SVAMA Morning Forum Series and Tibetan numbers

Last week, I gave a presentation on Improving Marketing ROI Through Web Analytics for the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Marketing Association. It was a great group of people and a lively discussion. My presentation centered mainly on building a story around web analytics, and specifically bringing the story of the customer lifecycle to life through the integration of analytics throughout the cycle.One of the things I got to do, since this was more of a personal viewpoint presentation, was use this slide:Tibetan has different symbols for numbers, which came as a surprise to me since every other language I've encountered uses the same number symbols, including Japanese and Mandarin. Perhaps they *have* their own, but on signs and in printed materials, I've seen the ones I'm used to. A few of the Tibetan symbols are similar to ours, but that can be misleading: the one that looks like a 4 is actually a 5, for example.Anyway, somewhere along the line of presenting scorecards to clients, I realized that when we numbers people look at spreadsheets, we immediately see patterns, key changes, etc. jumping out at us--but it's just not that way for most people. For the uninitiated, it looks like the above--a jumble of crap and some words that are easy to gloss over. Anyway, I used this slide to demonstrate that, then switched back to the usual numbers and text and went on to talk about monetization. I think it made the point, and got people to engage a bit more with the following slide (with legible data) than they might have otherwise.