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Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics & Facebook

June 10, 2010 Leave a comment

I’ve been impressed with the numbers of people using social networking sites – and the importance of social networking for marketing has become significant over the last few years.

Facebook claims 400 million users (i.e. nearly 6% of the global population that is approaching 7 billion people). I’ve always thought that this figure must include duplicate accounts – as I don’t believe that most people in China, India, Africa and many other areas of the world have Facebook accounts (or even computers – although the numbers are growing). The World Bank stated that there were just under 300m Internet users in China and 52m in India in 2008. (There’s a great graph of this at Google’s Public Data tool – that shows that in 2008 there were around 1.5bn web-users).

Even taking account the exponential growth – let’s assume that web users globally are now over 2 billion  people – Facebook’s figures imply that 1 in 5 users have a Facebook account.

I know of many people who don’t have an account and some who refuse to get one. In my age group (over 40), I’d guess that the majority don’t. So where this 400m figure came from and what it includes is a key question.

It now seems that Facebook has been boosting it’s membership figures. I just read this article from one of my favorite sites (www.pandia.com). Apparently Facebook has been telling advertisers that it has 1.6m users in Oslo. The trouble is that the greater Oslo metropolitan area only has 900,000 people. Facebook apparently counts members by IP address – and I guess that it is feasible that this could include users who access the site via Oslo based web-servers. However not if you consider the next statistic given. The Facebook advertiser tool says that there are 850,000 Facebook users between the ages of 20-29 in Norway – which is 235,000 more than the total numbers (613,000) in that age group.

This over-inflation isn’t just a Norwegian issue. According to CheckFacebook.com (a site that tracks data from the Facebook advertising tool giving Facebook membership numbers), almost 63% of online users in the UK now have a Facebook account. That’s 27m out of a total UK population of 62m. In some countries it’s even higher. Apparently all (100%) Nicaraguan, Qatari and Bangladeshi web users also have a Facebook account, as do 99% of Indonesians, 98% of Filipinos, 97% of Venezuelans, and 85% of Turks.

It’s possible that these statistics are true. However, if so, I’m sure that they also include occasional and infrequent users as well as dormant and duplicated accounts.

One of the most important types of competitive intelligence analysis is to not take everything at face value. When presented with figures, it’s important to sense check them – wherever possible by using other sources (e.g. official population statistics). Only then should such data be used in decision making. You should also ask whether there is an incentive to exaggerate or under-estimate statistics. If there is such an incentive, it is likely that this will be done, at least in the published data. Decisions made using such erroneous or manipulated figures will probably be poor decisions and fail to achieve the expected results. In the case of Facebook, the incentive in exaggerating membership figures is that they can then boost their attractiveness to advertisers, and consequently their advertising revenues.

RIP Kartoo

March 14, 2010 Leave a comment
When I conduct training sessions on how to search I always emphasise that it’s more important to know how to find information rather than to depend on a small selection of key web-sites.

Many searchers depend on their bookmark list but what happens when a key site disappears: if you don’t know how to search you are stuck.

Searching isn’t just going to google and typing your query in the search box. Expert searching demands that you consider where the information you are looking for is likely to be held, and in what format. It requires the searcher to understand the search tools they use – how they work and their strengths and weaknesses. Such skills are crucial when key sites disappear as happened in January with the small French meta-search engine, Kartoo.

Kartoo was innovative and presented results graphically. It enabled you to see links between terms and was brilliant for concept searching where you didn’t really know where to start. Unfortunately it’s now gone to cyber-heaven, or wherever dead web-sites disappear to. It will be missed – at least until something similar appears. Already Google’s wonderwheel (found from the “options” link just above the search results”) offers some of the functionality and graphic feel, and there are other sites that offer similar capabilities (e.g. Touchgraph). Kartoo however was special – it was simple, free and showed that Europeans can still come up with good search ideas.

Example of a Kartoo Search

Of course Kartoo isn’t the first innovative site to disappear. Over the years, many great search tools have gone. Greg Notess lists some in his SearchEngineShowdown blog – and an article in Online magazine. There are more. How many people remember IIBM’s Infomarket service – an early online news aggregator from 1995, or Transium.

In fact, it was learning that sites are mortal that led to my approach to searching: don’t depend on a limited selection of sites but rather know how to find sites and databases that lead you to the information wanted. That’s a key skill for all researchers and is as valid today in the Google generation as it was in the days before Google.

Google – public data explorer

March 10, 2010 Leave a comment

I’ve just been pointed to a new Googlelabs initiative – the Google Public Data Explorer. This promises to be a useful tool for finding public data in one place. (It’s always worth keeping an eye on GoogleLabs as they often bring out new ideas and products. These are kept together until ready to launch – and can be found from http://www.googlelabs.com.).

The data is not new – although i think some of the presentation is. I don’t recall being able to manipulate the figures from Eurostat so easily (but then that may be because I’ve not had to use Eurostat for a while). Eurostat – the European Union’s statistic service – is large and complex (or was). With Google a couple of key Eurostat databases (unemployment statistics, minimum wage, consumer price index) now become easily manipulable. Other databases include OECD, World Bank and a number of US databases.
Hopefully many more databases will be added – and eventually the service may become a one-stop-shop for global statistics, replacing the need to visit various local country statistics services (e.g. the UK’s Office for National Statistics).
Even though there are currently only a handful of databases available many of the most important types of data looking at GDP, population trends, health, etc. are available – plus interesting, but probably less critical examples, such as Internet users per 100 of the population. In this example, I compared the UK and US with two of the emerging power-houses – China and India for Internet usage. I found it interesting that the UK had more users per 100 than the US but not surprising that China and India were so low, despite the total web user numbers in China being higher than those for the US and growing rapidly. It would have been possible to add any of the countries on the left to the chart. 

The value of information

February 24, 2010 Leave a comment

I’ve probably said something like this before, but it’s worth saying again.

This was part of a post by Amelia Kassel of MarketingBase – on the AIIP member mailing list.

I recall someone in a workshop I gave about using the Internet for CI about 10 years ago. I introduced the concept of fee-based databases and a young fellow from a business analyst firm raised his hand in front of group of more than 30 participants to stop me from proceeding. He didn’t want to hear or learn about fee-based databases. He had tried them once and they were too hard to use. I asked what he did when couldn’t find information he was looking for on the Internet and he didn’t have an answer but said it didn’t really matter.

I’ve also come across attitudes such as this – why pay for information when you can find it for free. That would be true and valid if the time required to find the information, and the work required to put it into a usable format, was the same. In reality this is rarely the case. The advantage of paying for information from services such as Factiva, Dialog and several other similar services is that you can save a lot of time. The information purchased will be formatted consistently – so it becomes much easier to edit for a report.

Further, relevant information is collected together so there is no need to check hundreds of potential sources. These services index thousands of sources in a way that users of the free services, including Google, can only dream about. As an example, on Factiva, you can specify that search terms appear in the first 50 (or 100 or whatever) words of an article, or within so many words of another term. They support full Boolean searching and wildcard searching far beyond what even the advanced search in Exalead offers.

If that was all such services offered then there could be an argument that with today’s budgetary constraints, good researchers would first focus on the free sources. However many sources held won’t even be available on the free web, as their publishers only make them available on a pay-to-use basis or don’t keep full online archives. This means that unless the researcher has accounts with a multitude of publishers they won’t get the material they need for decision making.

I think part of the secret of being a good researcher is knowing when to use free sources and when to use fee sources. I’m sure that a proportion of the information that is available on pay-to-use sources could be found for free – IF you looked long and hard enough. However employers pay you for your time – and just because something is free doesn’t make it really free if you have had to spend a day finding it when you could have got it within 15 minutes by paying. Then there’s the risk factors of NOT finding something at all!

People who feel it doesn’t matter – that you can justify not paying for information – are actually high-risk employees. They may provide information that allows correct decision making to be made 80% of the time. Unfortunately the Pareto effect comes into play – and that 20% of the time they get it wrong represents 80% of the risk. Decisions made on inadequate data are likely to lead to serious consequences when they are wrong. Saying that you only did a Google search because Factiva cost too much won’t save you or your company in such situations – as it will be too late.