In The Headlights: August 21, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

This is one of the most common cliches heard in conference rooms and team meetings in business. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t duplicate effort. Don’t create something that already exists.

There’s a nuance to this cliche that we miss. Sometimes, reinventing the wheel is the only way to learn how a wheel works. A better example comes from cooking. Take the average cheese omelette. Seems like a straightforward dish, doesn’t it? Mix the eggs, put it in a pan, add cheese, fold, and boom, omelette, right?

Except.

Reading about it isn’t making it. Eating it isn’t making it (though an important part of understanding what the desired outcome is). Watching videos on YouTube isn’t making it. The only way to truly learn how to make omelettes is… to make omelettes. A lot of them. And to screw up more than a few times.

But omelettes exist! They’ve been done. Everyone knows how to make them. You can buy them pre-packaged in the frozen section of the grocery store, or go to a diner and have one made. All that is true, but if you want to truly understand the omelette, you have to make one. If you ran a breakfast cafe, you’d bet your diners want your omelettes, however good they are, compared to an awful frozen pre-made omelette.

Apply this advice to your content marketing, to your social media, to every aspect of your marketing. Any time that voice speaks up in your head that says, “But this blog topic already exists!” or “Other people have written about this, and much better!”, the answer to that voice is, yes, other people have. You haven’t. And your perspective, whatever it is, is unique and different as long as you focus on what you know, what you’ve learned, and what’s gone right – and wrong – for you in your journey.

It’s okay to reinvent the wheel in order to master how wheels work.

The Bright Idea

This week’s Bright Idea is a new Instant Insights download, showcasing the different kinds of problems machine learning and AI can solve. Download this PDF (no form fill required) to have a handy reference about problem types.

Get the PDF here and if you like it, please share it.

Rear View Mirror Data

In the rear view this week, we revisit our friend Instagram and look at account growth. In the last week (August 11-18), how did the different types of accounts and posts do when it came to gaining or losing followers?

Let’s first take a look at brands:

For organic, unpaid content, the average (arithmetic mean) number of followers gained for brands was 407 per post.
For paid, sponsored content, the average number of followers gained for brands was 519 per post.

Next, let’s look at influencers:

For organic, unpaid content, the average (arithmetic mean) number of followers gained for brands was 1,375 per post.
For paid, sponsored content, the average number of followers gained for brands was 643 per post.

What we conclude from this is that brands need to continue paying to be seen and attract attention and audience. For influencers, at first glance it appears that the sponsored posts are less appealing to their audiences than unpaid posts, which makes logical sense from a behavioral perspective. We follow influencers because we want to hear from them and see what they’re about, not what they’re shilling.

Methodology: For influencers, we tracked 3,167 influencers with audiences of at least 100 followers that posted in the last 10 days on Instagram using Facebook’s Crowdtangle software. The sample size of posts for influencers was 15,711 unique posts. For brands, we tracked 3,579 brands with audiences of at least 100 followers that posted in the last 10 days on Instagram using Facebook’s Crowdtangle software. The sample size of posts for brands was 32,685 unique posts. The timeframe of the study is August 11, 2019 to August 18, 2019. The last 3 days of the dataset were excluded (August 19-21) to allow for post engagements to mature, due to the Instagram feed algorithm. Stories of any kind are not included because analytics are not available in the Crowdtangle API for stories.

Media Landscape

How to edit YouTube videos using the site’s built-in editor: 2. Click “Trim” under the video preview.
How to make and post a YouTube banner for your channel: 5. If you don’t have any current channel art, click “Add Channel Art” near the top of the screen; otherwise, hover over the current banner and click “Edit” followed by “Edit Channel Art.”
Microsoft’s latest privacy policy says vendors listen to voice data: A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company collects voice data to provide voice-enabled services for Skype and Cortana and sometimes uses vendors to assist in improving these services.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

Verisim Life uses AI-powered biosimulations to replace animal drug testing: While this would, of course, avoid the unnecessary cruel treatment of animals, it could also accelerate the broader drug development process and get new medicines to market more quickly and with fewer resources.
AI researchers launch SuperGLUE, a rigorous benchmark for language understanding: GLUE assigns a model a numerical score based on performance on nine English sentence understanding tasks for NLU systems, such as the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST-2) for deriving sentiment from a data set of online movie reviews.
AI is great at tasks, but what about jobs?: The process is the job and what employees fear to lose.

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

Data Analytics: The Skill Everyone Needs to Know: With skills in data analytics, you are able to pursue a career in exciting fields like cyber security and provide much needed analytical ability.
CIOs can Meet Gen Z’s Demand for Digital Speed: Therefore, a full-stack approach to websites speed that touches on each of these three layers is needed to deliver nearly instantaneous personalized experiences.

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Mobile-First vs. Desktop Content: Does It Need to Be the Same?: Does the content need to be the same on the mobile site as desktop?
Google is aware of sites hosted on anothers subdomain: For brands that are looking to rent out their subdomains to third parties, Muellers statement suggests that, if the third party is hosting low quality content on your domain, then your entire domains search rankings may be affected.
14 CRO Tactics You Can Steal From Amazons Product Listings: Weve also seen how Amazon has made the best use of each listing feature to reinforce key brand and product positioning.

Business and Leadership

Are Smart Cities the Answer To Rising Populations?: Smart city technologies, when implemented correctly, can scale, allowing growing populations to be serviced more easily.
What Is The Heart of Social Innovation?: As the number of older adults increases there are now more people older than 65 than those younger than 5 so will the needs for addressing their health care challenges, including those created by loneliness and isolation.
Huntley Ritter on why Richard Branson made people stand in meetings: “He wasn’t a big fan of meetings,” Ritter said.

Join the Club

Are you a member of our free, private Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 500 like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today.

Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

Content Marketing World, September 2019, Cleveland
INBOUND, September 2019, Boston
MarTech East, September 2019, Boston
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington DC

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.