Thursday, August 30, 2012

Reddit Debuts Fundraising Button for Topic Pages

The Reddit social news-sharing site has had fundraising success stories -- such as $700,000 for a bullied bus monitor or $180,000 for Haiti earthquake reliefBut without a Reddit tool for accepting donations, most fundraising Redditors have had to point to crowd funding sites, independent funding sites, or custom landing pages on charities' websites -- and there was sometimes potential for abuse. Now, Reddit users will be able to execute some fundraisers within Reddit-branded pages. Managers of the site's topic pages, or Subreddits, can opt to accept donations to specific nonprofits by installing new "Donate" buttons on their Subreddit pages, with low transaction fees. The new program has launched with 12 nonprofit partners, including Kiva, Charity:Water, and DonorsChoose. For more, see the news story at http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/reddit-getting-fundraising-button-967956

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Most Marketers Don't Know How to Use 'Big Data'

In the era of "big data," why do so many marketers still go with their gut over stats? A recent Corporate Executive Board study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found that, on average, marketers depend on data for just 11% of all customer-related decisions! The rest of the time they rely on intuition, past experience, conversations with managers and colleagues, expert advice and one-off customer interactions. Data comes in dead last. One reason marketers fail the big-data test is that they flunk basic statistics. When marketers' statistical aptitude was tested by five questions, ranging from basic to intermediate, almost half (44%) got four or more questions wrong, and only 6% got all five right.  Even the data junkies (the 11% of the study) perform worse than the average marketer because, with weak statistical skills and judgment, they get distracted by the data noise --  constantly adjusting course for small changes in response metrics at the expense of long-term goals like lifetime value. The lesson: If you want to harness "big data," filter and focus on the "big picture" -- and brush up on statistics! For more on the study, see the Harvard Business Review blog at http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/marketers_flunk_the_big_data_test.html