Smart Rainmakers Data Crunch

Fresh off an exciting Super Bowl, Major League Baseball pitchers and catchers are set to report to their team's Spring Training camps in just two weeks. But "Moneyball" style MLB General Managers have been crunching data for months to determine who really are the players with the most value. Oscar-nominated actor Brad Pitt's portrayal of Oakland As GM Billy Beane illustrated the baseball executive's obsessive commitment to a new "radical" key performance indicator (KPI) called on base percentage (OBP). Beane and his Harvard economics assistant figured out that high OBP closely mirrored team wins and committed themselves to letting their system work over time. So far, the World Series title has eluded him, but Beane’s system has delivered the fifth best record in the major leagues since 1998 and many teams have adopted his analytical approach to the game. Beane recently extolled the virtues of using data and analytics to a room full of search marketers.

Top 2011 Social Media Developments

In 2011 there were many significant developments in the social media raindance and that led to greater adoption of raindance marketing by major brands. We saw brands more aggressively incorporating social media extensions into their traditional marketing mix in an effort to stimulate consumer feedback and pursue direct customer relationship building. While social media activations used to be primarily used to drive consumers to a digital brand presence after strategic planning was done, we're now seeing more brands brainstorm around potential ideas that could live on social networks. This was definitely the year that many brands unveiled their apprehensions about social media and began exploring ways to be most effective in the use of so many social media tools. Here are five key developments I feel significantly impacted the social media raindance this year: