I agree every business does not need this real time focus. However, it is the hope that a marketer will have that next best big idea that keeps them from continuously optimizing all their previous campaigns. It\’s this lack of being accountable and reactive to the metrics and not focused on the demands of a customer based whose expectations are becoming real time that causes a lot of business to not grow at the pace they should.

But while "real-time" and making the synapse-like connection between analytics and finance may be beneficial for breaking news organizations like HuffPo – for many businesses that kind of monitoring can have unintended and quite negative consequences. It can put unrealistic pressure on marketing teams to keep the graph moving up and to the right rather than making smart, creative – and sometimes "reset" decisions.

It's a little like putting a heart monitor in the doctor's office and asking them to determine whether the patient in the gym two floors below is having a heart attack or running a marathon.

We need to realize that sometimes squeezing that one percent better conversion rate out of a headline won't provide nearly the benefit of using the other half of our brain to dream up something entirely brand new.

Thanks for all the work you and your brother do. As you know – I'm a fan.

~rr

Absolutely! I am a big proponent of the data driven news room, but then again, as a tech vendor predicting the perfect front page for media I am biased. I do honestly believe that a hunch-driven (humans only) business model is destined to fail in the long term; there is simply no way you can out-maneuver a data centric business model.

I would like to add a cautionary note to the following HuffoPo statement though;

“..use Analytics to quickly gauge traffic spikes and update the content in minutes to drive the publication’s editorial direction”

This is easy to say, but it is actually extremely hard to execute on – and at worst publishers end up creating self-fulfilling prophecies that essentially de-optimize the objective they are trying to achieve. A top 10 list of the most viewed Articles over the last 120 seconds (or last 30 min. if you will) is not really of much use unless you have models in place to interpret that.

Great article Brian! Do come by and visit us soon, would love to show you how we think about increasing the front page performance for news media in particular.

Cheers
d. 🙂

CEO Visual Revenue http://visualrevenue.com/blog/