Let’s Talk Data

OK, so I’ve been talking lots about data, and most recently about my personal use of services I use for my clients. Since I told you about the postcard that I’ve created, I think it’s only right to show you what I created.

We didn’t want our postcard card to look like regular real estate cards, so we ruled out a picture of the house on the front. I designed my own card and made it a jumbo (double sumo sized! 11 inches wide by 12 inches when opened, talk about IMPACT!)

How do you put yourself in your prospects’s shoes?

I decided to step back and think about what I think when I see a “for sale” sign up at a neighbor’s house. (Hmmm! Why are they moving?? What’s it like in there? How much are they asking??) When there are open houses in the neighborhood, we like to go see, but we don’t want to be labeled as “nosy neighbors”. We thought about it, and concluded that our friends and neighbors are likely just like us. These are people who run many businesses here in the Syracuse metro would be open to poking around when we weren’t here — not only for their own knowledge of the market, but hey, they hire people, they have friends and relatives that move…why not put the cards right on the table for all to see?

So — we are hosting an open house for the neighborhood. And we won’t be there!

Funny thing, many of our neighbors likely don’t even know our house is for sale. We live in a development (Mallard’s Landing, built by Stringer Development) where there are covenants that are applied to only one part of the development, not all — in particular, the regulations of signs.

The result is that residents in the older sections of our neighborhood are free to display “for sale” signs and we can’t — since we’re in a newer section. Yes, we agreed to the covenants when we bought here, but the developer never says in the covenants that they aren’t applied to the entire neighborhood — that they are discriminatory by design.

And of course, they don’t prohibit the developer from putting up his own signs — which I think is absolutely a restraint of trade! They have a good 30 signs up, and they tell me that we can’t have a sign because it will make it look as if the neighborhood is transient. Well, in an area where executive families move in and out — it’s really good to let people know that your house is for sale — research from the Realtor association shows “for sale” signs as one of the top ways people find the house they ultimately buy.

“Home Buyer & Seller Survey Shows Rising Use of Internet, Reliance on Agents
WASHINGTON (January 17, 2006) –

Technology is transforming how Americans buy and sell homes in unexpected ways, including how they work with real estate agents and brokers, according to one of the largest surveys of real estate consumers ever conducted. The study was released today by the National Association of Realtors®.

Nine out of 10 home buyers use a real estate agent in the search process, but use of the Internet to search for a home has risen dramatically over time, increasing from only 2 percent of buyers in 1995 to 77 percent in 2005; it was 74 percent in 2004. The next largest source of information for buyers is a yard sign, mentioned by 71 percent of buyers.When asked where they first learned about the home purchased, 24 percent of buyers identified the Internet, up strongly from 15 percent in 2004 and only 2 percent in 1997. Although most buyers use an agent to complete the transaction, 36 first learn about the home they buy from a real estate agent and 15 percent from yard signs; five other categories were 7 percent or less.”

We’ve been trying to fight this developer, but unless we want to spend tons of money on lawyers’ fees, we can’t do much to defend our right to have a sign. In my humble opinion, its arrogant not to encourage a dialogue with the community — to just make a blanket statement “NO SIGNS” and the way it is presented to new buyers and applied is wrong. All of our neighbors that know of our plight are ticked off at the developer but unless I take up a new cause (while trying to run a business, raise two small children, and oh, move….) what can we do?)

(He can’t control my direct marketing efforts, can he? Hell no!)

Anyway, this card dropped into the mailstream on Thursday and we’ve had lots of great commentary from neighbors who say that it’s a gorgeous place and priced right — we just need a buyer! So, one lesson to keep in mind — is that even if you have the right research or data (in this case, the right audience — 1,000 of my neighbors, execs, Human Resources directors, ect.), and even if your messaging is on target — when selling products and services you must make sure to reach your buyer at a time when he is motivated to make a purchase.

No one can magically produce a buyer….but we can certainly increase our odds of selling our house by making sure the buzz is out there. That’s really the expectation I have….just to create awareness and get people who might be thinking about moving to the Syracuse area to look at our Manlius house.

Funny thing, anyone moving here from a larger city will be thrilled at what they can get for their money. We like this place so much that if I could click my Dorothy shoes, I’d start that twister and move this place right smack dab in Fairfax, VA! (A cool two million I’d bet if I tried to get what I have here, there.)

Ah… but I digress as always.

Marketing 101 — hedge your bets. Use a high quality list, think carefully about your messaging, use a high quality printer, first class postage, too. Then cross your fingers (and toes) and see what happens!

Will keep you in the loop with the 411. Back to my real work — for my clients!

Wendy

One of the things that drives me batty is hypocrisy.

You can see it in every aspect of your life, both personally and professionally.

As a consultant, in business for nine years (hard for me to believe that!) I see it daily and it just rubs me the wrong way.

I meet people who claim to work as consultants and want the professional salary and benefits that go with being a professional, yet they are very tight when it comes to investing in a good chair for the office, a decent working PC and a phone that doesn’t whine!

How many software companies have you worked at where they are too cheap to buy everyone a legal copy of software — made by someone else? Or get a decent printer (or even an extra one!) so that the staff can get things done on time with decent results?

I could go on and on… Am sure you see the same thing.

I’m not advocating a full out and out blow out of a budget, but why is it that some people and companies can’t seem to invest in themselves?

I have worked with some marketing companies that don’t clean their mailing lists — don’t use business firmographics to analyze customers, and certainly don’t invest in multichannel marketing.

Bottom line: when I look for partner companies, I look for those people who truly put their money where their mouths are. If you are selling it to someone else, you damn well be using it yourself.

As a target marketer, I know that “birds of a feather flock together” — segmentation works. And, my husband & I are in the process of trying to move from our lovely home in the Syracuse ‘burbs to somewhere in NoVA where my sisters live. We’ve always loved the Washington DC area and are ready for a change.

So, in order to help get the word out, I designed a postcard inviting 1000 of our closest neighbors to learn about our house and to visit on an open house night. My experience tells me that people who live near me in neighborhoods similar to mine are likely great prospects (or friends of prospects!) for my house.

I know quality makes a big difference so I used one of my regular sources, Axciom, to buy the list, and one of my other favorite vendors, Modern Postcard to get the news out in the form of a jumbo postcard.

I’ve used both of these vendors countless times for my clients, but not in a soup to nuts creative push for my personal business. Fingers crossed I’ll be posting from the data capitol, DC, soon!

I’m spent.

It was more than I expected. I’m drained yet pumped.

As an alumna of SUNY Oswego, I offered to participate in their Education Based Experience program. I have a few ideas for Catosphere and while I’ve got a great network of professional consultants that I could engage, I wanted to try a new approach.

And what better place but on a pulsing, beating, living campus can you find some new ideas — some real fresh views, fresh blood? After thinking about the responsibility of being a dedicated guide to interns, I decided that I would try to tap into the college. I wanted to find passionate, eager, smart partners who could help me plan and execute an idea I’ve been mulling over for some time. (This is no “fetch my coffee” internship/project.) While I was hoping to get a few takers, I was honored that so many expressed interest in the business and the project.

I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Ian Cuthills’s Market Research class in the Business School. “Speaking” is probably not the right word. I felt like I spewed incoherent tidbits of information that I have gathered over the last seventeen years. How does one describe what market research is in 55 minutes?

Yeah, you are collecting data to make a decision, but it’s so much more than that when it’s done with an eye on the big prize, the big picture.

Each industry has its own history, its own jargon. It takes awhile to feel at home in your own skin when you are introduced to something new. I loved the whole one to one communication you get with real radio — my first love. But slowly over time, I’ve been steeped in the world of data and now it practically oozes from my pores. Each technique I discuss is intricately linked to others in my brain. Primary research, geocoding, segmentation, pattern-recognition, file scoring, thematic mapping… there’s so much to learn.

And that’s not even the half of it. Privacy laws, balancing out the needs of a corporation against the rights of the consumer, benefits of certain methodologies over others, and the increasingly difficult time market researches have getting busy people to stop and give them the answers they seek…. there’s so much to cover.

How will I pass on this information without overloading them? More importantly, how to you awaken a passion in someone for something you feel compelled to do? How can I explain that once you learn the basics, you can make anything you want. You don’t have to stay between the lines?

One day at a time, I guess. It took me a long time to learn this stuff, and yet, sometimes, I am surprised as how excited I am about the prospect of learning something new — I feel like I’m 19, still, with my whole life ahead of me, and a whole world to explore.

New cool tool of the day: Clusty — this is organization (and segmentation) of the web at its best. I remember seeing this site ages ago, and somehow or another I lost the bookmark and forgot about it. But type in anything in the search, and watch how quickly and consistently it groups together like sites/pages and how much more meaningful research becomes when you are using it.

Yawn…. no more for me tonight.

So, I had all these great plans when I first set up this blog.

I spend so much time talking with colleagues about what is happening out there in our little data-driven world, that I thought I could spend some time every night jotting down something pithy. For what its worth, anyone with a few spare moments and a browser can comment on anything.

Was I ever wrong.

Seems like everytime things slow down a little bit — I get some stupid brainstorm about how I’m going to improve myself and my business. (Yes, as a consultant, you live your life pitching projects, waiting, then scrambling when they come through only to sit on the bench again in between assignments, with time to dream up new things to do, only to just get started on one of these new brainstorms and then have 5 projects drop at once.)

(Sigh.)

Anyway, dear sporadic reader, if indeed anyone is out there… do you think we’ve gotten to the point where you can define who who are by what you’re not?

I started thinking about that a long time ago, working on a project that involved a bank. They were starting a new debit card for people who didn’t have traditional accounts. As we tried to figure out how to find these people and learn their characteristics, it became increasingly obvious that we weren’t going to find surveys that said “are you unbanked”??

Once I was able to talk through the definition of what we were looking for we were able to use a big, national, syndicated survey to find the population that was “not”. Did “not” have credit cards, did “not” have lines of credit, etc. etc. And sure enough, when we finished creating this definition, we wound up with what we wanted. The project was a smashing success because we gave up looking for the obvious answers.

Sometimes, we’re so focused on looking for a specific list of characteristics that we forget that there is more than one way to peel the apple. (I hate saying “skin the cat”…we used to have 5 felines living with us.)

People have been using the negative to find the positive in data modeling and mining for years. And, on a personal basis (when dating for example, or hiring new employees) you have certainly heard someone rattle off what they didn’t want — as if experience showed that what you aren’t can be almost as important as what you are.

Am not sure if I am a better business manager, client service person, wife, mother because of the things I’m not. Right now, I’m not exactly profilic with my writing. Am certainly going to try to spend a little more time waxing poetic on something in this blog — hopefully, about data. It’s one of those things I think about. (God, I feel like such a geek when I say that.) And when I’m silent, its not because I don’t have anything to say…

Makes me think of one of my favorite Ani DiFranco songs… “Asking too Much”

I want somebody who sees the pointlessness
and still keeps their purpose in mind
I want somebody who has a tortured soul
some of the time
I want somebody who will either put out for me
or put me out of misery
or maybe just put it all to words
and make me say, you knowI never heard it put that way
make me say, what did you just say?
I want somebody who can hold my interest
hold it and never let it fall
someone who can flatten me with a kiss
that hits like a fist
or a sentence, that stops me like a brick wall
because if you hear me talking
listen to what I’m not saying
if you hear me playing guitar
listen to what I’m not playing
and don’t ask me to put words
to all the spaces between notes
in fact if you have to ask, forget it
do and you’ll regret it
I’m tired of being the interesting one
I’m tired of heving fun for two
just lay yourself on the line
and I might lay myself down by you
but don’t sit behind your eyes
and wait for me to surprise you
I want somebody who can make me
scream until it’s funny
give me a run for my moneyI
want someone who can
twist me up in knots
tell me, for the woman who has everything
what have you got?
I want someone who’s not afraid of me
or anyone else
in other words I want someone
who’s not afraid of themself

do you think I’m asking too much?

12-13 hours.

700 miles one way.

Busiest day to travel.

Snow predicted.

We knew all these things…we had the data. Yet we decided to travel from Syracuse to Raleigh anyway to meet up with our family and celebrate Thanksgiving. As we were making light of the situation (with two kids in the car, what else could you do?) I kept thinking “What makes rational people act irrationally when presented with the facts?” And, even more personally, 500 miles into the trip, 11 hours down, “What the hell were we thinking???”

After all, much of the data you need to make an educated decision is usually available if you just dig a bit to find it. For example, if you are contemplating starting a new business, you can actively research other companies that have been successful in the field, you can talk to others who own similar businesses, you can check the demographics and firmographics, strategize and contemplate until you feel as if you’ve done your homework.

But at the end of the day, what makes people or companies decide to act on the data? And when things go right, do they look for patterns in the research they gathered to see what could be improved on? And, if things go wrong, how do they assign blame?

For us, a holiday vacation had an overiding emotional component that made the logistics pale in comparison. After all, what’s a few hours in a car versus spending time with those you love? (She says with a sigh. It took 17 hours and 2 days….we didn’t count on sick kids!)

But when a decision involves something more serious, all the answers you may need may appear right before your eyes, and yet at the end of the day, it’s usually a gut feeling that sways the decision one way or the other.

For me, at least, having as many facts as I can gather makes it easier to rely on my gut instinct. After time, you gain experience which lets you know what data points to consider and which to discard. However, you can’t get that level of comfort without spending time examining the available data. Only during back end analysis can you start seeing the patterns that point you towards good decision making.

We knew it would be long, we knew it might be frustrating, but more importantly, we knew if we kept moving, we could handle the trip. Avoiding I-95 at all costs — cost us time. But in the end, it saved us sanity. And we got there just as the turkey was taken out of the oven.