What the Hell is “Meredith”?

TL:DR its a REALLY smart marketing software in production today. I plan to remake it from scratch and give it away to Cambodian business owners for free.

By now you’ve probably heard that we accidentally created a marketing software called Terri. Today, I’ll be breaking down the core components of Terri as it really stands today, and where I plan to go with it in version 2.0, “Meredith”.

Earlier this year, Google released a blog outlining three core concepts that allow marketing companies to be successful:

• Move toward a unified technology stack — and educate as you go
• Assemble teams with the analytics skills to uncover actionable insights
• Encourage collaboration across teams

I highly encourage you to give it a read. As Google’s primary revenue stream is from marketers, they have a vested interest in helping us succeed. Today, I’ll go over those three principles, and how we are addressing them in 2018.

Move toward a unified technology stack — and educate as you go

In “Moneyball” Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane used the same statistical methods we use today to break his players down into data points he could use to win games:

They later went on to break records in the world series against bigger teams with bigger budgets. They, like us, use data to do the same thing.

However, what they don’t show you in that romantic clip is the painful work it is to get the data in a good readable state to allow someone like Jonah Hill and their fancy math to make these brilliant decisions… he would have had a hell of a time if he got his data about number of times on first base from 1 source who was listening to the game on the radio logging on his computer, 1 source who was watching from the stands while eating, and another source who frustratingly refuses to call “first base” really “first base.”

enough with the romantic analogies Chris, just tell us what this means

Today, most marketers use data to guide their decisions, duh. Problem is, we get our performance data from all sorts of different sources. Social media, email systems, varying ad buying vendors etc. Then what they do is force some poor schmuck to “clean it up” for them.

Said poor schmuck then does his/her darnedest to put it all in one nice database and report for us. “Ok facebook calls a video view “1” but only if they watch for 10 seconds, Youtube if they watch 10%, so I’ll need to write a little formula here to make sure the youtube and facebook sources are counting a “view” the same way. THEY DO THIS ALL DAY, usually our databases end up being a disaster of if/then statements that inevitably break down. Imagine Jonah Hill tearing his hair out at the radio listener guy refuses to write “first base” like everyone else and writes “1” every time.

The other darker side of this inevitable data integrity degradation. Lets say you coded your website to track all clicks on a certain button as “button-click-1”. Great, then the client wants another page here, a quick change here, and despite your best efforts as a coder, you spelled the new button “utton-click-1”. Two things will happen: Either Jonah Hill will catch it and come yelling at you saying “whats this new random button showing up in my data about?” or he wont… and he can’t catch everything, there are millions of data points to look at.

Its fine, its a small mistake, nobody really hurts 99.9% data integrity is REALLY good, its fine. Problem is, between humans mislabeling, vendors changing their data delivery, adding new sources, etc. Tiny mistakes can happen all over. Eventually you end up with 95% accuracy, 90%, and so it goes.

The insanity of it all is that’d be like asking Billy Beane to do what he did, but with 90% data integrity vs competitors who were already using data. He’d have a hell of a time.

Until you consistently name your data points exactly the same way each time without error, you will have a much harder time making any true quick, actionable, game winning changes. Terri does that today.

We are able to accomplish this because for our trucking clients in particular, every traffic source is run by Terri. She is very particular and names everything exactly the same every time. That means we can start to win our World Series…

“A recent study by the Association of National Advertisers showed that top marketing performers are the same companies that spend the most money on marketing technology.² In many ways, their investments are paying off, but for those still using separate solutions for separate channels, there’s greater potential. Unifying their tech under a single, shared system could bring fuller, more tailored consumer insights — not to mention an easier way to evaluate what’s working and what’s not.”

The more we can unify all of our efforts into one unified technology stack, Terri, the more effective we can be. The educate as you go bit is easy… Just follow me :)

Assemble teams with the analytics skills to uncover actionable insights

Ok You’ve got all your data in a nice neat package, now what do you do? Turns out its a ton of math.² It takes someone like a Jonah Hill to look at all that baseball data and say “time on first base is important because there is a direct correlation between time on first base and a won game.”

Generally, in marketing we do the same thing “Traffic and cost is important because there is a direct correlation between cost and traffic and revenue generated.”

Today, we take pride in that we use data to guide most of our decisions and I believe we are doing the basics right. This “uncovering” bit is the really fun bit.

You could uncover that every PR release you put out decreases the cost per conversions from facebook. You could understand if Sally is viewing the same product as Steve but Sally is already following you on facebook, Sally has a 10% higher chance to convert. The possibilities are endless, and it takes a smart analytical team to start to uncover those stories.

This is where the true strength of Meredith shines. Digital marketing

Encourage collaboration across teams

I’m kinda taking this an extra mile by involving all of you in this whole process. “Collaboration” is really just a fancy word for knowledge share, and everyone can be involved.

Whether you have “I make great shit” skills like programming, video/photo, project management, or more knowledge based like years of work in the tech or finance space, everyone has an opportunity to add value at some point.¹

Example: While we have a pretty solid idea for software workflows, we don’t know a great way to setup a social media content workflow. Currently we use Buffer, but as video production ramps up we will probably need something more sophisticated. Whether you’re coding the backend, or offering a quick tip on how to collaborate easier with video production, we can make this together.

Anyway, I have a great core team that I have worked with for years, but we are always looking for more members to join our gang of lost boys.

How will this help Cambodia?

If you were to google “best coffee Siem Reap” you’d probably only get trip adviser reviews. That trend holds true to most business, best laundry, best market, best haircut… all the things us lazy Americans like to know at the tap of a button. In my eyes, that’s a great opportunity.

Basically, very few businesses here even have a website, let alone a full blown marketing software solution and strategy. My plan is to complete Meredith, and allow businesses owners here to use it for free.

Generally, a countries own citizens must be the one to lift itself out of poverty. That’s because they are acutely aware of the cultural problems, and how to solve them.

As an example, a Cambodian restaurant owner I know runs a duck raising program in tandem with his for-profit restaurant chains. Did you know most Cambodians don’t raise ducks because there is a superstition that if you do you will be poor because ducks have short legs? He goes to remote villages, loans them 50 ducklings and asks for 50 back at the end of the year. They can keep the surplus. He teaches them how to raise and care for them, and then comes back once a month to buy them at city market price, not village.

As a result, he is getting into a lot of trouble with local NGO’s (none-profits) here, “you’re stealing our farmers!” they scream, “No, I’m just paying them fairly and treating them right.” he replies. THAT’S the business owner you want to support.

Using Meredith, I anticipate that I can increase US tourism to their businesses, simply because there is little to no online competition for most businesses here. Meredith provides an immediate platform to increase traffic flow at US enterprise level effectiveness. This increases revenue and growth efforts with greater efficiency.

It should be noted that I am not ignorant to needing to have some way to make revenue eventually… my personal savings will run out. Some US based companies have already expressed extreme interest in Meredith, and I am not opposed to using them as the revenue generating arm to supplement our free services for Cambodians.

Timeline?

One of the things I have been trying to learn out here is to go slow. I plan to take 2 months to work on branding and generally just chatting you guys up about things. Slowly working on Meredith at the same time.

My sister Elizabeth (who is fluent in Cambodian) and her husband arrive in September. I extended to them the same offer I extend to everyone, if you’re willing to help me with this I will pay for your housing and give you a stipend. Elizabeth, who had spent 18 months here last year was eager to take the opportunity.

Having a fluent translator is an important step as being able to describe these complex concepts in the native tongue greatly helps alleviate confusion. Her husband is a jack of all trades IT guy, I’m sure I’ll put him to use in all sorts of ways.

Another marketer, Valarie, arrives in mid Augest. You’ll probably see way more structured posting schedules… someone to organize my thoughts and actually make a story you guys can follow heh.

All in all, just keep up. I’m currently most active on www.instagram.com/paulchrisluke . I’d love to hear from you.

Let’s do some shit,

Chris

¹ I’ve also taken this principle and applied it personally by inviting my immediate and extended family to Discord, a group chat system. We have found that a simple change from talking directly to each other in private and having our conversations in a public fashion allows our relatives to offer input and advice, increasing our group family collaboration. It’s been really cool, I don’t think everyone likes EVERYTHING out there, but I do. Keeps me honest.

² https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/report-mit-smr-the-data-driven-transformation.pdf

³ High schooler me would be very mad at current me if he knew I would eventually find myself reading lecture papers about statistical methods for analyzing data sets he’d be very pissed.