The Analytics Power Hour

You know what season it is? Well, in the United States, we're closing out a 4-year, never-ending cycle of electing a president. The tweets are getting tweeted and retweeted, the Facebook posts are getting posted and reacted to, and the video! Oh, the video! So, what better time to dive into social media ANALYTICS than today? Join Michael and Tim as they dive into this topic -- which they both love to hate -- with Hayes Davis, co-founder and CEO of Union Metrics. You might even want to Snapchat a filtered picture of yourself listening to it to someone! Miscellany mentioned in this episode include: Union Metrics, Great Lakes Brewery Christmas Ale, The Innovator's Dilemma, Oreo's Super Bowl Blackout tweet, WhatsApp, Scott Brinker on People vs. Data/Strategy/Technology, csvkit, SQLite, medium.com, and Is this my interface or yours?

Have you ever read an analytics job description? Have you found yourself wondering, "Is it just me, or is there something fishy going on here?" Who better to verbally cogitate this question writ large than a couple of guys who haven't actually applied for a job in a few years? Join Michael and Tim as they dive into the world of analytics job descriptions and chat about the red flags they find...and the various tangential thoughts that the exercise itself sparks. Resources mentioned in this episode include: the Digital Analytics Association, Google Tag Manager Updates: Workspaces and User Manager by Amanda Schroeder from LunaMetrics, Revamped User Interface in Google Tag Manager by Simo Ahava.

Do you listen to podcasts? Well, of course you do! Are you working in or involved with analytics? If you listen to this podcast, you almost certainly are! Where do those two interests intersect? On this episode! Steve Mulder, Senior Director of Audience Insights at National Public Radio (NPR), joins Michael and Tim to discuss podcast measurement...and audience measurement...and the evolution of analytics...and standards (well...guidelines)...and more! Tim fanboys out in a way that would be embarrassing if he was sufficiently self-aware to be embarrassed. In other words, it's a rollicking good romp through public media. Resources and the like mentioned in this episode are many and varied: The User Is Always Right, Podtrac, Public Broadcasting Podcast Measurement Guidelines (bit.ly/podcastguidelines), Comscore, DFP, Splunk, NPR One, Panoply Network, Gimlet Media, IAB, MediaShift: Bulgarian Analytics Startup Aims to Fix How Publishers Use Data, Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, the NPR Politics Podcast, and Planet Money #669: A or B.

The intro bumper for this podcast says "the occasional guest," and, yet, the last five episodes have had guests. That's hardly "occasional," so Tim and Michael had a choice: either change the intro or do an episode on a topic for which both of them have experience, interest, and, hopefully, at least modest authority. In this show, the guys dig into hypotheses: how to identify and articulate them, the pitfalls involved in *not* clearly stating them, and where they see organizations and analysts get tripped up. They have a hypothesis that you will get some value out of the show, and, if they're right, that you will share the show with a colleague and maybe even give it a positive rating on iTunes. People, places, and things referenced in this episode: Helen Hunt, Twister, Mythbusters, assumption governance, the Science Vs. podcast, and the Invisibilia podcast.

The machines are coming! The machines are coming! Artifiicial Intelligence is here. But what is it, and how long will we have to wait for the technology to completely take over all analysis work? Dennis Mortensen -- founder of x.ai -- joins us on this episode for a deep dive into the topic. You will be surprised by how pragmatic and real AI seems as Dennis describes how he approaches it. And...then his last call will completely blow up the nice, cozy layer of downy comfort that you've settled into during the discussion. So it goes. Artificial intelligences and things referenced in this episode include: x.ai, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Planet Money Episode #626, Wait But Why on The Fermi Paradox, and Rick and Morty.

Somebody wants to overthink their analytics tools? Tell 'em their dreamin'! We wanted to talk about open source and event analytics and Snowplow sits right at that intersection. Our guest Simon Rumble is the co-founder of Snowflake Analytics and one of the longest users of Snowplow. We wrap up the show with all the places you can find Simon and Tim in the next few months. Fun fact: You will also learn in this episode that conversion funnels go down the opposite direction in Australia.

Once upon a time, in an industry near and dear, lived an analyst. And that analyst needed to present the results of her analysis to a big, scary, business user. This is not a tale for the faint of heart, dear listener. We're talking the Brothers Grimm before Disney got their sugar-tipped screenwriting pens on the stories! Actually, this isn't a fairy tale at all. It's a practical reality of the analyst's role: effectively communicating the results of our work out to the business. Join Michael and Tim and special guest, Storytelling Maven Brent Dykes, as they look for a happy ending to The Tale of the Analyst with Data to Be Conveyed.

Tangential tales referenced in this episode include: Web Analytics Action Hero, Brent Dykes Articles on Forbes.com, The Wizard of Oz, Made to Stick, Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs, The Story of Maths, and mockaroo.com.

What IS customer intelligence? What is a customer? Is the customer best understood by breaking the word down into its component parts: "cuss" and "tumor?" Would that be an intelligent thing to do? Will these and related questions some day be answered by self-aware machines? Will any of *these* questions be answered on this episode? Give it a listen and find out!

The mish-mash of companies, products, and miscellany mentioned on this show include: Adobe, Oracle/ATG, SAS Customer Intelligence, Salesforce.com, Scott Brinker (Chief Martec), Domo, Data Studio 360, Tableau, iJento, Netezza, SPSS, Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, Eight Is Enough, Legend of the Plaid Dragon (and the Slack version), Office Vibe, p-value article on fivethirtyeight.com (and the p-hacking app), and the "AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning" video.

In this episode, we dive deep on a 1988 classic: Tom Hanks, under the direction of Penny Marshall, was a 12-year-old in a 30-year-old's body... Actually, that's a different "Big" from what we actually cover in this episode. In this instant classic, the star is BigQuery, the director is Google, and Michael Healy, a data scientist from Search Discovery, delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as Zoltar. In under 48 minutes, Michael (Helbling) and Tim drastically increased their understanding of what Google BigQuery is and where it fits in the analytics landscape. If you'd like to do the same, give it a listen!

Technologies, books, and sites referenced in this episode were many, including: Google BigQuery and the BigQuery API Libraries, Google Cloud Services, Google Dremel, Apache Drill, Amazon Redshift (AWS), Rambo III (another 1988 movie!), Hadoop, Cloudera, the Observepoint Tag Debugger, Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and a video of math savant Scott Flansburg.

As Dr. Phil says, "Never put more into a relationship than you can afford to lose." Not sure what that has to do with Excel but it sounds vaguely wise, which is the whole point. Tim and Michael try to be your relationship coach for Microsoft Excel. Despised by data scientists, but used by everyone else, where are the boundaries and who has what it takes to enforce them. Join us in an exploration of our digital analytics love/hate affair with that most ubiquitous of analytics tools.

(Cell) references made in this episode include: Chandoo.org, Juice Analytics, ggplot2, Bullet Charts in Excel, Geeks and Greeks by Steve Altes, Google Firebase.