Jolie O’Dell’s December 14, 2009 ReadWriteWeb article starts: “A recently released Google Labs product called Fusion Tables allowed users to grab data from spreadsheets, text documents, PDFs and other sources and create compelling, comprehensive visualizations from a merged data set.”
This announcement ushers in a new era where a SQL like language allows analysts to create new types of data visualizations that will lead to dynamic interpretations of data sets that was not easily possible before. It even incorporates the ability for groups to work on data sets.
This Mashable.com post from October 13 features a plethora of Word of Mouth Marketing tools. I currently use many of them and this handy resource gives me a few new ones to test. My favorite two tools are Google Alerts and Hootsuite. Every marketer, business owner, sales person, etc. should investigate as many of these tools as possible. Also, do not forget Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing Bible - Word of Mouth Marketing - How Smart Companies Get People Talking, Revised Edition.
Ron Shevlin rips apart customer advocacy measurement and adds his opinion as to what information should be captured. This is a good topic for discussion. I hope you comment and discuss as did I.
The New York Times Saturday, September 5, Op-Ed features a piece by Charles M. Blow titled “The Prince of Dispassion.” Among other things, it includes his opinion regarding a CBS News Poll about health care reform (press release PDF here). I found the data visualization used by The New York Times to be egregious. The data visualization’s rough measurements on the page was just under 11 inches high and approximately 3 1/2 inches wide. More simply, the data visualization is 66% of the space of the Op-Ed piece. That is huge. Below is the image that is available on the New York Times website.
The CBS press release showed the data simply, clearly and without fanfare as a data table. As seen below, it is compact and easier to read.
I would have preferred the Op-Ed piece to have had the original data table. This would have left a lot of room for Charles Blow to expand his commentary. Opinions in a newspaper are words and not huge charts. It would have been much better if the piece was 85% - 95% text and the rest supporitng tables or proper data visualizations.
In December 2008 The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, launched a “We’re Linux” video contest. The goal of this contest was to get linux fans around the world to create a one minute video to further the adoption of the Linux operating system. On April 9, 2009, The Linux Foundation announced the winner.
I have watched the winning video and the two runners-up. The videos are well done and as a Linux fan I like them, but if I was a MAC or PC user they would not get me interested to try Linux. I am the type of person that needs a little bit of substance. If the target audience for this competition is non-Linux users, I believe the target audience has been missed. Apple and Microsoft are able to spend millions of dollars on all sorts of research to uncover the the needs of their target audience and that gives them an advantage over their open source competitors. Having said that, the winning video is evocative. This is the winning video.
The next video is the first of the two runners-up. The visuals are very interesting and engaging. I could see this video appeal to those with strong visual arts backgrounds.
The second of the two runners-up videos is French and a lot of fun. It is also comedic in tone. To me, this video is for Linux users and not non-Linux users.
I spent more time at The Linux Foundation website and I found a Linux video submission that speaks to me, a computer power user. What I like most about this video is that it is direct and to the point. When you watch, you know who extactly the video is speaking too. This is a good starting concept. I would have liked to see this ad with better copy, visuals and music. If this video was as polished as the first two, maybe it would have won or been a runners-up.
The Ubuntu developers will be releasing the next version, 9.04, on April 23, 2009.
The feature I am most looking forward to is desktop UI Gnome 2.26 with its much improved CD burning capabilitis. The Gnome website says “Although previous versions of Gnome already had an easy way to burn CDs and DVDs, as of GNOME 2.26 this has been expanded to a whole application dedicated to disc creation: Brasero.”
The developers also worked to significantly improve the already fast boot perfromance.
I have been using Ubuntu since version 7.04 and every release has seen this Linux distribution get better and better.
One of the ratios closely watched in the banking community is the efficiency ratio. The efficiency ratio is defined as Non-Interest Expense divided by the sum of Net Interest Income and Non-Interest Income. The lower the ratio the better.
An example of efficiency ratio from Wikipedia is as follows:
“If expenses are $40 and revenue is $80 (perhaps net of interest revenue/expense) the efficiency ratio is 0.5 or 50% (40/80). Efficiency ratio is essentially how much you spend to make a dollar. In the above example, they spent $0.50 for every dollar they earned in revenue.”
In today’s down economy, companies are laying off employees and budgets are being cut. These are expense saves and many companies try to improve their efficiency ratio by way of expense saves. I am all for reducing wasteful spending, but now is the time to sell. The turmoil with the big money center banks is perfect for all us community banks to take business away from the big banks.
So what is the plan? Let’s keep it simple. We should all do the following:
Protect your existing customer base. Make sure you know who your best customers are and keep them happy. These are not just your most profitable customers but also your champions, those customers that like to talk about you and refer you to others.
Increase your service and products per household. Do you know how many of your customers only have savings products and no checking products? How many checking customers who have no savings products? Customers with out debit cards or not using their debit card? What about internet banking, bill pay, direct deposit, eStatement status? All these products and services add spread income, non-interest fee income, reduce expense and affect the customer life time value.
Focus on acquiring deposit rich customers. A simple segmentation strategy within small business and retail markets that focuses on high average non-interest deposits should be your focus.
These simple strategic steps will have a far greater effect on lowering your efficiency ratio than cutting expenses. They will also improve your bank’s profitability.
The ideas above are a simple broad stroke of what can be done simply. Each institution has its own capabilities to refine further for efficiency and maximum impact.
What are your thoughts?
Part 2 of this series will further explore protecting your existing customer base.
I told many people about my New York Times #NYT delivery guy waking me up Sunday morning at 6:45am by using the door knocker until I woke up.
Everyone I told, thought the delivery guy was nuts for doing that. I am glad I reported the behavior to the NYT customer care center.
Why did the NYT home delivery guy wake me up? Because I dared to call and complain that for two Saturdays in a row, I only got the Sunday advance sections and no Saturday paper. I really liked the New York Times customer service reps comments about the home delivery guy waking me up by saying he is not supposed to do that. DUH!
I spent some time this weekend exporing the new Linux Ubuntu 8.04 release. As I said in part one, I really enjoy how much snappier it is. All weekend long I made sure the 3D UI, compiz, was turned on. I found it to be much smoother then in the previous two versions.
During my second round of testing, I focused on my Citrix connection to work. I had no issues and with the 3D UI turned on and I actually got some of the fancy window open and close affects witht he Citrix windows that were running on a Windows 2003 server at work.
I played several type of videos at several sites, YouTube etc and had no issues.
The only glitch which I shoud report is the Update program leaves windows fragments on the desktop after checking for updates.
So, what is the bottom line? For me, I got a whole bunch of updates, the core OS, the UI, and many programs and continued using my computer without any major issues. To me, that is a huge success.
I upgraded my Linux installation on my Toshiba Tecra M2-S430 laptop from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 LTS. For those of you not familiar with Ubuntu, it updates every six months. However, they started a Long Term Support (LTS) version for those who do not want to upgrade every six months. LTS versions receive support for three years.
I used the upgrade feature from within my install, clicked a couple of confirmation boxes and went to bed. I woke up to find the upgrade complete and just one more confirmation box to cleanup the install. A few minutes later I re-booted and I was on the new version.
My very first impression was this is faster. The Gnome interface, the browser and even Open Office all while running the advanced 3D interface (Combiz).
The only negative so far is two applications that were installed outside of the built in install program did not work. One was a beta product (hey it’s a beta) and the other was the Citrix client which could be due to Ubuntu running Firefox beta.
Clay McDaniel is the principal and co-founder of social media marketing agency, 
