Artificial Collective

exitcreative: Over the last few days at UC, we’ve gathered a...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:22:31 -0400

Over the last few days at UC, we’ve gathered a couple interesting piles of information to help us understand what’s happening to the NBA dunk contest. Using three “advanced metrics” for NBA player performance, we found that the dunk contest features more scrubs today than it did in the past. With that said, it’s not all bad news.

Average PER is slowly declining. PER measures a player’s total per-minute effectiveness on both ends of the court. If you’re Ben Wallace, and you don’t score much, you still do well on PER because you contribute a lot in terms of rebounding and defense.

Average Win Shares is steady slippin’. Win Shares calculates how many wins a player contributed to during the season. High-PER players who spend a lot of time on the court (i.e. Michael Jordan) do very well here.

Average Win Shares per 48 minutes is on the rise! This is where we see that we’re getting more benchwarmers (even if they’re very good benchwarmers) in the dunk contest. If you play 5 minutes a game, but are very effective on a per-minute basis, you’ll do well here. I’m looking at you, Nate Robinson.

Anyway. More interesting stuff to come from us shortly.

derrickbradley: David Karp’s Tumblr analytics. Come get your...

Sun, 13 May 2012 16:29:24 -0400

derrickbradley:

David Karp’s Tumblr analytics. Come get your own.

I helped make this: mikearauz: Here’s your Tumblr analytics...

Wed, 09 May 2012 23:24:48 -0400

I helped make this:

mikearauz:

Here’s your Tumblr analytics tool. (via Undercurrent – Numblr: Designing A Tumblr Analytics Platform For All)

Every Noun Project Icon in Keynote files

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:43:33 -0400

Every Noun Project Icon in Keynote files:

markraheja:

mfdaniels:

Ever heard of the Noun Project? It’s the most amazing site for icons, and it’s super helpful if you ever have to build beautiful slides, wireframe, or concept out ideas in Keynote/Powerpoint. The problem is that all of the icons are in svg format, which means that it’s pretty difficult to import…

derrickbradley: I logged the Foursquare checkin count every...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:43:06 -0400

derrickbradley:

I logged the Foursquare checkin count every minute at my favorite lunch spot in Soho for the last three months. I wanted to know when they had the fewest people around so I didn’t have to wait in line. Here’s the data and story that goes with it.

derrickbradley: I made a MECE maker, a place where you can come...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:56:29 -0400

derrickbradley:

I made a MECE maker, a place where you can come to brainstorm long, long lists and collaborate with the whole Internet to add to them. Come check it out.

Mike Arauz discusses the meaning of strategy in his latest post...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:50:39 -0500

Mike Arauz discusses the meaning of strategy in his latest post “What Is Strategy?”

On Quantifying Ideas

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:09:30 -0400

Traditionally, ideas came in two shades: good and bad. And while it used to be easy to discern between the two, the increasingly diverse and complex marketplace many business are facing is making it harder to put labels like those on ideas. Now the undeniable bleed of digital into traditional business models and practices is making it harder still for leadership to make informed decisions.

Here’s a good idea: evaluate each of your strategic actions with a quantitative framework.

Every action a company takes impacts two areas: equity and earnings. The effects can be positive or negative. Note that I use the terms “equity” and “earnings” loosely: a change in equity implies a quantifiable change in assets, tangible or otherwise (like brand affinity or awareness); earnings refers to any direct financial impact on the business, in terms of revenues or costs.

Here’s an example. A small apple farm is interested in developing e-commerce on their website, affecting both equity and earnings.

Equity:
(-) brand; an e-commerce site reduces the farm’s appeal to its niche clients that seek out organic, traditional experiences;
(+) dot com; the new site attracts more visitors that are seeking to buy apples, not just research apples;
(+) infrastructure; the farmer may expand his apple production capacity with more equipment;

Earnings:
(+) existing markets; now more convenient, local customers may choose to buy apples more frequently;
(+) new markets; customers further away from the farm may buy apples online;
(-) development and maintenance costs; the new website has new costs associated;
(+/-) sale price; the farmer may choose to price apples online higher to compete with high-end holiday gift e-tailers or lower to compete with online grocers;
(-) shipping costs; new shipping costs are introduced.

Each of these items are quantifiable in real dollar and cents. If the benefits outweigh the costs, e-commerce may be a good idea for the farmer.

Operating with a limited investment budget, businesses can evaluate and decide which initiatives consist a priority based on the expected impact on the business. Market estimates and brand equity measurements are the norm in all businesses, but detailing the impact of each strategic action favors decision transparency and accountability. Here is an example of what the portfolio of ideas may look like for our apple farmer.

The estimates and predictions required to map out the strategic portfolio of a complex global business are not easy to calculate, and supporting data may be scarce or non-existing in some categories. Despite this, I believe that making the right choice in tough times is worth the extra work.

Please share your thoughts on twitter with @vladimirpick

The Dynamics of Outsiders

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:27:34 -0400

Have you ever travelled to a country where you were required to drive on the side of the road opposite to the one you are used to? And did you get many dirty looks, honks, and obscene gestures?

Any new element introduced to an existing system is likely to cause tensions. The topic of cultural integration is widely explored, but I thought I’d share the four main approaches to successful integration as I see them.

Note that the principles outlined here are explored from the perspective of cultural integration, but can ultimately apply to any organized or organic system integration.

@vladimirpick

On Scale

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:18:37 -0400

Solutions don’t always scale with challenges. And this is about scope as much as it is about scale.

Take a simple example of an apple farmer and say the farmer wants to grow more apples. He will need some helping hands. He may need a bigger truck or to make more trips to the market.

Photo credit: Migliorelli Farms, Tivoli, NY

Now imagine the local apple market does not need more apples, so the farmer would want to sell their apples in a different state. For many reasons (increased time and costs, volatility of various kinds, farmhand structure, and available capital) the farmer’s approach to hire more people and get more trucks will no longer work as well.

A clever farmer would review their approach and perhaps decide to diversify or change distribution methods instead of expanding.

Photo credit: Migliorelli Farms, Tivoli, NY

I often see opportunities for complex global organizations to apply similar principles to their growth. Evolving a team or a business to tackle more ambitious goals and broader geographies comes with new types of challenges and problems that require new thinking.

I feel that digital approaches will play an increasing part in changing how we do business. I may be biased, but I’m really wondering what that mix should look like for the blue chips of the world.

@vladimirpick

Why IRC Was the Coolest Thing Ever

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:42:00 -0400

You may remember the days when Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was all the rage. I hear that some communities still actively use IRC for real time applications (support for programmers and commentary for sports fans to name a few). But it’s been years since I clicked on the smiley icon of mIRC.

mIRC was just a client that connected you to any number of vast chat server networks, so you may remember using a different application for IRC. However, that’s partly why IRC was beautiful!

Networks served different purposes and some were exclusive while others were completely open. I used “Undernet” and I think that was one of the larger networks. Once on a network, you could join channels, often suggestively named like #beerlovers or #newyork. Does this remind you of anything that’s going on nowadays?

On Undernet, you could create an ad-hoc channels just by joining #whateveryouwannacallit and hope other people joined or directly invite people you know. On an typical evening, I would join #tineretului (my neighborhood), #cnitv (my highschool), #bucuresti (my town), #rockbucuresti and #metal (yes, I was angsty), and #laobere (translates to “out for a beer”, but was all just chitchat).

What I find interesting is that the channels I joined would so accurately reflect not only my interests, but the interests or places that I shared with others. One could argue that the IRC channels would form real-time interest networks and dynamic geosocial networks. It gets even cooler when you think about how the channels I frequented traverse the spectrum from general to specific and between hyperlocal and not so local.

I’ve mapped this out for you so the learnings are easier to spot. The size of the channel (average number of users online as I remember it) is represented by the size of the bubble and my engagement (how often I participated) is shown by the opacity.

What I notice is that I was more engaged in smaller, more specific networks. It’s easier to make meaningful connections in a clearly defined context (geographical or interest-centric) and I believe this applies to both individuals and brands that lurk online.

Two more amazing things about IRC and Undernet:

1. On larger channels, Undernet offered the option for registered users to get “access points” from the channel operators. Points gave you power (mostly to kick people out) and recognition of status (mostly with the ability to speak when others would be muted by the channel), but ultimately created a complicated self-organizing and self-regulating community in each channel.

2. Some of your friends may also hang out in more than one channel with you. Google+ with the new friend circles (and other social structures) very much reminds me of this way of natural digital congregation.

Many other features and quirks of IRC are relevant to my work as a strategist. I feel that we can attribute this to the flexibility of the system that allowed for things to fall naturally in place. If you like interest networks and you’re hungry for more, @mikearauz has pioneered some great thinking on interest networks that you can find here. Oh and by the way, if you’re not on Google+ yet, you should be.

@vladimirpick

O RLY?

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:41:11 -0400

Here’s a little trick I use: after I crank out some digitally inspiring work product, I go through it and try to fit each discrete part in this framework:

O - Objective; irrefutable truths (We have 20 apples and apples are fruit).

R - Research; proven theories or original findings (A study shows that 1.56 apples a day keep the doctor away).

L - Link; any fluff that keeps the O and the R together (Green apples are cool, but let’s think about red apples for a minute).

When I can fit everything under the above labels I stick a big “Y” on it:

Y- Fuck Yeah Digital Strategy.

@vladimirpick

#tigerblood

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:32:11 -0400

Two thousand eleven has already been a pretty eventful year: We’ve seen revolutions in the Middle East, and a tsunami struck the coast of Japan, but perhaps the most exciting event of the year has been Charlie Sheen’s social media foray following his dismissal from Two and a Half Men. Charlie Sheen has always been a bit of a bad boy. Now it seems that bad boys make excellent social media sweethearts.

You see, Charlie Sheen amassed right around 290 000 followers within just over 11 hours of securing his account on March 1, 2011. By comparison, that same arbitrary milestone took the combined efforts of @piersmorgan, @howardstern, @jamesfranco, and @adanicodemou_ a full week to accomplish. How’s that for a torpedo of truth?

As we write this, Charlie has more than 2.8 million followers on Twitter, making his account one of the most popular on the platform. One can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about?

Already well aware of his social media dominance, we immediately started tracking #winning #tigerblood and @charliesheen using Twitter’s Search API as soon as we heard about Sheen being live on Usteam. We counted 1543 uses of #winning, 448 #tigerblood’s, and 3275 mentions of @charliesheen during the pilot episode of Sheen’s Korner. We suspect the numbers would be high had we had access to Twitter’s firehose.

The sources of the tweets is something else we decided to tracked. 35% of the tweets that met one or more of the above conditions came right from UStream; this is hardly surprising given the #winning like numbers Sheen acquired during his live show that night. Not far behind, though, was Twitter.com at 25%. Things start to taper off after that. Twitter for iPhone: 6.5%, TweetDeck: 4.7%, and Echofon: 3.7%. Now a lot of this could simply be due to the popularity of each platform in general, but it’s interesting to look at nonetheless.

What does it all mean?

@dbbradle and @vladimirpick

Play the Analytics Game

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:50:00 -0500

I just bought a copy of Twlight Struggle, nerd-ranked as the best board game ever. Part of the fun is the scoring, and that’s basically an ongoing tug o’war over “victory points” between two players.

I figured this model could be applied to simplify any multi-variable performance measurement. Here’s how:

Say you have two website metrics, number of visitors and the average time on site, and you want to paint a clear picture of how you’re performing. Now give yourself a point for every extra 100,000 visitors you pull in and every 10 seconds more they spend on your page. Also take away one point if these numbers go down.

That comes out to two points total. Since these points are called “victory points” in the game, you can scream out #winning when you reach four points total (adjust that number depending on your goals and the number of metrics you’re using).

I especially like this approach because you can’t get away with just improving one stat while letting others drop. You need to reach a balance and show consistent improvement across multiple categories. Bonus: you have one number that everyone on your team can point to.

Ultimately, this scoring framework can be applied to any performance measurement. I know the New York City subway system is a bit short on victory points these days ;).

Cordially,

@vladimirpick

Artificial Collective - Thoughts on the Internet

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:02:00 -0500

If you’re reading this, you probably care about what we have to say. You should expect to see some serious posting action from a group of folks that care too much about the internet, how we use it, and how it’s changing us.

Make sure to follow our endless stream of collective wisdom!

@vladimirpick