Jun 11 2013
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Marketing Data Integration, Hadoop, Big Data, Enterprise Marketing Platform, Marketing Analytics, CMO, Data Silos, MapReduce, HDFS, Social Media, Twitter, Hive, Social Video, Agile Marketing, HBase

Definitions for “Big Data” – A Starting Point

Big Data

Written by Rob Lawrence, eSage Group’s Strategic Relationship Manager

Will someone please tell us all, once and for all, just what in tarnation is Big Data? What is it? Where is it? Who’s doing what with it? And why are they doing that? In one blog article I can maybe just scratch the surface of those questions. I might even provide some level of understanding for those curious marketers, bewildered and attempting to make heads or tails of the concept of Big Data. I could certainly dive deeper than even that because I’ve spent some time with this, and done homework, and lived Big Data. But this is a blog article, not a dissertation, so I’ll keep it at a 10,000 foot view of the ever elusive, yet intriguing, Big Data!

If you are one of the rare data scientists that have graduated recently from one of few schools offering Big Data degrees, which makes you an expert in this field, please feel free to stop reading here, or continue on to better understand what the rest of us are, well, trying to grasp when it comes to Big Data. For the rest of us, here is my take on the whole Big Data craze:

Big Data is simply all the data available. That means, in realistic terms, all of the data one can gather about a subject from all the places data resides: data sitting in some long forgotten enterprise software program in the basement of a large corporation, data from social media websites, website traffic data (click-through’s and pathing and such), text from blogs, even data from a sensor on a rocket ship or bridge in Brooklyn (not sure if they’re using sensor data on the Brooklyn Bridge, but they could be). Sources of data are vast, and growing. It’s cheaper to store data than ever before, and we now have the computing capability to sift through it, so now there is lots more data being collected, “Big” amounts of Data are being stored and analyzed. There is a lot you can do with all this Big Data, but this is where it gets dicey. You can collect all kinds of data with one subject, question or problem in mind, but end up realizing (through analysis) more important information about a totally different subject, question or problem. That’s why Big Data is so confusing to lots of folks just getting their hands dirty with it, and apparently also why it is so valuable to Marketers, Engineers, CEO’s, The FBI, Data Geeks, and anyone else interested in edging out the competition. Let’s explore some basics:

Wikipedia says: “Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target, as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. With this difficulty, new platforms of “big data” tools are being developed to handle various aspects of large quantities of data.”

The Big Data Institute says: “Big Data is a term applied to voluminous data objects that are variety in nature – structured, unstructured or a semi-structured, including sources internal or external to an organization, and generated at a high degree of velocity with an uncertainty pattern, that does not fit neatly into traditional, structured, relational data stores and requires strong sophisticated information ecosystem with high performance computing platform and analytical capabilities to capture, process, transform, discover and derive business insights and value within a reasonable elapsed time.”

So, we’ve only scratched the surface of truly understanding what Big Data is here in this blog, and really the multitude of possibilities Big Data represents has only begun to unfold to those of us using it to better understand whatever it is we’re collecting data about. I hope at a minimum by reading this you have gained a better understanding of what “Big Data” is, but moreover, a curiosity to learn more and perhaps even apply it to something you are working on. These are exciting times whether you are using data for marketing or designing a new rocket ship to explore Mars. Big things are coming, and it’s all due to Big Data!

Here are some great articles I’ve recently enjoyed regarding Big Data:

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May 15 2013
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Agile Analytics, Agile Marketing, AMA-LA, American Marketing Association, Big Data, CMO, Hadoop, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Data Integration, Networking

Networking and Big Data Panel presented by eSage Group and AMA Los Angeles

register now

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As the quantity of valuable marketing data grows, so does the amount of untapped insight that can be extracted!  As marketers, we want to use these insights as a “secret weapon” to better understand and engage with our customers and ultimately drive revenue. eSage Group’s Duane Bedard will lead a panel discussion with Brian Kao of AEG Worldwide, Christopher Bridges of ValueClick, and Raj Babu of Universal Music Group.

Panelist Bios:

Duane Bedard
Duane is founder and president of eSage Group. He formed the company in 1998 with a passion for delivering agile solutions to the business problems that many organizations face. eSage Group focuses exclusively on helping organizations from Fortune 100s to startups leverage the data assets they have to create incredible customer connections, increasing engagement, satisfaction and sales. eSage Group focuses on simple, quick approaches to help sales and marketing teams garner insights from all their data, from simple spreadsheet sources to complex, distributed databases, social media sites and unstructured “big data”. With an international team of data analytics and data science experts, eSage Group can deliver, fast, cost effective results that drive change and give organizations a competitive edge. Duane has an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Later he earned a Master’s degree in Software Engineering from Seattle University.

Brian Kao
Brian Kao is Director of Analytics for AEG. AEG is the lead world’s largest owner of sports teams and sports events, the owner of the world’s most profitable sports and entertainment venues, and the world’s second largest presenter of live music and entertainment events. Prior to AEG, Brian was Director of Business Analytics at AT&T Interactive. He has also worked at Yahoo! and Shopzilla. He is currently leading the effort to leverage Big Data Analytics for AEG’s AXS brand. Big Data initiatives include enhanced customer segmentation, re-marketing products, and a client facing Analytics portal. Brian received his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from UCLA and his MBA from USC.

Christopher Bridges
Christopher Bridges is Director of Analytics and Business Intelligence at ValueClick. ValueClick is an online advertising, affiliate marketing, and owned/operated web properties company. ValueClick provides online advertising campaigns and programs for advertisers and advertising agency customers, as well as a multitude of worldwide consumer facing content, web shopping and mobile digital properties. Prior to ValueClick, Christopher was Senior Director of Analytics and Business Intelligence at Grindr, Director of Analytics at Outlook, and Director of Engineering at MySpace/Fox Interactive Media. During his earlier career, Christopher was a BI and statistical process control engineer, and Senior Engineering Manager at Intel working on semiconductor information systems and web BI. He is currently focused on monetization, content optimization, SEM, marketing strategy, web and mobile initiatives. He started the LA Mobile Analytics Meetup which is focused on mobile business intelligence and analytics, and is currently in Google’s Trusted Tester Program. Christopher received his Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona.

Raj Babu
Raj Babu is Senior Director of Global Enterprise Application Architecture at Universal Music Group (UMG). UMG Group is the largest American music corporation in the world. UMG also owns Universal Music Publishing Group, which is the second largest music publishing company in the world. Prior to UMG, Raj was Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing Manager at 20th Century Fox. He has also worked at Microstrategy. Raj is focused on cross-channel analytics for UMG’s globally. He received his Bachelor in Engineering at University of Madras.

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Presented By:

image001AMALA-logo

Panelist from:

AEG   valueclick logo     Universal_Music_Group_svg

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Apr 22 2013
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Agile Analytics, Agile Marketing, Attribution, Big Data, CMO, Data Silos, Enterprise Integration, Hadoop, HDFS, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Data Integration, Social Media, Twitter

Breaking Down the Silos

Analytics 2.0Harvard Business Review recently published the article “Advertising Analytics 2.0″ in which it discusses the unprecedented amount of data available to help marketers manage their marketing mix in today’s multi-channel environment including both on and off-line. While there is vast opportunity, so is the challenge to sift through various data sources to tune down the “noise” and find actionable insights. Those that can effectively capture these insights have shown improvements in marketing performance of at least 10% to 30%.

The article states that companies must implement new analytic strategies to harness the power of the deluge of data. They point to 3 necessary activities – Attribution, Optimization, and Allocation. Attribution is the process of qualifying the contribution of each marketing activity. Optimization is the use of predictive analytics to run various scenarios. Allocation is then the redistribution of marketing resources in real-time.

Let’s first look at Attribution. The key to this step is to collect data from a wide variety of sources across your organization including sales, customer service, distribution, and finance; publicly available data like weather, traffic, unemployment rates and consumer confidence; and of course, the data from the various marketing tactics. By layering this information on top of each other in non-structured data stores, such as Hadoop, analysis can be done to look for correlations and causal effect. Getting your data out of the silos for analysis will allow you derive more robust insights.

Look for our next post on Thursday discussing Optimization and Allocation. In the meantime, check out our advice  on getting started with your analytics data integration project.

For the full Harvard Business Review article text, click here.

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Apr 18 2013
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Agile Marketing, Big Data, Concordia University, Facebook, Marketing Analytics, Networking, Social Media, Social Video, Twitter

eSage Group supports Social Media Harvest 2013!

Earlier this month at Concordia University in Irvine, CA, students and business owners met and chatted with a diverse panel of six marketing professionals on the topics of Social Media, its ramifications on marketing today, our personal lives, and the lives of our younger generations. This panel discussion event was organized, hosted and moderated by the Social Media Marketing and Adjunct Communications Professor at Concordia University, Angela Williamson, and our panelists for the event included Jeanne Rogers – Assistant Vice President, Marketing at IMPAC Mortgage, Valeska Jacques – Partner Channel/Strategic Agency Partnerships at Rivvid.com, Marieke Hensel – Digital Marketing Entrepreneur at Branding Personality USA, Ty Woodson and Mark Mobley of PBS SoCal, and our very own Rob Lawrence of eSage Group.

The conversation was both lively and sobering at times as the panelists answered various questions such as “Are our First Amendment rights protected on social media networking sites?” and “What company has the best example of social media marketing and how did they do it?” The panelists answered these and other questions sometimes with humor and at other times with a more serious take on just how Social Media is affecting consumerism, people’s lives in general, and especially the youth in society. Although sometimes varying in opinion, our panelists found common ground sharing their thoughts on Social Media such as: “Children today should put down the Twitter and text machines and interact more!”, “Small business owners should have a goal in mind when beginning a Social Media Campaign and pursue professional help from a creative agency”, and “yes, job seeker, your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and any other Social platform is fair game for prospective employers to look at whether they tell you or not!”.

Panelist Questions included:
1. Should social media be regulated by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC)?SoMe Harvest
2. Should there be mandatory time (time or age) limits for children using social media? If yes, what should the age be?
3. Has social media lessened face-to-face communication?
4. Does the content on social media lead to more depression?
5. How can I start a career in social media?
6. What skills do social media companies look for when hiring employees?
7. How much information on social media is dictated by what society says is helpful?
8. How can social media shift from a social use to professional use to help college students find a career?
9. Will future employers see be able to view our social media presence? Could it hurt me in finding a job?
10. Should there be laws governing social media to combat bullying on the Internet?
11. Are our First Amendment rights (Freedom of Speech) protected on social media networking sites?
12. Will social media eliminate traditional advertising and marketing activities in the future?
13. What’s the next trend in social media? If I learn this trend, will I be in high demand for employment opportunities?
14. Are there any social media professional groups/associations that I can join to learn more about social media and social media jobs?
15. What company or person offers the best example of social media marketing? How did it/they do it?
16. If I want to be successful in the field of social media should I have a niche (niche marketing)?

We think the dialog was great between panelists, students and business owners and much was learned by all. We hope to see you at next year’s SoMe Harvest at Concordia University in Irvine, CA! (Follow the SoMe Harvest on Twitter: @SoMeHarvest)

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Apr 02 2013
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Agile Marketing, AMA-LA, American Marketing Association, Big Data, CMO, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Data Integration, Networking, PSAMA

A Fortuitous Promotion: eSage Group’s Rob Lawrence Elected AMA-LA Chapter President

robWhat happens when you attend and volunteer at your local American Marketing Association Chapter here and there for just over a year? Well, not typically, but in our case you get asked to become the acting leader of your entire chapter. We’re happy to announce that our very own Southern California Business Developer, Rob Lawrence is now the acting President Elect for the Los Angles Chapter of the American Marketing Association. What does this mean? It means we at eSage Group are very proud of Rob’s fortuitous promotion and that we are one step closer to being the thought leaders in what is truly a community of cutting edge marketers in this new age of marketing.

The American Marketing Association – Los Angeles is a great community of people who are interested in maintaining awareness of what are the latest developments in the marketing industry. We are glad Rob will be an integral part of this association in the coming years and we look forward to the events he and the entire Board of Directors has planned for AMA-LA in 2013. As a matter of fact, Rob is not wasting any time. He’s already busy planning his first event as chapter President and it definitely fits with the new age of marketing theme. With Big Data, Multi Channel integration, Social Media and so many more developments in our industry, Rob hopes to lead AMA-LA into the future. Sometime in June (actually before he is officially President Elect) he is organizing an evening Panel Event: “Big Data and Integrated Marketing”. Although there is no firm date, it is expected to happen sometime in June 2013, so keep your eye on the AMA-LA Calendar and be sure to stop by and say hello to your fellow marketers, and Rob, at the event (www.amalosangeles.com/calendar).

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Mar 28 2013
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Big Data, Enterprise Integration, Hadoop, HBase, HDFS, Hive, Hortonworks, MapReduce, Marketing Analytics, Saffron, Tech Talk

Saffron is more than just a spice!

panoramaLast night was the 8th eSage Group co-sponsored Seattle Scalability MeetUp hosted at WhitePages.com. There were about 130 people in attendance to hear about HBase and Saffron. Very cool stuff!! Here is the SlideShare.

Summary:

Nick Dimiduk from Hortonworks, the father of HBase, gave us a sneak peek at what’s in store for the developer using HBase as a backing datastore for web apps. He reviewed the standard HBase client API before going into a framework architecture that makes HBase development more like other frameworks designed for developer productivity. He then went over fundamentals like rowkey design and column family considerations and also dug into how to tap coprocessors to add functionality to apps that otherwise might normally be overlooked.

Nick’s Bio: Nick Dimiduk is an engineer and hacker with a respect for customer-driven products. He started using HBase before it was a thing, and co-wrote HBase in Action to share that experience. He studied Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University, specifically programming languages, and artificial intelligence.

Paul Hofmann from Saffron gave a talk titled “Sense Making And Prediction Like The Human Brain.” It was an amazing presentation on machine learning and predictive analytics. Cool stuff!!

Abstract of Paul’s talk: There is growing interest in automating cognitive thinking, but can machines think like humans? Associative memories learn by example like humans. We present the world’s fastest triple store -SaffronMemory Base- for just in time machine learning. Saffron Memory Base uncovers connections, counts and context in the raw data. It builds out of the box a semantic graph from hybrid data sources. Saffronstores the graph and its statistics in matrices that can be queried in real time even for Big Data. Connecting the DotsWe demonstrate the power of entity rank for real time search by the example of the London Bomber and Twitter sentiment analysis. Illuminating the Dots We show the power of Saffron’s model free approach for pattern recognition and prediction on a couple of real world examples like Boeing’s use case of predictive maintenance for aircraft and risk prediction at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Pauls Bio: Dr. Paul Hofmann is an expert in AI, computer simulations and graphics. He is CTO of Saffron Technology, a Big Data predictive analytics firm named top 5 coolest vendors in Enterprise Information Management by Gartner. Before joining Saffron, Paul was VP of Research at SAP Labs in Silicon Valley. He has authored two books and numerous publications. Paul received his Ph.D. in Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology.

Make sure to put April 24th for the next Scalability MeetUp at RedFin.

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Mar 25 2013
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Agile Analytics, Agile Marketing, Big Data, CMO, Data Silos, Enterprise Marketing Platform, Facebook, Hadoop, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Data Integration, Networking, PSAMA, Social Media, Twitter Gallery

PSAMA MarketMix is a Success!

3-22-13 downloads 519

3-22-13 downloads 521

Last Wednesday, eSage Group’s Duane Bedard led a panel on Big Data at the Puget Sound Marketing Association’s MarketMix event. There were 400 people in attendance at the event. Duane, along with Adam Weiner of RedFin and Shish Shridhar of Microsoft had a candid discussion about powerful sales and marketing analytics using the vast amount of data that is being collected today. It was a packed house! Lots of interest in how to harness the power of today’s data deluge! A massive thanks to Shish (@5h15h) and Adam (@adamredfin) for their insights, relevant examples, and inspiration! eSage Group is looking forward to continuing to support the marketing analytics community with many more events like this in the future!

MarketMix

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Mar 20 2013
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Agile Analytics, Attribution, Big Data, CMO, Data Silos, Enterprise Marketing Platform, Hadoop, PSAMA, Social Media, Twitter

eSage Group’s Duane Bedard leads PSAMA Big Data Panel

MarketMix

Today is the Puget Sound American Marketing Association’s MarketMix event that will be bringing together over 400 marketers for a day of learning and networking!

During the 11:10 breakout session, Duane will be leading a panel discussion on Big Data.

If you are there, make sure to come listen to a great discussion with panelists Shish Shirdhar from Microsoft, Romi Mahajan from KKM Group, and Adam Weiner from RedFin.

Here is more information on the session. http://wp.me/p29dXf-9a

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Mar 19 2013
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Agile Analytics, Agile Marketing, Attribution, Big Data, CMO, Data Silos, Enterprise Integration, Hadoop, HDFS, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Data Integration, Social Media, Twitter

Breaking Down the Silos

Analytics 2.0Harvard Business Review recently published the article “Advertising Analytics 2.0″ in which it discusses the unprecedented amount of data available to help marketers manage their marketing mix in today’s multi-channel environment including both on and off-line. While there is vast opportunity, so is the challenge to sift through various data sources to tune down the “noise” and find actionable insights. Those that can effectively capture these insights have shown improvements in marketing performance of at least 10% to 30%.

The article states that companies must implement new analytic strategies to harness the power of the deluge of data. They point to 3 necessary activities – Attribution, Optimization, and Allocation. Attribution is the process of qualifying the contribution of each marketing activity. Optimization is the use of predictive analytics to run various scenarios. Allocation is then the redistribution of marketing resources in real-time.

Let’s first look at Attribution. The key to this step is to collect data from a wide variety of sources across your organization including sales, customer service, distribution, and finance; publicly available data like weather, traffic, unemployment rates and consumer confidence; and of course, the data from the various marketing tactics. By layering this information on top of each other in non-structured data stores, such as Hadoop, analysis can be done to look for correlations and causal effect. Getting your data out of the silos for analysis will allow you derive more robust insights.

Look for our next post on Thursday discussing Optimization and Allocation. In the meantime, check out our advice  on getting started with your analytics data integration project.

For the full Harvard Business Review article text, click here.

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Mar 07 2013
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Agile Analytics, Agile Marketing, Attribution, Big Data, CMO, Data Silos, Facebook, FreeWheel, Hadoop, HDFS, Hive, MapReduce, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Data Integration, Networking, PSAMA, Social Media, SQL, Twitter

eSage Group is excited to be a part of the PSAMA MarketMix!

 MarketMixBig data offers a lot of promise and opportunities for improving the way we do marketing.  As floods of data pour in from social media, mobile, weblogs,  digital advertising, CRM, POS, etc., companies need to effectively store it and develop robust analytics to mine the data for knowledge. By gaining new insights, marketers can tailor our marketing message to provide customers with the most relevant information and better engage with them through the lifecycle.  But how do we manage this data to make it truly usable?  How do we avoid the perils that comes with identifying and gathering the data, putting the analytics system in place, and getting the right people in place, so we can turn the data into actionable insights?

eSage Group’s very own Duane Bedard will lead a panel discussion on this and more at the Puget Sound American Marketing Association MarketMix on March 20th.  Panelists include Shish Shirdhar from Microsoft, Romi Mahajan from KKM Group, and Adam Weiner from RedFin.

ShiSh Shridhar is the Retail Industry Solutions Director at Microsoft and is responsible for strategy around Business Analytics, Big Data & Productivity Solutions for the Retail Industry. ShiSh has worked in Microsoft for the last 16 years across several groups and geographies and has a passion for empowering organizations through collaboration, knowledge management and analytics. ShiSh contributes to Retail Industry magazines, blogs and maintains the Retail Industry twitter presence for Microsoft: @msretail . He also regularly speaks at Industry events. ShiSh loves working on innovative ideas and has a patent in the Social Media space. When he isn’t working he sails and windsurfs the waters around the Puget Sound.  Follow Shish on Twitter at @5h15h.

Romi Mahajan is an award-winning marketer, marketing thinker, and author. His career is a storied one, including spending 9 years at Microsoft, being the first CMO of Ascentium, a leading digital agency, and founding the KKM Group, a boutique advisory firm focused on strategy and marketing. Romi has also authored two books on marketing- the latest one can be found here. A prolific writer and speaker, Mahajan lives in Bellevue, WA, with his wife and two kids. Mahajan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, at the age of 19 with a Bachelor’s degree in South Asian Studies. He also received a Master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at romi@thekkmgroup.com

Adam Weiner is Vice President of Analytics and New Business at Redfin, He leads the company’s efforts to use our proprietary data to build new products for the web and improve our real estate services. He is also responsible for identifying opportunities for business growth that align with Redfin’s overall mission to reinvent the consumer experience for buying and selling real estate. Adam joined Redfin in 2007 on the product management team and was one of the pioneers of the Redfin Partner Program for agents, in addition to our service provider directory, Redfin Open Book. Prior to Redfin, Adam worked at Microsoft in the SQL Server Division for 5 years. Adam graduated from Stanford with a degree in Symbolic Systems, and a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction. Follow Adam on Twitter at @adamRedfin.

You can still register for the event at www.marketmix2013.com!

 

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