’ve been listening maybe you’ve come up with some questions that were way better than the ones that Tom could get although those are some pretty good questions and frankly a couple of them were hard for us to really get get around on them. We fouled off a couple of them so thank you Tom. That was amazing. I think everyone definitely go check out his new podcast measured direction. It sounds like there’ll be some great conversations that he’s leading and guiding and getting questions from the audience so be get a check out.

[00:37:23] Obviously we would love to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter or on the measure slack which is the place to be. And as you heard in the pre roll e metric San Francisco a live recording event of the digital analytics power our Wallaby’s. What will happen there. Who knows but probably great idea if you came and found out. So join us there. That’s in April. We’d love to see you love to meet you. All right. Hey it’s been great. Tom thank you so much for coming up with this idea. Doing all the work to get questions from the community. It’s been great having you just hang out with us on the show.

[00:38:06] Yes it’s been great. I mean it’s been so much fun. And you know I really hate it if anyone that is listening to this would like to submit a question to the measured direction podcast. The link is believe that beyond a dot Alawite slash measured direction. Thank you very much. It’s been.

[00:38:24] Where can they find you on Twitter.

[00:38:27] Oh you can find me on Twitter at T M L L R.

[00:38:31] Great to have you. Thanks again to Kim and Jim for being good sports and putting up with this and having some fun today. Hope you enjoy it as well. We’d love to hear from you.

[00:38:43] And of course for all my cohost This is Michael humbling biting off keep analyzing.

[00:38:52] Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook dot com slash analytics now or on Twitter. The. Word.

[00:39:14] Hi everyone. Welcome to the digital analytics power. This episode 32.

[00:39:22] We’re going to get that thing audible. Who was that I thought it was. I thought that was so magical. Was like perfect for like a perfectly good meditation kind of like everybody from. Yo yo. Oh come on Jim you always stop right here. Like are you going to throw down hard. Yeah I would just you know came into the. Beam.

[00:40:05] Just trying to get comfortable. You know I’m like 20 months away from technically being a millennial depressive. And I’d be talking shit about myself a lot. Is just unacceptable. I love taking part. In part time part. Yeah it’s hard. Skype thing is going to hurt your audio the most when you’re about to get a place on the audio quality. Tim will send you a little snide one liners for the next few months. Skype knows that we’re flirting with an Gaster. So yeah I’ll shoot you. Right. Or did you just call a rescan rescanned Betamax player correct tax.

[00:40:59] This is Jim Kane trolling me trolling for willing to fight for digital analytics power Howard or Robocop. Let me let me answer this one. Robocopy. Obviously when the question is could be Clarins Boddicker it would be Deckchair and I got an opinion on that. I think Jim is Clarence Boddicker.

[00:41:21] Michael is obviously pretty sure we’ll be joined by Ron Burgundy and his news team for that fight. So anyway that might be a draw. I bet you grab the office when everyone is just late. Shut up. Just try to help with some mark jokes. Yeah I’ve never made a fart joke. That’s true. They usually open sackful. But if it’s a sexual Ferde Joe. That’s the name of my next band. Hello San Francisco we’re sexual part joke. You’re from Ottawa which is our fans. If anyone’s listening to this.

[00:42:11] Sorry. He’s quite popular. But you know he’s got my back. I’m here. Yes yes. That is. A. Bit strange.

[00:42:29] Rock and a hard question.

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