#squaredonline

This is a question I get asked often. It’s a good thing because it means that more and more people are looking to learn the the skills required to keep up with the speed at which all things digital are developing. 

Rather than responding individually, I thought I’d post it here so that more recent students or alumni are able to chip in and update bits where the course has inevitably evolved. 

The course by its nature is designed to be adaptable, meaning it is constantly changing based on feedback from current and past students. My comments are based on my experience from the January 2014 cohort, so it’s likely to have changed slightly since then. Anyone who has completed the course more recently is welcome to post any corrections or updates in the comments below.

Content

Course content is engaging and varied with a healthy combination of blog posts, video, lectures, discussions, and images. Lesson slides are available for download and students are provided with ‘further reading’ lists. However, other than the lectures and course slides, there’s little in the way of bespoke, original content – most is delivered through a curation of content readily available on the web.

Teaching style

Classes are mostly delivered via live online lectures and discussions accompanied with a deck of slides. Students are provided with a pre class brief which usually includes the content mentioned above. Live classes include a discussion box where students can chat in real time – a bit like if MSN messenger allowed everyone to chat at once in one conversation. These were eventually deactivated and activated at the discretion of the tutor as some people couldn’t help but discuss their dinner during a class. There’s always one, at least.

In my cohort, lectures were scheduled every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 7pm to 8pm GMT. Classes are recorded so you can watch on catch up if you miss a live lecture.

The tutors themselves tend to have impressive credentials and track records, having either been around at the dawn of the digital age, and/or have had a hand in developing a tech start-up or few. Over the course, many students feel like they’ve got to know the tutors, as you would in a real life class, which is testament to their individual personalities and their engagement with students during the online lectures

Coursework/exams

There are no exams as such, but assignments after each module to be completed in groups. These assignments need to be project managed, but groups are left to their own devices to organise themselves. This can be a bit of luck of the draw in terms of who you get to work with. Bear in mind that a number of people have signed up to the course under duress from an employer, as some sort of compulsory training. This can result in significantly varying levels of motivation and engagement across team members.

Whilst assignments were graded between 1-10, you only needed a pass (average of 6) to succeed. There was no merit or distinction available. There is a peer review at the end of each module, and at the end of the course students vote for  their top five most inspirational fellow students (what sort of suck up gets that?!).

General experience

Overall I found the course useful, but I knew what I wanted out of it. It’s not a specialist course in any one particular area of digital – meaning that it won’t teach a person to become an analyst or a strategist, for example, but it will certainly provide the opportunity to understand how each area works, enough to know how and where to explore more if need be. It really is up to the individual how much time they wish to put in. It’s rare that anyone fails, but people who don’t engage are unlikely to gain much out of it.

At a minimum, the course will help someone gain confidence when discussing digital aspects of their work at meetings or when speaking with contracting agencies. The rest is entirely dependent on the individual– you could find your learnings useful in any situation - from conceptualising an idea, putting together a pitch for venture capital, or piecing together a fully integrated cross-channel digital marketing strategy. It simply depends on how much attention you paid to a particular module.

It’s impossible to write about this without mentioning possibly the greatest take-away resource of all – your peer students. Cohorts could include anything between 350-400 students at any one time. This is an incredible resource of knowledge, experience and creativity. The ever growing alumni group on Google+ appears to be alive and kicking with interesting articles and topics for discussion. This is particularly great for keeping up in digital advancements in areas you may not be exposed to on a day to day basis. Having the Squared course in common also means that most posters are approachable and will engage when asked a question.

Time commitment

As mentioned earlier, this is entirely dependent on the individual – how much they already know, how fast they can read and understand, how confident and willing they are to reach out to networks for advice and help when needed. I would say it needs a minimum of 7-10 hours per week in addition to lectures in order to get something worthwhile out of it. This does depend on how organised teams are and how effectively they work together. The groups I worked in agreed to meet regularly in weekly Google Hangouts which meant we could check in and keep our assignments on track.

I did write a couple of short blogs about my learnings – one of which was specifically about my top five tips for working with strangers, which was well received.

Yes, there is much more to it! It isn't just a nicely packed set of beautiful visuals, there's more to it. At Google Squared online, we we are often thrown into challenges. At times, we felt like a non-swimmer squirming in a whale-ridden ocean of data.

So here's a quick 10 step guide for designing an Infographic -

1) Topic - develop a broad-based understanding of the topic, whether it is an industry vertical, a trend, a phenomenon or a process. Develop a broader understanding on the topic by exploring it's history, milestones, current status, key players and future predictions.

2) Audience -

Who are the target audience? What are their demographics, pschycographics and behavioral characteristics?

What could interest them? What would add value to them? Are there any benefits they can draw from this information?

3) Objectives - enlist the answers to the following questions:

What are you trying to communicate to the audience?

Do you want your readers to take a particular action after reading it? What are the key take-aways going to be?

Is this exercise being done for brand engagement, lead generation, general brand awareness or thought leadership?

Tie these goals with your brand's marketing objectives. These should be in sync with the brand's overall marketing strategy and fashion of communication. See where it fits into the bigger integrated communications plan and how you plan to leverage on this.

4) Develop an over-arching theme and message -

This is going to form the headline of your infographic.The overarching message should be -

attention-grabbing, should pique their curiosity

urging the audiences to read more

instigate humanly feelings and hence more sharing in the networks

5) Background research - it can be a daunting task to toll through heaps of information on the web and figure out what you need. So if you have your answers clearly chalked out in steps 1 to 4, it will help you to narrow down your search.

Segregate the data and chapterise the data points into various buckets. Form a logical flow between these chapters and connect them with each other.

6) Wireframe your infographic - based on the chapters and headline, try to create a wireframe of your infographic, connecting chapters with each other in the visual. Try to build a storyline and make sure it flows seamlessly from one chapter to another.

7) Pictorial representation and Sub-headings - use the data-points available in each chapter to prepare a pictorial representation. Build and insight for each such chart/graph/visual - use this insight as a sub-heading for this chapter

8) Designing - Either use mainstream graphic design tools like Illustrator and Photoshop or use Infographic design tools available on the web.

These tools will allow you to set a colour theme, typography, icons for the visual. Follow a consistent pattern through all sections to give it a seamless look. Look up some successful examples of visuals on the web.

While designing you may have to reiterate steps 6 and 7 in order to come up with the most optimum and relevant piece of information.

Prepare a light file, that is easily share-able and upload-able on various content management systems.

9) Feedback - share the finished piece for review with your friends and colleagues for a third-eye check, so that they can point out the obvious gaps that you might have missed.

10) Check-points before release -

Run a spell-check, take print out and check spellings

Proof-read, correct any grammatical errors

Make sure all the dates, icons, milestones seem logically correct and there are no formatting errors

If you have used any images, data points, quotes from the web, make sure you mention their references/sources to avoid any plagiarism issues

When I started off the Squared Online course six months ago, I never imagined how quickly it would go by. And how much my work life would change!

At the beginning of this course, I was working in an e-commerce company focusing on digital strategy. And my only objective was to hone my digital skills and focus on the details. However, as the course progressed, I became responsible for the entire marketing department and thus had to step out of the details and focus on the big picture and ROI of our overall marketing spends. And now I’m working in growth and marketing of a mobile finance app - what a journey it has been!

My expectations from the Squared Online course were to get a better grasp on the details of digital marketing. Turns out, my understanding of analytics and other details has been pretty good (at least for this course) and what I’m taking away is the importance of theory and the organizational tools. I now am familiar with the Business Model Canvas, how to make an kickass infographic and understand the 5 P’s of marketing. I also was exposed to some great examples of content and video marketing, and now really understand the value of a good concept before anything else.

As I move forward, I’ll be really looking forward to working on my mobile marketing skills, and specifically mobile analytics. While web analytics have really grown and evolved to the point of too much data, mobile analytics still seems to be far behind. I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve heard “sorry we can’t do that” or “we’re not sure” in the past few weeks. Considering how big a part of our lives mobile apps have become, I can easily see this to be a differentiation point for marketeers in the future.

Just for fun (!?), Squared invited January cohorts to participate in a live debate about privacy and data use policy. Our group was assigned to date the for motion for the subject of 'Facebook's Privacy and Data Use Policy is an unnecessary restriction upon its users rights".

Not being of a legal mind i found reading these policies pretty mind boggling, however a group approach meant that we were able to submit our one pager proposal for debate. 

Squared Module 5 was all about change and the Future. Pretty apt as this was the last module on the Squared Journey!

As we have all discovered over the past 6 months, the digital revolution is like a  runaway train, relentlessly changing direction and forever going forward. Some of the trends coming up are below:

Collaborative economy - where products, service and marketplace combine to create successful company models that are assisted by its users - one example being GiffGaff where customers provide customer support, marketing and product development.

Content curation - where content is gathered and packaged to present specific subjects tat consumers may be interested in - just like Pinterest is allowing by use of the scrapbooking idea for both customers and companies alike

Unboxing of the TV - interactive TV, not only being able to view what we want when we await it - but tailored to our own preferences and bringing us all relevant and interesting programmes. Who needs boxes of DVDs when we can rent a film, consume it and not have to dust it on the shelf?

Real time - wouldn't it be great if you could get realtime deals where you are? Flashsales in realtime benefit both business and consumers, fitting relevant deals to business needs

Internet of things - fridges prompting you to order milk when you are low, being able to to control your lights and heating via your mobile device are all things that a few years ago would have been unusual. Now we are beginning to see the rise of acceptance as these products help us like our lives. 

Bearing these things in mind onto the final assignment;

Analysing the impact of the digital by looking at its past and predicting where the future...now where did i put my crystal ball...?

Well i couldn't find it so Blue Group 4 had to pop on the thinking caps!

We were assigned the Telecomm's sector and got down to researching both past and future disruptors that have and will change the way that we are able to communicate, allowing us all to talk and share with increasing speed and distance. Once we had a historical timeline we were tasked to present our findings in an infographic. This was surprisingly tricky to do, even with some designers in our group, as distilling down trends to stats became our challenge. Conclusions for the future of telecoms fell into 5 areas;

The internet of everything

Super-fast connectivity

Infinite growth

Infinite networks

Personal data  for more relevant content

Teamwork and collabroration came easily for the majority of the group, with exception to one member, who we barely heard from! I guess i have been spoilt in previous modules and couldn't understand the lack of drive and commitment that the rest of the group shared.

When I found out Module 4 was all about data, I did a little internal dance. After all, data is my favorite part about marketing and probably one of the reasons I decided to switch over from engineering to marketing.

When people ask why/how I switched from oil-and-gas to e-commerce, I always remark that there are many similarities between reservoir optimization and digital (paid) marketing. And now I have the perfect opportunity to explain. In O&G, your inputs are water and gas which react with a baseline (reservoir/geology) formula to give you the output of oil. In digital marketing, you have inputs of money with a baseline CPC and conversion rate formula that you optimize to maximize your conversions to sales/registration. And in both cases, if you have the right data and understand it, you can  get things to work out.

At the beginning of my digital career, it was all about never having enough data. And more often than not, when I walked into a company, I’d see that certain key metrics weren’t even being measured. For example, in e-commerce, we’d keep track of sales coming from paid channels, but we never had a separate tracker for assisted sales generated by the customer service team. If I added these sales to my books, I’d see my campaigns were even more effective. Of if I didn’t take into account canceled/return/fraud orders, I’d be getting a rosier picture than what my finance team was seeing. So I learnt my first lesson in data - ensure you have the FULL picture before you make any assumptions.

Now that you have all the data and log-ins to all the tools you need, you can get going with analysis and give game-changing recommendations, right? Wrong! What I probably spend the most time doing these days is data validation. More often than not, you’ll have multiple sources of data for any part of your business, for example e-commerce sales reflected in Google Analytics and what your CRM tool is reporting. If you’re dealing with a small volume, it can really skew your analysis. And if you wait until you have large volumes, understanding the source of your discrepancy can become very difficult. And then sometimes it’s all about understanding HOW you collect data. For example, what happens when a JavaScript doesn’t fire or when data is sampled instead of measured - can you really trust these data points? A good data-led marketeer needs to validate and understand the technology and logic between data collection.

And as I approach the mid-career phase, I’ve becomes familiar with the perils of too much data. If you told me 3 years ago that I’d complain about too much data, I’d never have believed you. When starting any new project, once I’ve gotten all the data I need and  validated its accuracy, I’ll have more data that I can manage. Since my day job requires me to work on strategy and execution and not just the analysis, I can’t spend my day sifting through the data. I need to get a quick sense of the pulse of the business and most importantly react and implement what the data recommends. Because without actually acting on what your data tells you, data is just pretty graphs.