Power Retail report on Business Intelligence (BI): What's it all about, current trends, tips and tools

If you've ever wondered what Business Intelligence systems (or BI for short) are all about and how you can use them, and your data, to their fullest potential then you should read my article in the Power Retail report on Business Intelligence. Among other topics, the special report covers the following.
  • Current trends in BI and its implementation
  • Tips and case studies for using BI in your organisation
  • Reviews of Cognos, Oracle Business Intelligence and Tableau Software
  • The ways in which marketers can use data in everything they do (written by yours truly).
Specifically, I have a look at how marketers can use data for ROI measurement, segmentation, and probabilistic modelling, common complexities and pitfalls. I hope you like it.
Check out the Datalicious Supertag: Container tag for smarter tag management

We're hiring! Looking for a Marketing Analyst to join our team of data geeks in Sydney ($60-80K)

APPLY NOW, WE'RE ALWAYS HIRING FOR THIS ROLE!

If you are an analytics professional with at least 2 years of work experience in data-intensive roles (preferably in a digital/direct markering environment) who would like to get into big data, web analytics and data driven marketing then you should apply. More experienced analysts and marketers are welcome to apply as well.

What you should bring to the table
+ Keen interest in all things web analytics and online optimisation
+ Basic understanding of marketing principles provides a head start
+ Entrepreneurial spirit, business or marketing degree would be good 
+ Experience dealing with large and complex datasets a must have
+ Proven ability to turn data into insights and actionable recommendations
+ Ability to visualise and confidently present insights to key stakeholders
+ Ability to manage complex projects from start to finish a great advantage
+ Experience with business intelligence tools apart from Excel a bonus
+ Experience in dashboard design and development would be beneficial
+ Experience with either Tableau or Spotfire software would be fantastic
+ Experience with advanced statistical analysis and software a bonus 
+ Experience with Omniture and Google Analytics would be useful
+ Basic understanding of SQL and data warehousing would be good
+ Flexibility, lateral thinking and attention to detail are crucial
+ Ability to respond to client deadlines when necessary
+ Advanced Excel, Word and PowerPoint skills essential

How we will reward your efforts
+ Exposure to a growing list of interesting blue chip clients
+ Highly flexible working hours in a dynamic team environment
+ Young start-up with a "work hard, play hard" company attitude
+ Training on industry leading analytics and marketing platforms
+ Freedom to experiment with emerging technologies and new tools
+ Plenty of development and career opportunities in fast growing business
+ And of course you get a salary, maybe even a bonus plus other perks
If the above sounds interesting, please email us at jobs@datalicious.com so we can have a look at your resume and arrange a quick initial phone interview to ask you a few questions before we meet for a proper interview.
Check out the Datalicious Supertag: Container tag for smarter tag management

Tableau Public data visualisation and interactive dashboard on German politician's phone call data

The German newspaper Die Zeit and the EFF recently wrote about the German politician Malte Spitz from the Greens who procured and then published all the data that a local telco had been collecting on him by default over months.

Apart from being a little scary privacy wise I thought this was just plain cool data and perfect to do a little data visualisation in Tableau with. Check out the below screen shot of the dashboard or play with the interactive Tableau public workbook on Malte Spitz's call habits yourself.

Granted, this looks like a massive violation of privacy but let's take a breath and think for a second before we jump to conclusions. It wasn't the telco who maliciously released the data but the politician who requested and then published it on a newspaper so I fail to see the threat to be honest.

Of course companies are collecting data on our product usage and if you look at the data for a second from a telco's point of view and assume it's not just one person's data, then it becomes clear that the data contains quite a lot of information that could be used to either improve service quality in certain geographic regions or offer extended support hours for some services for example.

On the other hand, there are companies that are just collecting data for the sake of collecting data without a clear plan of how they're going to use it to improve their products and services - in my eyes that's the true issue here and much more of a problem than the collection of potentially sensible data in general.

Screen_shot_2011-04-02_at_12
Check out the Datalicious Supertag: Container tag for smarter tag management

We're hiring! Looking for a Head of Insights to join our team of data geeks in Sydney ($100-120k base)

THIS ROLE HAS BEEN FILLED!

If you are an experienced analyst with a solid statistical background and at least 4 to 5 years of work experience with complex data sets (preferably in marketing related roles but not necessarily) who is ready to step up and manage his own small team of analysts in a fast paced agency environment then you should apply. 

Please note: Business analysts as in project managers need not apply. 

What you should bring to the table
+ Keen interest in all things web analytics and online optimisation
+ Basic understanding of marketing principles provides a head start
+ Entrepreneurial spirit, business or marketing degree would be good 
+ Proven ability to turn data into insights and actionable recommendations
+ Ability to visualise and confidently present insights to key stakeholders
+ Ability to identify client opportunities and turn them into project proposals
+ Ability to develop and manage successful client and partner relationships
+ Ability to manage smaller teams and complex projects a great advantage
+ Experience with business intelligence tools apart from Excel expected
+ Experience in dashboard design and development would be beneficial
+ Experience with either Tableau or Spotfire software would be fantastic
+ Experience with advanced statistical analysis and software expected 
+ Experience with Omniture and Google Analytics would be useful
+ Basic understanding of PHP or MySQL would come in handy
+ Flexibility, lateral thinking and attention to detail are crucial
+ Ability to respond to client deadlines when necessary
+ Advanced Excel, Word and PowerPoint skills essential

How we will reward your efforts
+ Exposure to a growing list of interesting blue chip clients
+ Highly flexible working hours in a dynamic team environment
+ Young start-up with a "work hard, play hard" company attitude
+ Training on industry leading analytics and marketing platforms
+ Freedom to experiment with emerging technologies and new tools
+ Potential for public speaking engagements to build personal profile 
+ Potential for a wider regional APAC role in the not to distant future
+ Attractive salary package plus performance based bonus and perks
If the above sounds interesting, please email us at jobs@datalicious.com so we can have a look at your resume and arrange a quick initial phone interview to ask you a few questions before we meet for a proper interview.
Check out the Datalicious Supertag: Container tag for smarter tag management

Data mining and visualisation of raw social media data from BuzzBumbers in Tableau BI platform

Bnlogo

We recently did a bit of custom data mining for one of our clients to showcase the power of analysing raw social media data through business intelligence platforms such as Tableau and given it was only a demo of public data it should be ok to share the results with the rest of you.

The Australian based social data provider BuzzNumbers (great platform, check it out) was so kind to provide the raw data (small sample of consumer generated content mentioning Zara fashion related terms) and we then analysed and visualised the data using Tableau and the free word cloud service Tagxedo, the results of which you can see below.

BuzzNumbers is scanning all social profiles for geographic keywords and based on their frequency they allocate users with a home location which allowed us to visualise not only where social buzz originated from geographically but also what region was generating the most influential buzz. In Zara's example the majority of buzz volume came from the US, UK and Australia but there were a few interesting outliers such as Thailand and Egypt that showed high buzz influence (smaller but darker red dots).

Next we looked at what sites and categories of sites were generating the most buzz value or media value and interestingly while Twitter generated the most buzz value other sites such as Youtube where more influential (darker red bars). Once we broke the sites down by major categories and countries a completely different picture emerged hinting at different site categories performing better in certain countries for example forums seem to be big in Australia but negligible overseas.

And of course we had to visualise what people were actually talking about hence the word cloud to help visualise the different topics, i.e. the larger the font the more mentions that term had. The BuzzNumbers guys don't believe in automatic sentiment analysis (and we kind of agree) so they offer a cost effective manual sentiment analysis but unfortunately we didn't have enough time to set this up in this case.

BuzzNumber metrics definitions

  • BuzzValue: Equivalent online advertising value in AUD (based on banner ad CPMs)
  • BuzzRank: Website rankings based on traffic/visitors/page views (1 being highest)
  • BuzzInfluence: Influence based on search rankings & link popularity (for post not site)

(download)

Check out the Datalicious Supertag: Container tag for smarter tag management