Let’s talk about ordered effects for a moment. One of the skills that sets apart thought leaders from regular leaders is the ability to use ordered effects, to foresee the consequences of decisions beyond the immediate impact. If you cultivate this skill – and it’s a learnable skill – you will drastically increase your impact as a leader.
Ordered effects are nothing more than chained cause-and-effect analyses. If this happens, then that happens. Let’s use the COVID19 pandemic as an example.
A worldwide pandemic occurs. What’s a likely effect of this incident?
The economy suffers, which Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security forecasted to be a -11% GDP planet-wide in year 1 of a pandemic. What’s a likely impact of -11% GDP?
Less spending, and thus less business growth. What’s the likely impact of that?
Companies will need to tighten their belts. What’s the likely impact of that?
As a marketer, you’ll be called on to prove the ROI of everything you’re doing. What’s the likely impact of that?
If you can prove ROI, you’ll keep your employment and budget. If you can’t prove ROI, there’s a real risk of drastic budget cuts and downsizing – and you may be among the downsized.
Here, we’re looking at sixth-order consequences, six degrees of consequences away from the initial stimulus. By thinking this far ahead, we put ourselves ahead of the curve. We anticipate – with logical, sensible deductions – what’s likely to happen, and thus we can begin preparing now for the most logical scenarios. In the past two newsletters, Katie and I talked about scenario planning; using ordered effect thinking, you can forecast those scenarios and get ahead of them now.
If you haven’t already started planning for a business downturn, now’s the time. Take a hard look at the ROI of all your marketing, so that when the boss comes knocking, you’ll be more than ready.
This week’s Bright Idea is our session from Social Media Marketing World 2020 on data science 101 for marketers, answering questions like:
- What is data science?
- What isn’t data science?
- How do you get started with data science?
Listen to the session now, no form fill needed >
This week’s Rear View Mirror looks at SEO characteristics of top content in February 2020. What trends do we see in content that drove the most organic traffic to 31,000+ top articles?
We see some common characteristics of previous analyses:
- Domain ratings (also known as domain authority) averaged in the mid 60s
- The average post garnered about 2,000 visits, but traffic was highly variable by day, with Thursdays having abnormally high traffic from organic sources
- Shares of content were abnormally low on the weekends
- Referring domains averaged in the mid 60s, with Thursday again being the anomaly
- Post length averaged in the 800 word region
What’s more informative are what the top 25% of headlines had in common, a natural language processing technique called collocations. The top 3 phrases of top traffic driving content are:
- You need to know
- Things to do in
- To know about
When you’re crafting your own content, consider these and the other phrases shown in the graph above to make your content more appealing to audiences.
Methodology: Trust Insights used the AHREFS SEO tool to extract 31,646 articles in February 2020 that matched the top 25 English language stopwords, such as a, and, the, etc. based on organic traffic to each article. The date of the study period is Febrary 1, 2020 – February 29, 2020. The date of extraction is March 11, 2020. Posts were de-duped by post URL. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors.
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Data-Driven B2B Marketing Personas
- Plan to do nothing with your marketing
- Marketing Analytics, Data Science and Leadership via March 9, 2020 Week In Review
- Proving Social Media ROI at SMMW20
- Instant Insights: The Video-First Transmedia Content Framework
Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.
Social Media Marketing
- 9 Exciting Things to Try on Instagram in 2020 via Hootsuite Social Media Management
- Everything Marketers Need to Know About the Byte App
- Why Social Customer Care Is Marketing via B Squred Media
Media and Content
- 10 Tips to Produce Superior PR Results on Twitter
- Better Together: 3 Reasons to Use Content Collaborations via Velocitize
- Create Insanely Shareable Content: HIghlights From Social Pulse Weekly
Tools, Machine Learning, and AI
- The case for an AI that puts nature and ethics first, not humans
- How designers could help free AI systems from gender and ethnicity biases
- 3 important trends in AI/ML you might be missing via VentureBeat
Analytics, Stats, and Data Science
- Emily Glassberg Sands via How Data Science Can Unlock Teaching & Learning at Scale via Data Science 101
- Survey Finds SMBs Arent Fully Leveraging Business Analytics via insideBIGDATA
- Data protection faces a crisis of faith as medical records are stolen and shared via SiliconANGLE
SEO, Google, and Paid Media
- ‘A big drop in demand’: Confessions of a media buyer on managing coronavirus fallout via Digiday
- Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected via Moz
- Crawled Currently Not Indexed: A Coverage Status Guide via Moz
Business and Leadership
- The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds
- Why You Should Have Opinions and Embrace Creativity
- Warring Algorithms Could Be Driving Up Consumer Prices via Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
Got a “Silly” Question?
One of the things we’ve found with friends and colleagues is that you have questions you don’t feel comfortable asking in front of your peers for fear of appearing less knowledgeable. We all have those questions – they start with phrases like, “I really should know this but…” or “I’m so embarrassed to ask this, but…”
So we’ve put up a page where you can ask those questions anonymously, and we’ll answer them here or on our blog, podcast, YouTube channel, newsletter, etc. without ever naming names.
If you’ve got a question that you want to ask privately/anonymously, go ahead and ask it here!
Join the Club
Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 800+ 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?
Important: events in Q1/Q2 are likely to be postponed due to the pandemic.
- MarTech West, April 2020, San Jose, CA
- ContentTech Summit, April 2020, San Diego, CA
- HELLO Conference, April 2020, New Jersey
- MadConNYC, May 2020, New York City
- Women in Analytics, June 2020, Columbus, OH
- MAICON 2020, July 2020, Cleveland, OH
Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!
Want some private training at your company? Ask us!
In Your Ears
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- In-Ear Insights on Apple Podcasts
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Stay In Touch
Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?
Required FTC Disclosures
Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.
Trust Insights maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Talkwalker, Zignal Labs, Agorapulse, and others. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which we may receive indirect financial benefit.
Conclusion
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