Data Summit 2018

May 22-23

Boston

The Data Summit brings together a wide variety of attendees including IT practitioners, business stakeholders, top corporations, government agencies and public institutions. It is an educational conference about the leading technologies and strategies for success in the data sphere.

Data for Development Festival

March 21-23

Bristol, UK

The Data for Development Festival takes a look at UN government’s progress towards their commitments regarding the Sustainable Development Goals. 12 years away from the 2030 deadline, the Data for Development Festival will be a space to celebrate successes and identify areas for improvement in utilizing data across agencies and borders.

Data Visualization Summit

April 19-20, September 11-12

San Francisco, Boston

Interested in learning about data visualization and how it has grown as a skill and a tool? The Data Visualization Summit combines live demonstrations and interactive presentations to provide an immersive and educational grounding in data visualization.

Shared Value Leadership Summit

New York

April 30-May 2

The Shared Value Leadership Summit brings together corporations that focus on solving social challenges. How can data help these companies help people, attract new custom, save money and retain talent? Hear from leading voices in academia, business and government.

Strata Data Conference

March 6-8, September 12-14

Sane Jose, New York

Learn how to gain a business advantage with data algorithms. The Strata Data Conference brings together analysts, executives and engineers to talk about driving business results with data.

DevexWorld 2018:

June 12

Washington DC

Many of you will know devex.com for it’s publications on global development project work. DevexWorld started in 2016 and brings devepors together to look towards the future of development work. If you want to deliver programs that enrich people’s lives, then this is the event for you.

Gartner Data & Analytics Summit

March 5 – 8

Phoenix

Interested in AI, blockchain and Iot? Want to build on your business intelligence and data management skills? Gartner Conferences, while expensive, are a great place to learn how to utilize data to achieve better business outcomes. The common theme of their talks is data best practices.

UN World Data Forum

October 22–24

Dubai, UAE

The second annual UN world Data Forum will bring together IT and data science experts with leaders from across the UN system. The event continues the UN’s mission to help governments collect and develop policy with data.

TDWI Conference and Leadership Summit

May 6 – 11

Chicago

Plus more dates

TWDI conferences provide hands-on workshops and boot camps, imparting practical skills and knowledge of the latest data trends. Topics include data warehousing, big data, business intelligence, advanced analytics and more. You won’t find a hard-sell in disguise at TDWI.

CT4D

May 8–10

Lusaka, Zambia

The core of the VisualizeNoMalaria movement is Zambia, where technologists in the humanitarian and international development community will gather for the CT4D conference. Learn how Zambia’s ministry of health is incorporating visual analytics into the fight against malaria.

The post Top Ten Data Events to Attend in 2018 appeared first on Slemma.

With the proliferation of data visualization and business intelligence tools on the market, it can be difficult to know exactly how to visualize your data. For internal and external reporting, your aim should be for the reader to understand and compare information as easily as possible.

Before you build a chart or a dashboard, consider how humans process information. We perceive visual element likes color, length and size subconsciously – before we process what the information means.  

This is why you should lean towards bars rather than circles when creating visualizations. It is easier to judge differences based on length than it is based on area. Especially for business purposes, where the information is more important than what the report looks like, simple bar charts are the way to go.

Since bars all have the same baseline, the reader only needs to look at their endpoints to compare data, such as sales by department. Labeling the bars with specific figures will help the reader more, as they won’t have to do much work to understand the chart.

Of course, this gets more complicated the more information you are trying to communicate. Sort your information by importance into primary and secondary information. So if we are to extend the sales by department example, let’s say you also want to define each departments sales as a percentage of overall sales. You could place a circular visualization such as a pie chart beside each department bar to represent this.

Although it’s harder to distinguish differences in circles, the chart will be more visually interesting. While we don’t recommend this approach for business, it can work well in other fields like journalism. In situations where you want to attract people to look at your chart and engage them, an aesthetically attractive visualization can work well. That is, as long as the critical information is highlighted efficiently.

An easier way to represent secondary information is with “blobs”, which are unsized rectangles placed next to the relevant bar.

What Charts Can I Build in Slemma?

1. Columns
   • Stacked
   • 100% Stacked
   • Histogram
   • Bullet
2. Bar
   • Stacked
   • 100% Stacked
   • Histogram
   • Bullet
3. Line
   • Spline
   • Step line
   • Line with Markers
4. Area
   • Stacked Area
   • 100% Stacked Area
   • Step Area
5. Pie
   • Donut
   • Donut with total
   • Funnel
   • Treemap
6. Maps
   • Filled
   • Symbol
7. Scatter Plot
   • Scatter
   • Bubble
8. Cross Table
   • Raw Data Table
9. Single Values
   • Progress Bar
   • Gauge
10. Word Clouds
    • Pictorial (amount)
    • Pictorial (size)

To how Slemma can work for your data visualization needs, try a 14 day free trial today!

The post Bars or Circles? What Visualizations Work Best for Different Situations appeared first on Slemma.

Los Angeles is best known for the bright lights of Hollywood, but it’s quickly making a name for itself as a major tech hub.

Due to the large number of tech companies and startups locating in the City of Angels over the last 15 years, it’s focus is shifting from entertainment to enterprise.

People are talking about L.A as a hub that could rival the Silicon Valley. It’s even being referred to as the “Silicon Beach” in some circles.  L.A is ranked third in a StartupGrind list of leading entrepreneurial hubs since 2015.

It’s estimated that L.A is home to 900 startups and 70,000 engineers. A large talent pool for companies to tap into, drawn to L.A due to the difficulty of setting up in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is losing talent to L.A  because to its “exorbitant cost of living and a yawning income gap brought on by fast-growing tech companies competing for highly skilled employees,” Marisa Kendall wrote for the Mercury News.

Northern California’s venture capital decreased between 2014 and 2015, LA’s rose by 50 percent. LA’s position as an entertainment and film hub gives it a unique status for tech companies who combine the two fields. With Snapchat and Hulu located there, and YouTube and Netflix setting up offices, it’s clear that content creation companies are taking advantage of the talent already in LA, as well.

“Tech in LA is booming and you can feel that energy being in the heart of Silicon Beach. The media and entertainment industry is going through a seismic shift and it’s an exciting time to be a part of this evolving landscape. We love being so close to the agencies, networks and studios we work with because it makes it so easy to collaborate and get real-time feedback on the products we’re developing.”

— Kai Pradel, CEO at Wiredrive

Slemma

Slemma is proud to be a part of LA’s burgeoning Tech scene, and was recently named #24 in G2 Crowd’s list of top-rated LA-based companies. The list is ranked by user satisfaction of the company’s top-rated product. See Slemma’s entry below:

Slemma is a data visualization solution that was ranked a High Performer in its category on G2 Crowd for Winter 2018. This tool lets users view, analyze and share all their data — whether it’s from a data warehouse, data storage provider or cloud service — on one platform.

Total Reviews: 24

Categories: Data Visualization

Average Company Size: 71% of reviewers work for a small company (50 or fewer employees).

Highest-Rated Features: Slemma reviewers rated the tool’s graphs and charts (91%) and dashboards (93%) as its two top-rated features.

The post Is Los Angeles the New Silicon Valley? appeared first on Slemma.

It’s not a requirement for a business to use content marketing, but it can be invaluable if used correctly. However, there’s no point in posting on Twitter just to be a part of the popular thing. A good strategy will allow you to meet or exceed your goals.

Below we outline 5 steps towards an effective content marketing strategy.

Define your goals:

It’s tempting to start pushing out content because everybody else is, but for your efforts to be worthwhile you need solid targets to aim for. What do you want to achieve with content marketing? Increase sales or introduce your business to a new audience? Add to your email list? Retain existing customers? By establishing goals you can create a framework to achieve them. Knowing what you are trying to achieve will inform your content creation process and prevent you wasting time on campaigns that don’t have the desired impact.

Know your audience:

Whether your courting new customers, trying to keep existing ones or reaching out to a niche audience, you need to know who these people are. What platforms do they use? What times of day are they likely to be online, and what content do they like? Knowing these things is crucial to creating content that will resonate with people. Your content has to be engaging if your audience is going to click on your links and share your content. If your content is too broad, you will attract a lethargic audience. You won’t know all of this straight away, as you will learn more about your audience the more you share with them.

Marketing personas are a useful way to define your message. “Marketing Mary” is a common persona. Marketing Mary is a VP or manager in her mid 40s who works in a small marketing firm. If you know her goals and challenges, you can create impactful content that will drive results.

Create an editorial calendar:

If you try to start sharing content without a plan, you’ll quickly find you’re running out of ideas and becoming repetitive. Creating a content calendar does mean a lot of up-front work in coming up with ideas, but it will serve you well going forward. Having a plan to follow eliminates the possibility of running out of ideas, and lets you see what types of content work.

As well as serving as a schedule, your content calendar or editorial plan should outline your style, and how the content you create communicates your brands message. A public content calendar with defined responsibilities will also keep everybody involved motivated and accountable.

Create quality content:

The vast majority of content, particularly on social media, is timely and entertaining. However, a robust content strategy requires that the content you share does more than entertain momentarily. It has to resonate with your audience and impact them on a personal level. It has to influence your audience beyond the initial engagement.

Originality is important: Your page won’t rank well on search engines if it’s similar to content that’s already out there. Besides, your audience will appreciate original or interesting material and will therefore be more likely to click and share.

It’s vital to maintain high standards. Memes or deliberately flawed content can be funny, but to build a loyal audience your content should be factual, correct and interesting. So proofread, fact check, and make sure your content is of the highest quality before sharing it.

Track the data:

Your job isn’t finished once your content is shared. The next step is to gather and analyse the relevant data to determine what works and what doesn’t. A good reporting process allows you to evaluate and strengthen your content strategy to best serve your business and marketing goals.

The Content Marketing Institute has a great chart of important content marketing KPIs to track.

Once you define your most vital KPIs, track their performance on a dashboard. Displaying all your data in one place like this makes it easier to identify trends and to report your results to your team or supervisor.

Looking for a content marketing reporting solution? Try a 14-day free trial with Slemma. Slemma’s easy-to-use builder lets you make beautiful reports and dashboards in minutes. With 75 + connectors, you can display data from your favorite content marketing tools like Twitter, Instagram, Mailchimp and Google Analytics. Improve your content marketing with a data-driven strategy.

The post 5 Steps Toward an Effective Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Slemma.

Even if you don’t have the time or resources do dedicate to in-depth website analytics, tracking basic website metrics will give you an advantage. You can use this data to identify what works on your website and what needs to be improved. Tracking basic website metrics will also help you to account for marketing campaigns and spot anomalies. Here we outline 3 basic website metrics to track and analyse.

Web Traffic

Knowing the total number of visits to your website can help you understand how it’s performing. Traffic metrics indicate whether your site is growing, stagnating or declining over a given period of time. As well as that, you can measure the success of a marketing campaign. For example, if your traffic spikes after a Twitter campaign, you should look into doing similar campaigns. Although, if your traffic is declining, you need to try some new ideas.

Breaking visits down into unique and repeat visits is useful for determining how well you attract new visitors and how well you retain existing visitors. If one is much higher than the other, you should adopt a new strategy to better attract or retain customers.

Traffic Sources:

As well as knowing the total number of visitors to your website, you need to know exactly where this traffic is coming from. The four types of traffic sources are Organic Search (visitors who found your site via search engines), Referral (visitors who came from another website), Direct (visitors who typed your domain into their browser) and Social (visitors who found your site through social media).

It’s important to have traffic coming from a variety of sources so that you’re not overly reliant on one source. If your organic search traffic is low, you might need to take a look at your SEO strategy. To get more referrals, try writing a guest post on another website. If you don’t have much direct traffic, you need to think of ways to promote and encourage user/customer loyalty. To improve social traffic, make your content more shareable and engaging.

Conversion by Traffic Source:

As it’s important to know where your traffic is coming from, it’s important to know where your conversions are coming from. This will give you a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses, and the significance of each traffic source to your business.

If your direct traffic is much higher than your social traffic, you can target your loyal customers and change strategy on social media. If your referral traffic is higher than your organic traffic, it means that you’re being linked to from the right places, but that you’re SEO strategy is ineffective.

With Slemma, not only can you display data from Google Analytics on attractive visualizations, you can display it alongside data from your favorite CRM, Marketing, Social Media, Finance and Database tools on a comprehensive business dashboard. Slemma is the most competitively priced analytics tool on the market. Try a 14-day free trial today.

For enquiries, email sales@slemma.com

The post 3 Basic Website Metrics to Track to Gain an Advantage appeared first on Slemma.

Customer Relationship Management is a technology-based formula for building relationships with customers, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty and ultimately, increasing revenue. It is designed so sales teams have all the information they need to convert leads and management have the ability to analyse the sales process.

Whatever CRM App you use, you’ll want to analyse the most important data it collects right away. In this blog we’ll discuss the 5 most important CRM metrics to track.

Sales Calls

Sales calls are a vital part of the sales process that must be constantly reevaluated. Managers first need to know the number of calls by rep and by the group. From this, you can identify trends based on different time periods, different reps, different stages of the process, etc. The average number of calls per sale is a decent fast health-check for a sales team. With Slemma, you can make an all-in-one CRM dashboard to see what changes need to be made to your sales process.

Sales Conversion Rate

Sales Conversion Rate is a measurement that shows how many leads were converted into customers over a given time period. Examine the pros and cons at every stage of the sales cycle to identify patterns. You can determine your best and worst performing reps, best leads and best sources. Armed with this information you will know when to change your marketing strategy, your staff or your product.

Length of Sales Cycle

The sales cycle is simply how long it takes you to convert a prospect into a customer. If you know your average sales cycle, you can create sales forecasts, measure sales performance and project revenue. Display your sales data alongside metrics from 75 + other tools over time to see how other areas of your business impact your sales cycle. With the right data, your sales reps will make more effective decisions.

Customer Retention Rate

Considering that it costs more to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one, it is important to measure how good you are at keeping loyal customers. Over a given period, subtract your new customers from the total number of customers obtained and divide it by the number of customers you had at the beginning of the period. To help understand why customers come and go, record the reasons for a win/loss in your CRM system.

Lifetime Customer Value

It is essential to gauge how much each of your customers contribute to your revenue. You can determine this based on customer spend and length of time the customer spends with you. Go more in-depth by looking at the average customer value. Knowing who your most profitable customers are will help you to tailor an experience to retain those customers and attract similar prospects that you can convert into loyal customers.

If you’re not sure where to start with CRM analytics, try a 14-day free trial with Slemma. Slemma’s intuitive report and dashboard builder will save you time and help you gain vital insights.

The post 4 Important CRM Metrics to Track appeared first on Slemma.

2018 is likely to see more business adopt a data-driven strategy than ever before.

Unprecedented amounts of data are being created, stored, shared and analysed, and this will only increase. With this increase in the amount of data, there are also a wide variety of self-service Business Intelligence and Data Visualization tools that allow non-technical stakeholders to access and analyse data. Heading into 2018, here are 7 data visualization trends that any data scientist needs to be aware of.

Self-service Visualizations

Modern organisations have embraced the culture of analytics. However, older Business Intelligence methods have been too complex, too time consuming and lacking in flexibility. In 2018, dashboards will become even more popular. They allow businesses to see how their organisation is performing in real-time. Although BM predicts a 39% increase in demand for data scientists over the next 3 years, that role is becoming less vital.

Self service BI solutions like Slemma, DataVizProject.com, and Google’s Data Studio are changing analytics from a specialized, time consuming skill into something that everyone can access and carry out.

Social Visualizations

It will never be 100% mainstream, but in certain corners of social media, data visualizations are seeing high levels of engagement from followers. The thing to remember here is that the attention span of social media users is low. So, make sure to present your data in a visually attractive and intriguing way. Team up a creative with a number cruncher and have some fun with GIFs and looping animations.

Mobile Visualizations

We are used to hearing that “mobile is the future”. Considering the shift of internet users from desktop to mobile, mobile is also a huge part of the present. Despite the smaller screens of smartphones, expect innovations in mobile data visualizations in 2018.

Slemma lets you share charts and dashboards on any device, including mobile. This ensures that the right people can access the right information whenever they need it.

Storytelling

Visualizing data on it’s own is not enough anymore. Now, data scientists need to become storytellers who can explain what is happening in the data and uncover vital insights. This fusion of analytics and the arts is made possible by advances in data visualization. Businesses can now tell a beginning, middle and end story with their data. When there is so much data and so many ways to visualize and analyse it, using data effectively through narrative is even more vital.

Data Journalism

Tech businesses are not the only ones taking advantage of the increased availability of data. Media companies are also using great data visualization tools to report the news. Increasingly, journalists are learning how to create visualizations that drive stories. In an environment where their opponents will label their work as “fake news”, reporters are fighting back with hard data.

Increased Availability of Data

With BI tools like Slemma that allow you to plugin data from a wide variety of sources, as well as the advent of open data projects, finding data is no longer the biggest challenge for analysts. Instead, it is making sure the data is up to date, relevant, and correct. In 2018, even more data will become available and more will be created. Visualizers need to be cautious about which data they use, and from what sources the data comes.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are going to impact data visualization as much as they will everything else. AI is already being used as a support in BI and data visualization tools. Machine Learning can help to detect patterns and unlock vital insights in large, complex data sets. It can also be used to detect problems or anomalies. Salesforce has released their Einstein AI tool  to help users detect patterns in their data. Artificial Intelligence is another step towards the complete democratization of data analytics, ultimately leading to a point where a person with no technical knowledge whatsoever will be able to access data and insights in minutes.

The post 7 Data Visualization Trends for 2018 appeared first on Slemma.

It’s 2018, and the market for data analytics and business intelligence is awash with self service tools to suit the data needs of any business. Due to new technology, and the fact that this area is still growing, you may think that businesses have only been using analytics since the year 2000. However, the current saturation of data analytics has its roots in the industrial revolution. In fact, data has historically been at the heart of all accelerated changes to the way we work. It is the way these tools and practices have evolved that has led to the exciting BI solutions we have today.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was a mechanical engineer in the late 19th century who is remembered as the first management consultant. The time measuring exercises he introduced to the factory floor – applying engineering principles to human labour – started the first wave of improving workplace efficiency.

Later, Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing by measuring the timing of the production line. Smaller businesses in this time would have analysed their available data, but it would have been a slow, arduous process with limited data and insights. It wasn’t until the 1960s and the advent of the computer that technology became a part of the decision making process. Enterprise Resource Planning, Data Warehouses and all manner of hardware and software has been developed since then.

Self Service

In the 1980s and 1990s, early versions of Lotus or Microsoft Excel began to replace pen-and-paper data analytics. However, they were so difficult to use that only IT experts could use them. The release of a user friendly version 5 of Excel in 1993 has seen the spreadsheet program dominate the market ever since. It was the beginning of self-service analytics, and businesses have never looked back.

In the early 2000s, businesses began to automate the visualization of data into charts and graphs. This was significant, because for the first time, businesses could examine their data in real time, not just retrospectively. Since then, companies like Slemma and Tablueu have been leading the way with self-service software, allowing businesses to gain fast insights and make better decisions.

Despite such aggressive growth in data tools, the process remains the same. There is still an expert examining the final data and making recommendations. What more sophisticated BI tools give you though, is greater speed, greater agility and greater efficiency. Gathering and analysing data is no longer a time consuming task. It’s a task that anyone can carry out without the need for huge technical knowledge. Instead of spending time and effort gathering data to inform future decisions, businesses can quickly access insights to inform immediate decisions.

Give your business a competitive edge with a Slemma free trial. Slemma connects to 75 + tools you already use, so you can display all your business data on one dashboard. Any-device sharing means everyone is on the same page. Quick templates and drag and drop customization allow you to visualize your data any way you want. Start making better decisions today.

The post The Evolution of Business Analytics appeared first on Slemma.

We are in the middle of an accelerated change in the way humans exchange information. Before we had technology capable of instantly spreading ideas en masse, we used the arts. Ideas and wisdom were spread through songs, books, and spoken word. In other words – storytelling.

In 2017, staggering amounts of data are being collected and turned into insights. Machines are playing an increasingly influential role in our decision making, and they’re getting better at it. This caused us to wonder if we were if we were moving away from our storytelling tradition and towards a clinical, data-driven society.

However, what is becoming clear is that big data and the arts aren’t two separate, adversarial fields. Actually, they need each other. Nowhere is this coalescence more apparent than in the tech and analytics space.

This is due to the proliferation of self-service data analytics and visualization tools, and the increase in businesses using these tools to make better decisions. Democratizing big data, they allow people without sophisticated technological knowledge to access and carry out analytics. As a result, analytic tasks are being done by people who understand how to frame a question and how to tell a story.

Asking the Right Questions

In analytics, it’s not enough to simply provide information. The information you provide has to lead to a decision or a change of some kind, or else it’s useless. It has to be communicated in an engaging way if you’re going to persuade others to act on it. This is where storytellers come into their own. Their craft lies within making their audience feel something, which you can’t do with data alone.

Equally, you can’t ask the right questions with data alone. You need somebody at the beginning of the process who understands how to solve problems in a creative way. If you get the question wrong, the answer will also be wrong.

Liberal Arts graduates and Mathematics and Statistics graduates probably never thought they’d be working alongside each other, but they are. In fact, according to Fast Company research from 2014, one third of all Fortune 500 CEOs have Liberal Arts degrees. According to Linkedin, data analysis is in the top 4 sought after skills over the last two years.

However, they also found that Liberal Arts graduates are joining the tech workforce up to 10% faster than technical graduates. It’s a logical partnership. Businesses need highly skilled technical workers, but they also need to tell a story with numbers and communicate them properly.

Data Visualization could become the next medium of choice for storytellers. By adding a narrative to facts and figures, you can explain what is happening in the data and why it’s important. This will resonate with people in a way that data alone cannot because stories play a big role in our daily lives.

 
Slemma’s data visualization tool gives you all the options you need to create beautiful, persuasive data visualizations. Start telling compelling data stories today with a 14-day-free trial.

The post Telling Stories With Data: The Intertwining Worlds of Analytics and the Arts appeared first on Slemma.

…. Yes!

As more companies seek to make the most of their resources with data analytics, the Business Intelligence industry has been booming. New or small businesses may hear a lot about BI without knowing exactly what it is or how it can help them.

Essentially, Business Intelligence is a tool that helps businesses to make better decisions by tracking, storing and analyzing data and turning it into insights. Management can use these insights to cut costs, identify new opportunities and improve organizational performance. And, it’s not just for companies with huge budgets to play with. BI no longer requires huge data centers to be set up and IT teams to be employed. A wide range of BI tools now exists to suit all requirements and price ranges.

So how can BI benefit you? Below we list 4 ways Business Intelligence can help small or new businesses.

Faster Decisions

Compared to a decade ago, the size and cost of BI tools has decreased, making it accessible to small businesses. Small businesses can use BI to predict the future and make better decisions. The main advantage of BI tools is the ability to visualize data in an attractive and persuasive way.

As well as saving time on data-gathering and chart design, data visualization allows you to interpret what this information means quickly and act accordingly. For small companies, it is advisable to choose a BI tool that connects to the tools and services they already use. This way, you can start gaining insights with minimum adaptation or upheaval.

Increased Profit and Growth

Today, decision makers predict trends which could affect their businesses bottom line. Due to this, CEOs and Directors are more reliant on data to reduce costs and increase profitability. BI is great because it deals in facts, not opinions or instincts, so you can be assured that you’re making the right decision.

BI tools can help you to discover trends in your past data that may previously have gone undiscovered. By analyzing past performance under any parameters or context, you can leave no stone unturned in the search for growth opportunities.

Improved Efficiency

BI is commonly used to improve business performance. With a good tool, you can turn apparently unrelated datasets into meaningful insights with minimal effort. Analytics no longer needs to be laborious and time consuming. Not only do you save time on data collection and visualization, but automatic updates and live dashboards put the information in front of your eyes without you having to do anything.

Increased Data Accessibility:

Despite the rise of big data and analytics, there are still people who lack the skills to access and interpret big data. The fact that self-service BI now exists eliminates this problem and allows all stakeholders to access the same insights.

This means that employees can access data they need even if it’s outside of their area of expertise. This empowers teams to make data-driven decisions together and means that your data strategy will be prevalent in all aspects of your organization.

Still don’t know if Business Intelligence will work for you? Try a free trial with Slemma. Our team will guide you through how to use it so you can start analyzing data right away.

The post Why Small Businesses Should Invest in BI appeared first on Slemma.