This is a joint article written with Mr. Tommi Salenius who works as a digital marketing specialist at Parcero Marketing Partners. Introduction Facebook advertising is a powerful form of online marketing for many purposes ranging from direct response campaigns to brand visibility and awareness. However, the competition in the ad platform is increasing every year, […]
How to identify useful user feedback? Three tips for value driven-user development
In our APG team (APG = Automatic Persona Generation), we have the goal of doing value-driven system development. “Value-driven” means that each feature we add or incorporate, solves a real user problem (i.e., provides real value). Since our clients are typically operating in the business domain, their problems deal with understanding their customers better. That’s […]
Automatic Analytics: Considerations for Building User-Oriented Data Analytics Systems
This is an unpublished exploratory study we wrote with Professor Jim Jansen for Machine Learning and Data Analytics Symposium (MLDAS2018), held in Doha, Qatar. Change of landscape: For a long time, automation has been invading the field of marketing. Examples of marketing automation include the various scripts, rules, and software solutions that optimize pay-per-click spending, […]
How to write emails that get read? 11 tips I use daily.
Here are some tips to make people more likely to read your email. I’ve noticed that some people struggle to communicate effectively via email, so maybe sharing these tips will help someone. Tips: 1. include *one message* per email — when you include 2 or more, the others easily get ignored. It’s better to send […]
Medieval Game of Death (#bisnesidea)
korttipeli, jossa yritetään selvitä keskiajan kylän läpi. A plague – a rat bites you and infests you with plague death guillotine alchemist mermaid hellhound inquisition witchcraft burning at stake lonely knight harlequin B map: back alley market place castle tavern underworld gates of heaven A+B –> jokaisessa oma tarina “travel through a medieval town and […]
“No Startup Is an Island” – How to Use Network Pictures to Position Yourself in the Market
I got introduced to network pictures by Valtteri Kaartemo a few years back, and thought it was a cool idea. Since then, I’ve realized — after talking to many startups — that it’s more than a cool idea. It’s actually useful. That’s because startups routinely overlook their networks and just focus on competitors. They make […]
Use Cases for Personas
This is a joint piece by Dr. Joni Salminen and Professor Jim Jansen. The authors are working on a system for automatic persona generation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The system is available online at https://persona.qcri.org. Introduction Personas are fictive characterizations of the core audience or customers of a company, introduced into software development and […]
Web 3.0: The dark side of social media
Web 2.0 was about all the pretty, shiny things about social media, like user-generated content, blogs, customer participation, ”everyone has a voice,” etc. Now, Web 3.0 is all about the dark side: algorithmic bias, filter bubbles, group polarization, flame wars, cyberbullying, etc. We discovered that maybe everyone should not have a voice, after all. Or at least that […]
Tips on Data Imputation From Machine Learning Experts
Missing values are a critical issue in statistics and machine learning (which is “advanced statistics”). Data imputation deals with ways to fill those missing values. Andriy Burkov made this statement a few days ago [1]: “The best way to fill a missing value of an attribute is to build a classifier (if the attribute is […]
Creating Buyer Personas: Common Interview Questions
Introduction At Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), we are developing a system for automatic persona generation (APG). The demo is available online at https://persona.qcri.org As a part of this research, we’re interested in the information needs of end users of personas [1]. People working in different domains are interested in different information, after all. For example, […]