This week’s top conversational marketing stories:

Should marketers be able to answer these 5 stats questions? – on Chief Marketing Technologist

This Chief Marketing Technologist Post originally targets a post made by HBR on marketers and big data,  “The HBR post stated that when they asked Fortune 1000 marketers five "basic to intermediate" statistics questions, 44% of those marketers got four or more answers wrong. Only 6% of the marketers they interviewed got all five right. The implication was that marketers lacked statistical aptitude — a serious concern in an increasingly analytical and data-driven discipline. My immediate reaction: what were the questions? After all, statistics can often be technical and counterintuitive. Reams of academic research have shown that people in general are very bad at reasoning statistically. Were the questions asked a fair instrument to judge marketers' capabilities in this brave new world?” The five questions are included in the post. So read them and tell us, how many did you get right?

Marketers and Content Consumption, Use, and Measurement - on MarketingProfs

“Content consumption is no longer a choice, it's innate. If you own a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, chances are you're absorbing content the majority of the time that you're awake. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, mobile apps, and many other tools and mediums continue to provide us with news. It's endless and will remain so for the foreseeable future.” This MarketingProfs article, with over 369 social likes, then goes on to show results from a PAN Communications Survey that was recently held covering how marketers are consuming the content, marketing now vs. five years ago, and measuring social media. Can you draw any interesting conclusions from these metrics?

Not Having a Blog is Not an Option - by John Jantsch on Ducttapemarketing    

This Jon Jantsch post, which garnered over 280 social likes, pertains to the idea that if you don’t have a blog, you basically don’t have a business. “If your business doesn’t have a website, it doesn’t have a chance. And, I’m not even talking about a professionally designed and optimized one. If you don’t have even a basic website up and running these days, your prospective customers and clients are going to have a hard time seeing you as being relevant. And, if you don’t have a blog attached to your website, those same prospective customers and clients aren’t going to have a chance to learn about your expertise, and about the human side of your business. 55,000,000. That’s how many blogs there are (in the world) at the time of this writing. And, those are only WordPress blogs.”  Even if your business has a website, does it have a blog section? Is it time to adopt one?       

Let's keep the conversation moving forward! Does your business not only have a website but a blog as well? Jantsch brought up several valid points are they enough to sway you in the direction of blogging? And what did you take from the PAN Communications survey? Have any interesting questions been raised in your mind? Was the HBR too harsh on the marketers who completed the big data test? How many of those questions did you get right?