The beginning of March we had four auditors in the office for a week. While they were here the snacks and drinks in the vending machines were flying off the shelves, with sales nearly doubling from the previous week. With those numbers, I’m thinking that our auditors were verifying the quality of more than just our books. Oinkers?
Now, although the auditors may have purchased a snack or two, I doubt we can attribute the major increase in snacking to just those four people. The average snack level of the entire office must have increased during the audit.
Morrena, who restocks our vending machines, said: “I can always tell how stressed the office is by how fast the drinks and snacks go out of the vending machines. When the auditors were here I couldn’t keep it stocked.”
Stress in the work place can be expensive. The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reports that: “Health care expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress.”
Not only are people eating more junk food, which is unhealthy, they are feeling more stress at work. Vending machine inventory turnover can give managers more than an ethereal way to quantify the stress level of their employees and office.
Seasonality is the idea that business volume ebbs and flows at different times. While landscapers and lawnmowers know that their busy season coincides with summer, seasonality is affected by a lot more than just the weather. Retailers’ busy season coincides with holiday shopping (of course), wedding season is in the summer, and so on.
Check out http://www.google.com/trends to view the seasonality of any keyword search.
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I’d like to start tracking innovative Utah companies and publishing their online progress, or regress every month. We can use this type of list for a lot of things, but I’d like to show where internet professionals can look to for a good, local, example of good online strategies. As well, it’s pretty neat to think about working for the top firms, if a corporate job is your thing.
Index Description
As you will see, this internet rank index for Utah companies is composed of the estimates from Alexa and Compete rankings, and the two estimates are averaged. The list is then sorted with the highest rank first.
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Omniture recently announced that they are working with Adobe to: “provide greater measurement of rich media for applications built with Adobe® Flash®, Adobe Flex™ and Adobe AIR™” (source). In my opinion this could cause a monopoly for rich media analytics, but hopefully they would share with the rest of us.
What jumped into my mind first when I heard this was the fact that traditional analytics companies like Nielsen Media Research are losing their share with measuring audiences, especially internet audiences. The second thing that came to mind, and the fact one that affects a lot more of us, is that gathering analytics from most Adobe products will be expensive and on a tight leash.
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