Archive for the ‘baseball’ Category
Streaming to the Max
Details are emerging on HBO Max, HBO’s new live streaming service.
It’s $15/month (U.S.), which is what existing HBO costs…but AT&T is planning to bundle free subscriptions for some customers of its other services.
Compare that to Apple’s $5/month and Disney’s $7/month (Netflix comes in between $9 and $16/month, depending on what flavor you get).
On the subject of money, Sony announced a Q2 operating profit of $2.56B, jumping 16% on its 102.8M total unit sales of the PlayStation 4 (now larger than the original PlayStation).
Funding Rounds: Duality, which makes privacy-preserving data analysis tools w/ homomorphic encryption, raised $16M in a Series A led by Intel Capital. And Quill raised a $2M seed and $12.5M Series A for its messaging product and Slack competitor.
At today’s TensorFlow World conference in Santa Cruz, Google launched TensorFlow Enterprise, an “optimized” version of its open source machine learning framework for large businesses.
Tonight: It’s the Houston Astros vs. the Washington Nationals in a winner-take-all game 7. On the mound, Zack Greinke for Houston & Max Scherzer for Washington. It’s hard to believe it came down to a game 7, but that’s late October for ya!
Play ball!
Yankee Clinch
Happy Friday.
Apple iOS 13 is now available for download. I’ve been using an earlier beta for a few weeks, and while some have said it was buggy, I’ve certainly been digging the dark mode.
Apple’s also including some new (but some may say, annoying) privacy friendly features, like periodic pop-ups to remind you how many times an app has tracked your location (that could get interesting).
You can also now give an app location access just once, and Bluetooth access now requires consent. This is starting to sound like verbiage from the Fair Credit Reporting Act (but kudos on the privacy-friendly moves).
On a related front, ZDNet is reporting that 47% of organizations now have cyber insurance (up from 34% in 2017). And 57% of large firms with revenues over $1B have it compared with 35% of those with under $100M. The more they stand to lose, the more insurance they have@
Okay, I can’t let Friday PM slide home without a shout-out to the New York Yankees for clinching the AL East for the first time since 2012. Both they and the Houston Astros have 100 win seasons to date (and it’s the second time in a year that that’s happened for the Yankees).
Remember, every game is game 7!
Did You Hear THAT Pin Drop?
The Raspberry Pi just got an upgrade, with the $35, credit-card sized computer adored by geeks everywhere recently obtaining an upgrade to 512MB RAM, double that what it used to offer at the same price. With this upgrade, the latest Pi can now handle multimedia, high memory and mobile applications. This should also enable the tiny computer to run a future version of an Android 4.0 OS.
Whew.
That’s all I have to say after the brutal 30+ hour journey back home from Singapore.
Jet travel = one big giant petri dish, and after I took ill during the first leg of my trip from Singapore to Tokyo, my sinuses took it upon themselves to become completely inflamed and congested, so I learned yet another helpful travel trick: Pack sinus spray in the carry on at all times.
Fortunately, my head never got to the point that it exploded mid-flight, and I was sentient enough when I landed in Austin to be able to drive home. Where I promptly slept for 10 hours.
The weekend in sport was just as daunting: My UT Longhorns got on the wrong side of the Sooners in the Red River Showdown, my Cowboy’s QB doesn’t know how to count in seconds at the end of a football game, and my New York Yankees lost their beloved captain Derek Jeter in an ankle-wrenching, season-ending heartbreaker, now heading to Detroit down 0-2 to the Tigers in the ALCS.
And then, to awaken today bright and early and discover more potential consolidation in the telecommunications space, this time with SoftBank’s 70% stake its buying in Sprint, which amounted to a $20B U.S. stake!
TechCrunch reported the news brought down the Sprint website overnight.
As has been widely reported, Sprint is well behind in the LTE game, and the SoftBank infusion is expected to help Sprint with their continued rollout of the new network technology, as well as consolidate their position in wi-fi broadband provider, Clearwire.
Faster, cheaper, better. Isn’t that (almost) always the objective in the technology game?
Speaking of, if you’re made in the spirit of a tried and true “Maker Fairean,” DIYer, the new Raspberry Pi is now shipping with double the RAM (512MB!) at the same tiny price tag of $35.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that runs several variants of Linux and is primed for attraction to emerging growth market countries looking to move into the computing realm at a ridiculously affordable price.
And if that news is music to your geekish ears, also on the Monday morning news run down is Microsoft’s announcement it’s moving into the digital music game, using its X-Box as a music streaming Trojan Horse.
The Xbox Music service will be available through the Xbox Live service, and on Windows 8 tablets, PCs, and Windows mobile phone devices, and will include free and paid models for streaming AND downloads.
While you’re at it, how about delivery of a patch that keeps the “blue screen of death” from ever darkening my virtual door again?!
Okay, that’s enough silly news banter for the moment.
I have to get back to work — Information On Demand 2012 is less than 7 days away (more on that shortly!). In the meantime, stay tuned for more interviews conducted last week at IBM InterConnect 2012.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down…
What a week. I spent most of it either in meetings or on airplanes (save for that happy detour to Fenway Park, which still has a smile on my face).
Speaking of which, it’s April 20, 2012 — the official anniversary of the 100th year of Fenway’s existence. Happy birthday to all my friends in Boston, and to people everywhere who adore Fenway Park — of which I now count myself a happy one.
FYI, for the hardcore Fenway fanatics, Sports Illustrated is offering up a very nice tome about the history of Fenway for $21.00 US. You can find it here.
But boy, what a week otherwise. The jokes about today being 4/20 aside (a point which many marketers are taking advantage of…for example, the Magnolia bio-documentary about Bob Marley, entitled simply “Marley,” is out today…And Austin is unveiling the new Willie Nelson statue today at 4:20 PM this afternoon. Coincidence?)
You can read all about the marketing advantage being taken of on this date from none other than the Wall Street Journal.
No, I was more referring to the bummer news about Dick Clark and Levon Helm. Helm, of course, was the drummer in Bob Dylan’s original backing band, “Levon and the Hawks,” before going on to co-found the band named, appropriately enough, “The Band.”
Helm died of throat cancer earlier this week, and in recent years had been most known for his “Midnight Rambles” at his studio in Woodstock, NY, which earned him three Grammys in recent years. But of course, “The Band” fans remember classics like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up On Cripple Creek.”
Bob Dylan had this to say about his old friend and former band-mate on his own website: “He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.”
Surely we will.
But we’ll also miss Dick Clark, a radio and TV personality who’s “American Bandstand” helped grow generations of music fans, and helped launch or boost the careers of an endless stream of renowned musicians, ranging from first guest Elvis Presley (who used to sign my mom’s arm during his Louisiana Hayride performances!) to Smokey Robinson to the Talking Heads…the list of musical acts featured on “Bandstand” goes on and on and on.
And never mind us welcoming Dick Clark into our homes, and the subsequent New Year, every New Year’s Rockin’ Eve starting in 1972.
We’ll miss you both terribly, Dick and Levon. May you both continue to find the musical beat in the Great Beyond.
How fitting, then, that the very same week, the friends who brought you some of the great hack attacks of the late 2000s, Anonymous, announce they’re putting together a social music platform, one that pulls up songs streaming from all around the Internet (including from the likes of YouTube), and lets anonymous users put them into playlists and share them — all while intending to shield the service from being shut down by lawsuits.
Ladies and germs, welcome to “Anontune.” This short video (featured on Wired’s Web site) indicates it will focus on “information about the music.”
We’ll wait and see if Anontune makes it past the first “bridge,” but my read on the situation is that this move could revitalize Hilary Rosen’s career (CEO of the RIAA from 1998-2003, Rosen led the organization in its successful efforts to bring down Napster).
Fenway Park
Let’s talk baseball.
I mentioned in my post yesterday that I was going to be making my first visit to Boston’s Fenway Park last evening, home of the Boston Red Sox, and a 100 year history of baseball that will be officially and ceremonially recognized later this week.
My own baseball team, the two years running World Series participants (but not champions!) Texas Rangers, showed up in Boston last night to play, and play they did. It was the Great Boston Massacre of 2012.
The Rangers leapt out early with a 2 run homer from Mike Napoli, who sent a shot over an advertising sign for “Volvo” atop the famed “Green Monster” (all 37 feet and 2 inches of it) and out into the streets of Boston. But, it was only a half-inning later before Boston’s Dustin Pedroia answered with a two run homer of his own.
But after that, it was pretty much all Texas, all the time, including a home-run laden top of the eighth that sent a couterie of Boston fans sprinting for the renowned Cask and Flagon sports pub on Landsdowne Street.
And who could blame them, the Texas Rangers’ offense last night was beyond potent. I just wish this Texas offensive line-up had shown up last October in the last two World Series games against the Cardinals!
But as I fessed up on Facebook earlier, I was impressed with the grace and humor with which the Boston fans took their beating. It was an absolutely gorgeous night for baseball, in Boston or anywhere, and the Boston fans who stuck around for the full torture given over by Texas sang along with a rendition of “Sweet Caroline” that seemed more Rocky Horror Picture Show than Norman Rockwell:
“Swee-eeet, Caroline…..BOM BOM BOM….Good times never seemed so gooood!” (So Good! So Good! So Good!)
Somehow, I think Neil Diamond would still approve, and little did I know at the time that this has come to be something of a tradition in Boston, even if unofficial.
What was official and entirely self-evident to me was that Fenway Park is a national treasure and most elegant representative of our national pastime.
Fenway Park is the way baseball is meant to be played, and I’m not sure until you’ve seen a game there firsthand you can comprehend the history and intimacy it and its emblems provide: The Red Seat. The Pesky Pole. The Citgo Sign.
I’ve visited quite a few MLB baseball venues throughout the country (although I’ve not made it to the new Yankee stadium as of yet, but frequented the original several times during my time in New York), but none have I ever walked in and looked around with the kind of awe that I had last evening here in Boston. It’s a kind of waking history for an entire American century.
Ponder this for a moment: The first game at Fenway was played April 20, 2012. According to Wikipedia, then-mayor John F. Fitzgerald, the grandfather of John F. Kennedy, threw out the first pitch. In that game, Boston defeated the New York Highlanders (renamed the Yankees the next year) 7-6 in 11 innings.
Overshadowing this debut, of course, was the sinking of the Titanic just a few days earlier.
But emerging from that week was an age-old rivalry and the beginning of a baseball legacy.
The 1912 Red Sox would go on to win the World Series that year, helped along by the famous “Snodgrass Muff” (A Giant’s outfielder who dropped a routine fly ball — something that Boston’s left fielder did last night, one hundred years later).
A ship could be sunk, but not a stadium. Especially not Fenway.
An Interview With Michael Lewis And Billy Beane: Data In Baseball And Business
Michael Lewis, journalist and author of several best-selling books, including Moneyball, his 2003 tome that revealed how a small market baseball team could compete with the big teams by using empirical statistical data from baseball to predict future player performance.
Billy Beane is a former Major League Baseball player and the current general manager and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics. He was the first major league manager to put "sabermetrics" into practice.
At the recent IBM Information on Demand 2011 event in Las Vegas, Nevada, one of the key themes of the event was the idea of putting business analytics into practice to help improve business outcomes. No one was better prepared to address this topic than Michael Lewis, author of best-selling books Moneyball, The Big Short, Boomerang, and others, or Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and the first major league manager to utilize “sabermetrics,” or statistical historical data about baseball player performance, to take a smaller market team with less money to spend on players to the post-season several years in a row. I sat down with the two of them backstage at the Mandalay Bay Events Center just prior to their keynote presentation for several thousand IOD attendees, and following is the result of that interview.
Todd Watson: One of the key themes of the IOD event has been “turning insight into action,” and that seems to be a theme prevalent in some of your books — most notably Moneyball and The Big Short. I’m curious, in terms of baseball managers who are using sabermetrics to make more informed decisions, I’m really interested in how you got turned on to that topic and also just how that came to be and what inspired you to write the book?
Michael Lewis: It was really simple. I was living in Billy’s [Beane] backyard in Berkeley so I was paying attention to the A’s. I didn’t know…I wasn’t a baseball fanatic, but I did know there was this payroll issue and I got interested in that.
I got interested in that in the first place, because at first I thought I was going to write a piece about the A’s. I think it was when Jose Canseco got this giant deal, and he was being paid something like $8 million, and the right fielder and left fielder was being paid something like $150,000, and I wanted to know if the outfielders were pissed!
And, how they felt when those Jose Canseco dropped a fly ball. (Laughter) And I was going to come out and write about that, and then I started thinking about it, and I realized there were these huge discrepancies from team to team. And then I wondered, so how does the whole team feel about being poor???
Todd Watson: As a long time Rangers fan I can sympathize…
Michael Lewis: But I didn’t do anything about it. And then the As had a sensational year in 2001. They were clearly the force in baseball, although they didn’t win the World Series, and I thought this is really weird, they’re playing against four times the sum of money and they are as good or better. How does that happen? And I knew someone who knew Billy, who set me up to go see him.
I thought I was just going to write this little magazine piece, maybe. And when I went to go see him, the answer was so interesting, I just kept listening for a couple of months.
Billy Beane: And I just kept talking.
Michael Lewis: You just kept talking. Because there was so much to talk about. I mean the idea that the market for baseball players didn’t work, or was inefficient some way, had vast implications for all sorts of other things. But I’ve never written a sports book. So it took me a while to get my mind around the idea that I would, and how to do it. That’s kind of how it started
Todd Watson: Okay. And Billy, I’m curious for you… I’ve seen the movie and I’ve read the book and I understand what happens in Hollywood movies, but I’m curious was there some kind of cultural aversion at first, a resistance amongst your staff, to move in this direction?
Billy Beane: Yeah, I mean even in my own upbringing through the business it was somewhat traditional as well. Until I worked under a guy named Sandy Alderson who never played the game, who was a Harvard law graduate, and who was a former Marine who taught himself the game through books. So that was my first exposure.
So I sort of straddle both sides, which was a benefit to some extent. So yes, there was certainly some resistance internally, but anytime there is mathematics involved there’s going to be a certain amount of resistance. I think 99% of us have some resistance because going back to seventh grade, and when are we going to use this [math], and now you’re seeing somebody use it!
But from our standpoint, it was really out of necessity, and, we had a blank canvas. We had a fertile place to do it because we really didn’t have the pressures of a Boston or New York, and if we failed, we were probably going to finish wherever we were, anyway. So for us it was no risk, high reward.
And the other thing was, we had spent a number of years previously looking at this, and there was more evidence…The great thing about math is there something logical to it, so once we had faith in it among a small group of us, we did really feel like we weren’t taking a risk. You know, it didn’t seem risky to us. That’s what everyone asks all the time, and quite frankly, we were wondering why doesn’t anybody else get this?!
Todd Watson: So once the book got out the secret was out. How did you stay competitive then?
Billy Beane: Well, you know there was some momentum going on, and there was this other line of young executives who were taking a similar way to Sandy, and who read outside sources for information and looked at it in a rational way. So, now you’re starting to get a movement…if there’s anything I think the book did, I think it accelerated it by putting it [sabermetrics] out there for everybody. It was gonna happen anyways.
Also the parallel with technology helped it take off — access to information was all over the web because it was being gathered. You know, whereas before Bill James was doing it — and he used to print basically these tight little pamphlets – and even some of the stuff that we were originally using was somewhat, not literally, but was somewhat manual, related to how information is gathered today.
I think the parallel with technology also helped it take off, because it just gave it access to more people out there who were sort of running their own models as well. So, there was just more and more evidence that there was something to this.
Todd Watson: So this question is some red meat for my baseball buddies. Is, in fact, on-base percentage a better metric now for a player’s contribution to advancing scoring than runs batted in (RBI)? And if so, could you talk a little bit about how you arrived at realizing that?
Billy Beane: Well, that’s interesting, I don’t think we’ve ever taken ownership of inventing anything. I mean, there were some academics there outside the industry…
Todd Watson: Sure. But it’s a different way of viewing the data, right?
Billy Beane: Yeah, I mean for us, simply put, it was what metric or statistic were we going to get the most value for the dollar because we had to be more efficient than the others! Quite frankly, the correlation between on-base percentage and winning was stronger than any other statistic, other than pitchers’ E.R.A. [Earned Run Average], which is almost equal.
That being said, pitchers, going back to the earliest part of the century — everyone knows you need pitching to win. Therefore, it was an expensive commodity. At the time, on-base percentage, or guys who got on base, were not being paid at the rate the statistic probably said they should. And there is a very strong correlation…well, like you said, on-base percentage is the one metric that has the strongest correlation with winning games.
For us, it was very linear, and it was very easy for us to put all our money in these guys. And, there were players we couldn’t acquire who had skills beyond that, but the fact is those were the Derek Jeters and Ken Griffey Jrs. who did everything. And for us, we focused on one to maximize their ability to hit or walk and get on base.
If we did one thing really well, and that one thing had the strongest correlation to winning, we were going to be able to compete.
Todd Watson: So why hasn’t somebody really put this together…I mean baseball has a 100-something year history?
Billy Beane: Like I said, we were borrowers of an idea that had been around for years. Once again, I think it is part of any business culture that there is a traditional way of doing things. One of the beauties of data and statistics is that it’s the one rational way that you can challenge conventional wisdom, and somebody has to be there first to go all in.
Todd Watson: Michael, I wanted ask you one more question of you. I read The Big Short and I’ve read some of Boomerang, and I remember when the Iceland story first came out in Vanity Fair, which cracked me up, the idea that these fishermen suddenly became world bankers…
Michael Lewis: It didn’t crack them up!
Much laughter.
Todd Watson: Yeah, obviously the repercussions were not good for them. I’m just curious, then, if someone had taken an objective look at all of that data at the time surrounding the collateral debt obligations and some of the sub-prime stuff at the time, would that data have told us something was amiss?
Michael Lewis: Oh yes! The Big Short has the story. Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager in San Jose, did just that. But what he did…the subprime story is only partly a story of data, but in part it’s an illustration of data measuring the wrong thing.
Because what everybody did was just accept the measurements of the ratings agencies. Their measurement was AAA, and nobody looked at what that meant, or if that meant anything, and this investment manager looks at this pile of supposedly AAA-rated bonds and finds the individual loans and starts to measure them. And he starts to calculate what these loans are, what their loan-to-value ratios are, and the profile of the borrowers and all that, and when he did that, he saw it was a disaster, and not a question of if, but when.
So, the funny thing was, Wall Street, the big firms figured out, they could make a lot of money going with misleading information. That for the machine to keep working on Wall Street, they had to keep going with what a lot of them all knew was a false measurement taking place.
And they rated things as AAA so they could sell them. Because once you got that point you had a whole group of unthinking buyers who just accepted the stats – kind of in the same way that someone in baseball might used to say, “The guy hits .300, he must be really good.” — without thinking whether or not his hitting .300 leads to runs.
So it was a really kind of textbook case of first, people measuring the wrong things, and then, having measured the wrong things, figuring out how to make those things work for them narrowly. But it was a disaster for the system.
Todd Watson: So what are the lessons…I mean, we’re here at Information On Demand 2011 just to bring it back home to IBM and our customers. So what’s the lesson in it for our customers who are interested in using Big Data and some of these analytics capabilities effectively in their business?
Michael Lewis: It depends on the business. I think the Wall Street story is as illustrative as the Moneyball story…just be very careful what you measure, because the minute you start measuring the wrong thing it becomes a fetish.
You sort of like…organizations are sort of like greyhounds at a dog race. You set the mechanical rabbit on a track and go where the rabbit goes. So you gotta be careful where you set the rabbit.
So that’s the…there’s nothing you can do beyond where it’s okay to have a culture that you can critique existing standards of measurements and existing value systems.
And that’s just a matter of keeping it in an intellectually open place. That’s the big challenge. Bosses don’t like that. It’s just disruptive to the hierarchy to be able to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to keep yourself heading in the right direction, I think. Moneyball has some of that in it, measuring the wrong thing.
The other thing is just how much opportunity there is to measure new things. It’s amazing what happens when markets form around existing metrics. Take the stock market…price/earnings ratios…and forever it’s been sort of where value investors go to figure out if there’s value. It’s a stat that’s been around 60 or 70 years, and it’s pretty good. But is there a better way?
There’s nothing wrong with accepting if we’re doing things a certain way. Or asking some of the questions, if we weren’t doing it this way, would we invent some other way to do it, would we find some better way.
So I gotta ask you, your last name’s ‘Watson’?
Todd Watson: No relation to the computer or to the founder of IBM. In either case, I’d be on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean.
Much laughter. End of interview.
World Series Of Analytics: Josh Hamilton, Twitter MVP
I’m still trying to get over the fact that my Texas Rangers lost the World Series two in a row.
But that didn’t stop the Rangers’ Josh Hamilton from earning the social media MVP award, based on positive-to-negative sentiment from fans in the USC Annenberg Social Sentiment Index that I mentioned in a couple of recent posts.
Texas Ranger Josh Hamilton just edged out St. Louis Cardinal David Freese for the "Twitter MVP" in the USC Annenberg Social Sentiment Index for this year's MLB World Series.
The final analysis from the 2011 World Series between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals revealed that Hamilton took home the MVP, but just edged out the Cardinals’ David Freese by 1 percent.
Thank Heavens for small favors. Freese was the Rangers’ clutch hitting nemesis during those last two games.
The USC Annenberg Social Sentiment Index is an ongoing project between IBM and the Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) students to explore Twitterology trends, the moods associated with social media communication.
Students are using IBM Social Analytics technology to analyze millions of tweets in order to assess public social media engagement and opinion from sports and film to retail and fashion.
Each game in the World Series averaged a million tweets, totaling seven million total tweets for the entire series as diehard fans exuded their social media voice and opinions on the players and coaches they followed.
IBM and AIL analyzed each game, identifying the players and coaches with the highest tweet volume and most positive sentiment, then generated a final analysis for the series.
While it’s obvious that Freese and Hamilton both had stand out performances, other noteworthy findings were revealed through the sentiment analysis, such as:
- Texas manager Ron Washington generated five times more tweets than his counterpart, St. Louis Cardinals’ managerial veteran Tony La Russa.
- Freese earned an 85% ‘T’ score – the ratio of positive to negative tweets; Albert Pujols earned an 82% positive sentiment rating. Texas’ Derek Holland pushed ahead of St. Louis’ Chris Carpenter.
- Holland garnered the most tweets for any pitcher during the series, and a respectable 82% sentiment score. While Carpenter, clearly a star and critical to the Game 7 victor, earned a 75% rating.
- Clutch player Lance Berkman from the St. Louis Cardinals earned an 81% sentiment score, putting him in close contention for social media MVP.
- Fans appreciated the game’s specialists, such as Arthur Rhodes from St. Louis, who appeared in three World Series games. He got one batter out in each game that he faced, helping him earn a fan high of 94% in Game 7.
More social sentiment as discovered in the USC Annenberg World Series Social Sentiment index using IBM business analytics technology.
The analysis found the volume of tweets associated with players and coaches had a strong correlation to the amount of television face time each received during the games – regardless of the caliber of player or coaching performance.
What mattered was personality and fans’ affinity for it defined the social sentiment. With each additional game, fans couldn’t wait to turn on the TV and their Twitter accounts, generating a higher TV audience and higher volumes of tweets, igniting the power of fans’ banter, usually limited between themselves and their televisions and inserting it into a measurable voice in the Twitterverse.
“This analysis underscores why the social media element in sports — and in any industry — should not be discounted as an unimportant source to glean actionable insights,” said Professor Jonathan Taplin, Director of USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.
“Relying solely on traditional channels to measure fan and customer engagement just won’t cut it anymore.”
IBM and AIL are collaborating to help students explore how analytics technologies can be used by organizations from news outlets and journalists to movie studios and film marketers in order to understand information buried inside Big Data – structured and unstructured information.
To date, the Index has been applied to film forecasting in order to accurately predict movie blockbuster success rates, and most recently was used by students to identify top trends for retailers from the New York Fashion Week shows.
With this project, social analytics is proving you can find out how a fan is feeling directly from the fan’s mouth, or in this case, Twitter handle, versus relying on what traditional media is telling us the fans are feeling.
The same principle applies in the business world too, social analytics is changing in the way research is conducted as the rise of social media has participants discussing openly what they like and dislike, what their plans are, and so on. For marketers, business analytics may take the place of traditional market research in the future as a growing number of companies start to use the technology to track market sentiment.
In fact, according to IBM’s 2011 Global CMO Study of more than 1,700 chief marketing officers, the majority of the world’s top marketing executives admit they are not sufficiently plugged into real-time conversations about their brands.
Eighty-percent or more of the CMOs surveyed still focus primarily on traditional sources of information such as market research and competitive benchmarking. Many identified their key challenge as the difficulty in analyzing vast quantities of data to extract meaningful insights that can improve products, services and the customer experience.
However, eighty-two percent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years.
“While in this case, its fan sentiment, the opportunity to get closer to your customer through social analytics is an opportunity organizations across the industry spectrum can’t afford to miss,” said Rod Smith, Vice President of Emerging Technology, IBM. “Harnessing Big Data for insights is the key to having a competitive advantage.”
IBM’s collaboration with the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab is part of its continued efforts to advance student skills in analytics across academia. IBM is working with more than 6,000 universities around the world to develop curricula and provide training, resources and support for business analytics.
You can learn more about IBM business analytics capabilities here.
turbotodd
Turbotodd 