HR departments dispair! I’ve always thought of LinkedIn as a great place to run competitive intelligence. With a little effort, you can put together a decent org chart of any given company, complete with names, departments, and job responsibilities. Now the folks at LinkedIn are rolling out Company Profiles and, essentially, mining their vast social network database to reveal intra-company networks for you. Particularly interesting for a bit of corporate spying are the lists of “New Hires” and “Recent Promotions and Changes”.

From Marty Neumeier’s Zagbook

Of course, a great brand is a precious asset, but marketing, PR, and the rest have their place and time in the marketing mix as well. Consider advertising. The beauty of Adwords and other PPC advertising is that businesses without a powerful brand can still compete and thrive in the market: “I’m a great lover. I’m a great lover. I’m a great lover. Click.”

A data visualization guru once came up with a brilliant idea, a means to show vast amounts of data in the simplest way possible.  The only problem was figuring out how to make standard tools like Excel display these precious wonders, these sparklines.  Enter SparkMaker.  I’m sure there are other solutions on the market by now, but this sure seems like a nifty way to drop those sparklines into Excel’s cells.

SparkMaker from Bissantz

The other day my Google Analytics account made an offer along the lines of “give us your data and we’ll give you industry benchmarks”. Of course, Google already has my data, but this takes it a step further, as my data would presumably become part of the data pool that produces the benchmarks. I can also opt in to share data with Google products and, in exchange, get access to future, unspecified new features.

I unceremoniously rejected this offer and will keep my data for myself, thank you very much. Its not so much that I buy into the whole Google is evil and eats babies myth. I just don’t see the value in benchmarking. Of course, benchmarks can work wonders with management: “we are here and the rest of the industry is way up/down there…” and that might be reason to peak at Google’s benchmarks. However, I don’t build websites for some industry, I build them with for specific customer segments and with specific marketing purposes in mind. The raison d’état for each site is so varied that any comparison with some aggregated and averaged number of visitors or time spent on site is totally meaningless. What value have I achieved if my site attracts twice the number of visitors or half the bounce rate of the industry average, but I have failed to meet my own marketing objectives? For that reason, I prefer to define KPIs on a site-specific basis, to track the trends over time, and to compare with external benchmarks only when absoluted needed (and, even then, with a huge grain of salt).

Do you have what it takes to command a tank battalion? This series of grueling tests had me sweating bullets, but it seems that I could have a promising career in the Swedish army. I’m thinking this creative recruitment exam on multi-tasking, spatial thinking, memory, and concentration would be great way to find out if your hires/colleagues/boss/CEO have got the right stuff.

As for the Swedish Armed Forces, they may want to apply the memory tests to their current staff.

Web analysts rejoice. I just spotted this promising application which intends to bring Google Analytics reporting to your desktop. The project is still in beta, but the benefits for those of us managing extensive portfolios of websites should be already evident: speed, convenience, and usability.  Less evident, but certainly enticing, are the future possibilities for this application.  It would only be short leap to integrate additional plugins and data sources into the desktop program and we suddenly have the makings of an ultimate marketing tool.  You’ll need the Adobe AIR runtime to use the beta applications.

Sometime ago Steve Rubel wrote about the rise of the geek marketer, a new breed of specialist who bridges the great divide between marketing and IT. It sounds like a glorious career path for those of us who fall in this category, until you realize how far away most companies are from recognizing the value of their geeks. Clearly there is a market for this profile in interactive agencies, so why hasn’t big business caught on? Kevin Hillstrom explains where the problem lies in this insightful post on career opportunities and perceived value.

Its become fashionable to run AB and multivariate tests for just about anything on the internet. Of course, direct marketers have been practicing tests vs. control groups for a long time before the rise of the world wide web. It would be a shame to spend so much time testing and yet not know when you’ve found something meaningful. Knowing when and how to check for statistical significant belongs in every marketer’s toolbox (or at least, you better get know a friendly web analyst who will run the numbers for you). Here are two of my all-time favorite posts on this subject:

RKG on finding statistical significance in two Adwords tests Interesting commentary on the value (or lack-of-value) in copy testing in PPC
Avinash Kaushik on separating signal from noise with statistical significance

What I am reading

URL’s are totally out In Japan, someone has taken the time to study how people really use search. Instead of listing URL addresses, innovative advertisers have started showing images of a search box with recommended search terms. A commenter mentions that this idea is reminiscent of AOL Keywords back in the 90s. Regardless of the origins, the idea is brilliant, assuming you’ve done the SEO footwork to ensure you rank first for your brand keywords.

What I am reading

Will the credit crunch inflate the internet bubble? In this article, Techcrunch ponders the impact of the latest credit squeeze, as ex-bankers and ex-real estate agents search for new careers. Are we about to see another mass migration of talent to the internet industry? Those of us with a few years to our careers can remember the first bubble, the so-called “dotcom boom” of the late 90s when everyone wanted to be in Silicon Valley, “eyeballs” where the key metrics, old ways of valuing businesses were tossed away, and everything eventually ended in tears. As with all domains of rapid innovation, the world of Web2.0 has been balancing on the brink of another bubble for sometime, with some very dubious business models once again appearing in our midst. For better or worse, we may be about to revisit some of the irrational exuberance of 90s.