There’s this confidence game (aka con) that’s been going around. It’s called lying with data.
A friend of mine recently fell for the lying with data con as performed by Jakob Nielsen.
Jakob Nielsen should know better.
Any successful con involves three Continue reading “Jakob Nielsen should know better”
Sometimes, when evaluating size and scope of market, it’s useful to look at the volume of traffic for some bellwether sites. In the US real estate industry, those bellwethers would be Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com.
Here are some graphs of their yearly traffic for 2012 as gathered from Compete.com’s SiteAnalytics product: Continue reading “Data, unique visits for three real estate aggregation sites according to Compete.com”
As I’ve been messing around with a pile of event data for Twitter I’ve been mulling over aspects of visualizing the data in a way that helps to unlock the meaning and insights contained in that data. Along the way I’ve come up with a new way of visualizing data and I’d love your thoughts to help me make it better.
Twitter events, while often interesting in their own right, have things in common with Continue reading “Introducing the flowgraph”
Some friends and clients of mine asked me to streamline the Twitter channel for Inman News’ Agent Reboot and Real Estate Connect conferences.
Here is the streamlined hashtag. Please note that none of the retweets in this stream should be construed as endorsements or non-endorsements. I simply retweeted items from the main hashtag which contained anything I felt was Continue reading “Inman’s Real Estate Connect and Agent Reboot NYC 2013 Twitter Hashtag, streamlined”
Thoughtfaucet is launching premium content to help streamline delivery on a range of topics that Gahlord is asked about frequently. Content will be available in pay-per-post and as an “Everything” yearly subscription.
The first item available is a conversation on Social Strategy, Tactics and Measurement that took place between Gahlord and Eric Bryn earlier this month.
This is a roundup of data gathered around the 2012 Black Friday sales event, with a special focus on online sales data.
Every year when the data comes out there are dribs and drabs scattered across a wide variety of studies, sites and posts. I’m going to aggregate them here.
As a specific event, the timing of when Black Friday begins in terms of shopping behavior, provides an opportunity for Continue reading “Black Friday Sales Data 2012”
Recently BloombergTV has decided to use the #BTV hashtag to promote special events on their channel. This post contains some data regarding one such event.
Those who have read articles here for some time will be familiar with the ongoing experiment in digital community known as “the #BTV hashtag.”
The short version is that, since 2007 Burlington Vermont has been actively using the hashtag #btv. In the years since then there have been several challenges ranging from automated bots polluting the channel to usage in Bahrain during the Arab Spring (and beyond). It’s a short, three letter little hashtag and this makes it attractive.
In addition, as any Twitter user will tell you: no one owns a hashtag. This means anyone can just start using one–even if it’s been in use. This is part of Twitter’s charm.
Skilled social media strategists and practitioners will first Continue reading “Some data on human behavior in a Twitter community”
A quick illustration of how misaligned or non-existent strategies yield new and interesting results. Continue reading “The six things people do when they see your sponsored Facebook post on their mobile device.”
If your organization is just beginning to get beyond the “5 great ways to blahblah” kind of advice so that you can get strategic with your content creation, use the thoughts below as a starting point as you assemble your plan. You may find thinking this way more valuable and practical than the 5 inane things to do or even the well-meant advice of content calendars etc.
There’s a reason to make content and distribute it to the world. The reason isn’t to generate likes or followers. It’s to demonstrate knowledge, mastery, experience, craft and all of the other qualitative aspects of your organization that influence and inspire people.
Different kinds of content demonstrated different kinds of things. This is why it’s so frustrating to listen to “gurus” and “experts” hand out simplistic advice like “make short blog posts because people don’t read” or “post lots of photos because Continue reading “Content demonstrates”
Don’t worry, this isn’t a “death of” article. I’m simply giving notice that the phrase “traditional media” really isn’t very useful. Sure it’s handy as a shorthand way of referencing print, TV and radio. But in the long run, I think the phrase “traditional media” does more harm than good; both digital and real world media would be better were the phrase retired.
In a hurry? Jeff Turner has kindly identified the pullquote : “Continuing to think in terms of “traditional” and “digital” allows one group to feel tired and old while the other group gets to feel fresh and new. Both groups, however, are lulling themselves into a slumber which disconnects them from meaningful work.”