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In my last post, I promised to lift the lid on British etiquette in time for your visit to the Analytics conference. Well, I’m going to be a bit more specific and focus my insight on London Etiquette, primarily, Greetings and Tube Etiquette.

Greetings

Around the world, we greet people in different ways depending on whether we use formal language or informal language. In London, it’s no different. You will often hear people use formal phrases such as "good morning", "good afternoon" or "good evening", informal phrases such as "hi"; "hello"; "how are you"; or sometimes just dropping the ‘good’ from a formal greeting and saying “morning”, “afternoon”, “evening”. A formal greeting is usually accompanied by a firm handshake, an informal; a nod of the head or a wave of the hand. We sometime say 'cheers' instead of thank you. You may hear 'cheers' said instead of 'good bye', what we are really saying is 'thanks and goodbye'.  In London, you may specifically hear some people say, Alrigh' or Wotcha or Allo. Sometimes accompanied with rhyming slang, (the rhyming word isn't usually spoken), for example: 'Alrigh me old china' (translated as ‘alright mate?’, China Plate = Mate ), but most Londoners are more likely to say "Wotcha, mate" or "Alrigh' mate". To show respect, you can also use Guv. (short for Governor), "Alrigh' Guv?"

Tube Etiquette

The London Underground, (Tube), was the world’s first subterranean railway. Carrying over 4 million passengers daily, some say it resembles a mild form of torture. That many people in a close confined space can be a recipe for disaster, but the unwritten rules of the tube make traveling on the underground an unforgettable experience. Here are my top ten tips to surviving your Tube journey:

1.         Have your tickets at the ready. Causing delays at the ticket barrier is a big no.

2.         On escalators, stand on the right, walk on the left.

3.         If you’re first onto the tube, then move down well inside the carriage to allow more commuters on board.

4.         Give your fellow commuters enough space.

5.         Step to the side. Most useful when leaving escalators, looking for directions, or letting people off the tube that’s just pulled in.

6.         Possibly one the tube's golden rules: Let others off the train first.

7.         Your bag or suitcase is not entitled to a seat, especially if the train is crowded.

8.         Invest in a decent set of cans or keep your music on low.

9.         Though it is quite tempting, don’t read over other people’s shoulders.

10.       Mind the gap! You really don't want to fall in, there's dirt down there.

When you ride through the tube, you are riding through living history. From the hum of the hordes to the drone of the trains as they go from station to station. With this history comes it’s own brand of humour, supported by these genuine announcements made by London Tube Drivers:

"Ladies & Gentleman, upon departing the train may I remind you to take your rubbish with you. Despite the fact that you are in something that is metal, fairly round, filthy and smells, this is a tube train for public transport and not a bin on wheels."

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I do apologise for the delay to your service. I know you're all dying to get home, unless, of course, you happen to be married to my ex-wife, in which case you'll want to cross over to the Westbound service and go in the opposite direction".

Until next time, Cheers!

photo credit: @Doug88888 // attribution: creative commons

This year we’re holding the first of our Analytics Series conferences in London, right by Waterloo Station.   Not too far from the hotel is the Florence Nightingale Museum.   Most of us (at least in Britain) know her well from school as ‘the Lady with the Lamp’.  Florence Nightingale is most famous as the founder of the modern profession of nursing and a champion of women’s rights in a very different time to our own.  But fewer probably know that she was also a pioneering statistician.

Florence Nightingale was born into a wealthy British family in the Italian town of Florence; hence her name.    Her career was spent in the service of others and she helped look after wounded soldiers during the battle of the Crimea during the 1850s.  There she acquired her moniker ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ as she would do her rounds in the military hospital with a small lamp.

Florence Nightingale was also an accomplished statistician.  Although she had not formal training in the subject, as a girl she had shown an aptitude for mathematics and took to the use of numbers to back up her arguments for improved sanitation as key to public health.  In fact, she showed a particular interest in data visualization. She made good use of the existing bar chart and pie chart, but went on to develop her own variation on the bar chart known variously as the ‘Nightingale rose diagram’, circular histogram, polar area diagram or “coxcomb”.  You can see her chart below.

It’s essentially a stacked bar chart arranged around a central point, with each segment representing a month.  It is especially useful for showing cyclical classifications; hours, days, months, points of the compass etc.  But not so useful for classification variables such as year, gender or country.

You can create a polar area diagram in JMP  and similar diagrams are available in SAS including the Windrose diagram in PROC GRADAR.

So, when you’ve got a moment during your visit to London for the Analytics Series Conference, perhaps take a break and visit Florence Nightingale’s museum, see her statue, you can also often see a stained glass window of her in many London churches.

References:

Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale

Celebrating statisticians:  Florence Nightingale, Laura Lancaster:  http://blogs.sas.com/content/jmp/2013/02/04/celebrating-statisticians-florence-nightingale/

Summer in the City: The Analytics Conference in London

This year, we're holding the Analytics conference first in London (June 19-20, Park Plaza Westminster Bridge) and then in Orlando (October 21-22, The Peabody Orlando). It’s a great opportunity to hear how the world's top analysts are putting analytics to work to solve pressing issues facing businesses and other organisations. Ranging from text analysis through to fraud detection, analytics is really changing how our world works.

But have you ever wondered, how do we use analytics to promote the Analytics Conference?

Fluffy Marketers and Hard-Nosed Analysts

As a marketer, I know that marketing often gets bad press, in whatever sort of organisation you work in. I’ve probably heard them all over the years: the colouring in department, the lunch division, the home for retired sales people. Incidentally, I used to work in the training department, so the last one doesn’t quite fit for me. And, of course the adjective ‘fluffy’, something that is soft, furry and billowy. So, we think of an activity which is vague and undefined.

However, marketing actually has to be quite a precise science. In essence, your job as a marketer is to offer a product or service to people who would be interested in buying it, at a price they are prepared to pay. And that’s not fluffy at all, in fact it’s quite hard-nosed and requires a close and honest examination of the information available to you. So, marketing can’t be fluffy, because if it's fluffy it won't work.

Assessing the Size of your Market

There are over 60 million people living in the UK, and – depending how you define it – nearly 740 million people living in Europe. But out of these millions of people, who should you target to attend a conference like Analytics 2013? Actually, the question is simpler than that. How many people are you actually able to target? You have to have some means of contacting them and they have to be contactable, this is termed the total serviceable market.

My role as a marketing manager for the UK and Ireland is to contact my local customers and prospects. So, my first job is to extract a list of them. I know who they are, their job title, who they work for and where they are based. All are relevant factors, only certain types of people use analytics, some companies are more and less likely to send delegates, and for an event in London, people closer to the venue are more likely to attend than those who are further away.

Laying out the Tiles

So, the first step is to segment the target list. The most relevant factor is job title, a ‘business analyst’ is more likely to attend than an ‘ice cream consumption specialist’ not that there are many of them on our list! A good way I’ve found to visualise this is the ‘tile chart’.

A tile chart can be created in many ways in SAS, including PROC GTILE, or using SAS Enterprise Guide, or through data visualization with SAS Visual Analytics. It’s a good way to see how large your segments are, and whether you have too many or too few. You can also quickly see if what you are trying to market has a large enough potential audience to make it viable. If not, how could you expand that audience? As a result, I recommended that we introduced an ‘introduction to analytics’ stream at this year’s event.

London Calling

The the second step in the process, now that we know who to contact is to actually contact them. Targeted communications are much more interesting and less annoying than random ‘spam’, so making sure that you contact the right people is crucial. Also, the price of a call is more than the price of a postcard which costs more than an email. And getting an unwanted call is really annoying, well it annoys me anyway. Analytics and data management is crucial here too. We need to know that the people we are contacting are happy to be contacted, and that they haven’t been contacted very recently.

Measurement and Forecasting

Finally, the success – or otherwise – of our campaign needs to be monitored, measured and forecast. Is it on track? How many people have read and responded to our communications? How many people have actually booked? A combination of these allow us to project the likely result of the event and take any appropriate action to ensure that it is a success.

Analytics for the Analytics Conference

So, I hope you are reassured that we do practice what we preach and make use of analytics to promote our events. But if you’d like to find out even more about how analytics is used in marketing, why not attend the event yourself?