Pinterest Success in 2012

I have been seeing bloggers refer to “pinning” images on Pinterest for a year or more and just recently I finally got an account started. Pinterest required linking to my FB profile which was a dealbreaker, but I deleted the app and unlinked it afterwards. I was curious as to why Pinterest was different than other mood board sites (polyvore) I had seen that didn’t really impress me. At the same time I have been reading more about how Pinterest drives more traffic to retailer sites than Google Images, how women are the primary audience and why Pinterest traffic has taken off like a space rocket.

My take on the site as a web analyst, a woman and a user of the site may be different than the media’s perceptions. I concentrate on the behaviors and uses of the site and have listed my opinons on their growth/success here:

Some reasons I think Pinterest has been a growing site:

1. Images do say more than a 1000 words – They can make you feel hopeful, creative, inspired and motivated. Great images move people. That is why good photography is both art and marketing at the same time. (think Flickr/Instagram) What happens when you want to see that powerful/inspiring image again? Do you bookmark it? With your other 1,000 bookmarks? Blogging it has been better, but not everyone wants to blog and some people frown on hotlinking in your posts although that is what Pinterest uses. Flickr has been great with it’s searchable favorites image list, but not everyone likes Flickr like I do. Some people just want to link other people’s photos and not upload their own. Facebook is ok if you want to blast your friends with all the images you save/share about your home remodel project and make everything archived by the borg, but I really think image saving/sharing is out of context on your personal branding page. Capturing and sharing this image information has had a tricky history and Pinterest solved a problem we didn’t know we had.

2. People are busy and ideas are fleeting – Maybe this is the ADHD generation? I am a GenXer. I have way too much to do, a reasonable income and a very short attention span. I have a hard time keeping track of things that aren’t completely essential and ideas are on that list. In a personal example: With my process of moving around a lot in the last few years, my confidence in the house decorating department was a bit threatened from being a bit out of practice. I have made up for it with a huge file of images saved on my computer from design blogs. It was an old school solution to needing a place to look for ideas from images I already filtered and liked. Did it create solutions for my house? Yep, several rooms in the new house have been redone based on color pallettes from those photos. But in a day I may only see 1-3 photos I like from 50+ interior design blogs. In a year that is a lot to comb through and it isn’t share-able offline nor is it accessible from anywhere. So, Pinterest has recently proved more accessible and more shareable for keeping these images. Plus it is free for now. I could see them evolving into suggesting ad based photos by retailers based on your tags/likes/pins in the future.

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3. Trends/Decisions are easier to analyze when you have all the information from multiple sources in one place. I find it difficult to make buying decisions in this day and age because in most every category there are too many brands, products, colors, choices, prices and options to keep straight. (information overload) Making a pinning board for new shoes you are considering buying takes a lot less time than going to the 5 stores in your area and trying to decide that way or ordering online from Zappos and having to return them all. Plus you can save that pic of that shoe you love but don’t need right now for later. Side by side lists and comparisons make shopping a little easier, but in most cases these wishlists really work on selling to you and others. Someone recommends something, you loooove it, click-click-bought. That isn’t really a bad consumer strategy. I have found that if I ever pass on an item and want to look it up to buy later, it is impossible/gone  with how short the merch time is in stores (online and off) and how styles change so vastly that it may never be seen again. (yet the things you’re never very thrilled with seem to pop up again and again in many different stores). Items/Pictures that are popular on Pinterest may have more staying/selling power due to the large audience or they may be more trendy when people move on to the next micro trend. I am not sure yet because there is a lot of churn in products these days, some people consuming constantly, others stopping completely.

4. Like TED some ideas are worth sharing. I enjoy seeing what my friends have discovered and pinned. It tells me what they are into, what is new, what really good ideas/recipes they want to share and hopefully some of those ideas are good for me too. I have found some interesting clever solutions for household annoyances this way. True, this may just mirror the offline world where women would share tips on household stuff while chatting in the yard, but it makes sense for other subject matter/industries too as long as there aren’t proprietary info in the photos and there is a collective community sharing information. This could be a marketing strategy if you have real solutions your product offers and the story can be told in an image that looks real.

5. The biggest reason? Discovery is a process that a lot of us get a big burst of happy from. It doesn’t matter if it is online discovering photos, reading a magzine, watching a TV show, taking a vacation or creating something like artwork or crafts. Many of us have jobs that are pretty specialized and we do a short list of things for the company and don’t have a lot of variety or creativity in our daily lives. I have found that I need some form of creativity (writing, photography, art, dance, design) in order to be happy and I have a feeling that this may be the case for others too. Even the simulation of creativity by discovering and learning from photos of how to keep wrapping paper on the roll with a sliced toilet paper core haves us that Aha moment and makes us feel happier, smarter & more connected. All this in an easy to use format and without requiring much reading for the ADHD generations.

6. Another reason it may be growing is that Pinterest is very accessible on iPads which can go anywhere in the home when you have time to look at it. (the app is just fair, I prefer the full site in the browser on an iPad) It is a guilty pleasure just like celeb blogs on some level. I think mobile/tablet use is making the site more addictive although probably not the main reason for it’s success. Now that retailers (Etsy) has added pin it button to their listings pages I hope more retailers do this to help promote their products. One thing is clear though, it will take 500+ views and likes before you find someone ready to buy, and you will probably have to have some familiarity/trust built with them first. Most people do a lot of window shopping/dreaming on the site, a lot more than buying. But that is part of marketing, getting the word out in the first place, or as some say, creating the need. A large enough audience may just be able to significantly impact sales too.

7. The more I think about it there are more reasons that this site works well and attracts people so quickly. An element of new sites that often works well is keeping the interface simple and the navigation self explanitory. (especially with people who don’t have a lot of time or patience) In this case the content/images take center stage and the navigation/functionality is uber simple and almost in the background. If/when they would like to expand on it they can build more complexity over time and teach the audience along the path to more features just as/or before they get bored with the current ones. Facebook has done this pretty well and has been able to innovate its way ahead of many other sites.

Any other reasons you think Pinterest is growing so quickly?

Design Trends 2012: More reprocessing of the past

This article in Vanity Fair describes a design rut that we seem to be in at the moment.

I’m not sure I would describe it as a rut, but I think there is a lot of reprocessing going on.

You may wonder why I care.

I don’t work in design but I do have this habit of moving around a lot, and buying/selling/decorating houses so I can move seems to be my unofficial job. I also have 47 blogs in my RSS reader under the home/interior/design category that I have been using as resources for about 4 years. I see a LOT of design in order to have an opinion on it.

Looking at all these blogs, I have wondered how the 18-25 crowd looks at a lot of the resale stuff, clothing and music from years past as new. (anthology, lonny, backgarage are examples) I attribute this to a specific age group because that seems to be my observation from the bloggers but it could be more widespread.

I do think as a rule the younger generations tend to drive style & design innovations and it then travels through age brackets like waves. By the time it reaches the eldest brackets the youngest don’t want it anymore.

Its like Eddie Izzard once said, things work in a circle: cool hip & groovy is right next to looking like a dickhead, but you can’t back into it, there is only one way around.

Some of my thoughts about this younger generation’s design mash ups:

• They take furniture that my grandparents donated to charity years ago and call it mid-century modern and cool. I sometimes call this style “granny chic”. I make fun of it, but I do have a 1965 stereo credenza in my living room now.
• Sometimes the rooms look like a 19th-20th century explosion with no 2 pieces with any similarity whatsoever. I sometimes think of it as the garage sale look. (I also have a mixed era home.)
• This new generation takes jeans and sneakers from the 80′s and call them cool one day and wear bell bottoms from the 70′s the next. (This I can’t do)
• They have convinced me that yellow gold colored jewelry is ok again after loathing it for about 20 years post 80′s. (about 75% of what I wear is yellow gold now)
• They like 80′s music, and not really the stuff I feel nostalgic about.
• The people who haven’t lived through much of the 20th century seem to be driving the rebirth and reprocessing of all the styles from that time.
• It is also important to note that the millennial generation has the highest unemployment of any age bracket due to the recession. It may not be a surprise that they would think so differently about design/life and choices based on what they can afford and have experienced.

The vanity fair article cites several reasons for this design rut. One being a cultural overload where people just can’t process any more new information because the internet/call phones was too much! This may be true for the Boomer age groups but not the Genx-Millennial. I think the millennial is actually driving the design changes and for completely different reasons.

Does this drastic innovation make me less interested in new stuff? New design? More nostalgic for the past? Not at all.

I feel lucky that all the drastic innovation and change that is listed in the article happen just after I graduated high school. (internet, computers, cell phones, social networks, search engines) None of the available professions at the time really appealed to me so it makes sense that I now work in a field (internet marketing) that didn’t exist in 1993. I look at these radical changes as “normal” and something I need to and like to learn about.

I think there are other elements to this design nostalgia epidemic and reprocessing phenomenon.

1. It is easier and cheaper to reprocess than invent. This relates to my previous post about ROI being the only metric in business these days.  Society has no time for developing cutting edge design. Good ideas come at the sacrifice of time and a lot of re-dos, and time is expensive just like materials. And what materials are available now that weren’t 10-20 years ago? No real innovation there either. Things just keep getting made from cheaper less durable materials. The only R&D going on is how to make things cheaper that look good but fall apart quickly so the customers come back again to buy more. Plus we don’t have enough trees for everyone in the world to own teak/oak/mahogany furniture.

2. We have had a more documented history in the last century than ever before both through museums, video/audio, photographs and the family history of people passing down their personal stories while living much longer. We look back at history and think, boy they had it right.  Nothing is as elegant as how they designed things back then. And they took pictures in B&W, what an elegant design choice! You get reprocessed things like the PT Cruiser/Plymouth Prowler/Chevy SSR, Oxford Heels, Swing Dancing, Sailor Pants, Pea Coats, Red Lipstick/Bottle Blondes, Bombshell hair, Mad Men, Starburst Clocks and just about any kind of hat.

3. Law of diminishing returns: It is also more difficult to keep finding something “new” in design when we have to design so much more stuff. It is common for Americans to replace their entire closet of clothes every 3 years and retail stores have to replace everything on the sales floor every 6 weeks to seem “new” again. We kind of don’t respect good design, or any design. As a culture we want to throw it out as soon as we see it in too many places and be more unique again. Shows like Project Runway also show how anyone can be a designer with training and everyone gets more educated about what the demands of great design should be. This makes the general public much harder to impress.

4. At the same time a certain part of the population is sick of all the new-new-new and the churn that happens. We want useful, dependable, reliable and timelessly elegant.  We don’t have time to go shopping for things every 6 weeks in order to find those elusive great items at a great price before they’re sent off to the overstock stores. And of course when you do need something…you can’t find it anywhere because the supply chain in China didn’t anticipate that need 6-12 months ago, and it’s not “new”. I think some people literally choose to go retro because they see it as timeless. In many cases this is cheaper, more elegant and less work.

5. Globalization happened. We used to think it was quaint to go visit another country and come back with something to remember it by.  Now we see places all over the world in places other than World News Tonight or National Geographic. We see the world on Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Imagur, Stumble Upon and Google. What used to be new to us is not all in mash up mode. We take the best of every era as well as every culture in our past to create this new hodgepodge mix that represents who we are. And everyone is more global now than we were 20 years ago. I have had fascination with Asian prints and Indian jewelry as much as Scandinavian furniture. We have bought most of our cars from other countries for a while. It is just lagging that the rest of the items we buy are more globally influenced too. I sometimes click to buy things on Etsy or from a blog link to a store and don’t notice that the store isn’t even in the USA until I see the shipping cost. Sometimes I buy it anyway, it is a rare moment to be unique in my neighborhood.

Lastly, we’ve seen the future before.

We grew up hoping for flying cars and they never showed up.

Our future can be found in watching FUTURAMA. Or Wall-E and  Idiocracy.

We know where things are going, and it seems more about recycling and less about space ships so I’m going to hang out with the millennials and see what else they come up with.

Is More Data Always Better?

There has been a discovery in the online marketing and data/statistics world in the last few years. We have had more websites, products and tools created online than we can possibly keep track of. The terms to describe this deluge of activity we have been hearing the most are “data overload” and “information overload” from both companies and consumers. This Google Magazine uses the term Data Obesity to describe this phenomenon.

They ask the question, why is more data always better?

I think the idea of “more data us better” is common from people who lived before the Internet was prevalent. We had to work hard to find data. Researching something meant going to a library and looking in a card catalog (or maybe something called Gopher) and then finding your way around the Dewey decimal system to find that book. And then sometimes they didn’t even have the book because it was checked out or possibly it was just filed wrong because nobody understood the Dewey decimal system.

On a related note recently we got invited to my cousin’s wedding in Santa Fe New Mexico. My dad promptly went to the library and checked out 3 books on Santa Fe and New Mexico. I cringed. He asked how to find out the flights to book something without a travel agent. I realized I have been traveling since 2000 this way and he stopped traveling about that time so he never has. I introduced him to Travelocity, it was mind blowing and a bit of data overload compared with the OAG book he used to use in the 80′s.

The point here is that finding data was really difficult. People had control over its distribution because it was in print. When it became more freely accessible due to Google and other companies efforts we assumed this would be good, because people could remember where to find it and use it whenever we wanted. We never thought it would get this big so fast. Now travel sites are overwhelming, they have too many choices and there are too many of them trying to get you to opt into something you don’t want while being over charged for bringing a suitcase on a flight. This is just one example of how data has gone exponential so quickly.

Others of us have come to a data overload conclusion when they have 200 emails in several in-boxes, 1000+ rss reader posts from feeds waiting, several work projects, 500+ Facebook wall posts in their feed and hundreds of tweets that have gone un-read. This is among a climate where you have to follow-up with projects 5-10 times to get things done, post blogs/tweets/FB status updates daily to keep on people’s radar, empty the DVR so it doesn’t get overloaded and auto delete something you really wanted, listen to the radio on the way to work just in case something big happens and still find time to scoop the litter box before it gets full and the cats poop on the floor.

And the real purpose in all those tweets/FB posts and feeds is that you business changes yearly and if you don’t know about the latest trend and some real insights about it before your boss asks about it, you won’t have a job for all that long. (in digital marketing)

Having data overload be a “good” problem to have from some people’s perspective (as in that it is growth oriented). The democratization of publishing combined with tracking methodology and databases have all contributed to this problem, giving everyone a voice, a potential following of readers, a data trail to analyze and method to say something important online 24/7/365.  And then we have an even bigger problem of processing what is being said, figuring out if it is important or not and sharing/processing/saving it in some way if it is. Acting on that data is way down the line and many of us don’t even get there.

And this isn’t even the big problem with data overload. Where will we store it all? Why do tweets disappear from search so quickly? Because there are millions of them and the failwhale is full. According to the ThinkQuarterly UK, there are 800 Exabytes of data/information created every two days. It took humans from the beginning of civilization until 2003 to create the first 800 Exabytes, and we’re on a roll now.

Where does all this seemingly random data go? How will we know what it says without having to go into a database table and read specific field information? Where are the software tools to manage all this and still give humans the ability to customize the out put in ways that match the behavior or business purposes that we really need? Does any of this stuff ever get deleted?

These are all huge questions we have to answer as more people publish, share, create, track and do business online. We also have to weigh the possibilities of sharing data openly and locking it behind walls as well as how will people comprehensively find what they need when they want to as well as gauge the validity/accuracy of the information presented?

I’m betting on paid services for personal and business data management/archiving & Analysis tools. We will pay for good analysis, good data access & processing and good reliability/backups when we feel the pain of missing good insight, losing good data and just too much happening. Both personally and professionally. But unless you know how to work with SAP, SPSS, SQL, Oracle or a bunch of other systems data management is largely out of your control at this point. They are the librarians of our digital data and they need to find a workable way to Dewey decimal system it back into order and allow us to use it as humans need to.

Japanese Earthquake Tsunami Disaster is Different from Haiti

Within a day after the Haiti Earthquake in January 2010 (7.0)there were celebrities on TV urging people to donate money to help those who were in need. Within a day of the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 we saw the same attention drawn to the even in the name of help for those in need. Both had telethons on television pleading with the public to donate millions of dollars to the relief efforts.

This time there is a very different mood in the USA a week after the 9.0 scale earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan. (2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami) There have been some Facebook/Twitter/Yahoo links to the red cross to donate but overall the donation numbers I have seen shown on U.S. sites were very low. We haven’t seen any celebrities saying that they have donated money to the cause and our own government isn’t really talking about loans or donations right now in our budget crisis (and yet they’re contemplating invading Libya at the same time). 

We’ve seen the news focus their coverage on the nuclear disaster that was the result of the loss of electricity during the earthquake and the loss of the backup generators because of the water/power of the tsunami. This combined with explosions that cracked containment vessels and a lot of hot spent fuel sitting around in 6 reactors has an enormous risk associated with it. Sure, that is the big-blockbuster-disaster-film story here, but it is not the largest problem facing Japan. The newscasters have a captive audience worldwide with this topic because this is the one issue that could affect people outside Japan.

It is a weird difference in opinion that Americans have about Japan compared with the past earthquakes/tsunamis/disasters in Indonesia & Haiti. At this point in time it surprises me greatly that Americans have issues with a country like Japan to the point that they do not want to help. It makes us look un-educated and small minded. I thought Americans would identify directly with the Japanese, like I do but I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that it is the case.

Some celebrities have been cited making rude jokes about the Earthquake/Tsunami within the last week and Gilbert Godfried was fired as the voice of the Aflac Duck (he needs to be retired anyway) because of rude and insensitive tweets he sent. 50 cent also has been criticized for his lack of understanding and even a government spokesperson in Mississippi had to resign over tasteless rude comments (not really surprising for Mississippi).

I was not always a huge fan of Japan. In the 1980′s I viewed them like many people did, as the reason that US car companies and manufacturing companies here were going out of business. There was the assumption that the Japanese were ruthless and as smart as robots and we felt threatened by that. Now we feel that way about China instead. (I do not feel that way about China though, one of my best friends is Chinese and I’ve spent a lot of time with her family for decades and could never think of them that way)

 In the last 30 years things have changed. I think Tokyo and most Japanese people share a lot of commonalities with us. They love their cell phones & gadgets as much as we do. We’ve adopted their Anime and Video gaming interests as mainstream. Toyota/Honda/Mitsubishi/Mazda sell more cars here than American companies do because people really like them and they’re innovating with hybrids and new ideas like Scion. (I don’t have the exact sales numbers for this, it is more my impression from seeing what is on the road in Chicago). Entire movies have been made about the following for Japanese imports (Fast & Furious) And who is going to give up their big screen TV or computer monitor from Samsung, Sony or NEC? Or their Wii?

But the real change in perception happened when people started liking Sushi. About 10 years ago Sushi started getting popular in Chicago. With it U.S. audiences began to discover the california roll, spicy tuna and the joy of Miso Soup. Along with our broadening pallets beyond teryaki we discovered udon noodles, bento boxes, tempura, sake, mochi and red bean ice cream. (red bean ice cream may also be Chinese, and it is better than the green tea flavor)

We also discovered through Flickr that Japanese people love their cats as much as we do (Junku) and Sakura is the cherry blossom festival each spring.  A blend of Asian styles from China, Japan and other areas is very popular right now in home decorating, emphasizing the strong minimalist lines of furniture pieces and the delicate organic patterned styles. We also share our love of all things digital with Japan. And who can forget Sanrio and the super-popular Hello Kitty and her cast of friends? Can you get any more cute and friendly than that?

So how did I overcome the feeling of competitive anxiety with Japan? By enjoying the exported food. And the rich culture of preparation that surrounds it that makes it unique and special. Exporting your culture really does change views that people have of your country around the world. Through this I have realized that the Japanese are competitive people, but they are also very nice people and respectful of us as a country too. I’ve come to the conclusion that we can learn a lot from them about managing large populations in small places (like Tokyo) and how to continue to innovate in industry, manufacturing and the economy.

So that is why it bothers me that the U.S. population is not really doing anything to help here. Sure, some closed-minded conservatives will always have rude views, but I really think the people in America should do something to help.

Instead of understanding that Japan is a nation of people with a lot more in common with us than most of the world, a large portion of the U.S. public continues to focus on the differences. The bottom line is that Japan is an industrial/manufacturing/technology based economy like ours. The average person in Japan is pretty well-educated on a world scale, like us.

In fact we really do depend on each other a lot, buying/selling from each other and sharing strong bonds of family and friends across borders. We can’t just stand by and watch these nuclear reactors go out of control and not think about the people who don’t have food, water or homes anymore. It is a disaster just like anywhere else in the world. And that world has gotten a whole lot smaller in the last 10 years with the internet, skype,  international business and Sushi. And we’re not doing enough to help.

The Future of Marketing

I’ve been thinking about the future of advertising & marketing lately sincem y boss is off to SXSW this week. I’ve found that in the last decade there is a new trend that takes over as the next-big-thing in online marketing every 2 years.

Before that, the TV/Radio/Print models lasted for about 50 years. I used to think that we were looking for the next big model/philosophy for advertising and things would settle into a steady pattern for the next 20 years but I am beginning to doubt that is going to be possible.

Either we’re still evolving or we’re going to always be evolving from now on. I don’t see any stopping in the development of new devices that use the internet nor the methods in how people use them.

This could prove exhausting for companies having to add another “expert” to their teams every year or so instead of making sure their staff has time to learn on the job, which they really should do. It also means that unless there is a new person or time to learn for companies, their effective advertising will become less effective every year they use it just because behavior is changing so rapidly.

A look at what is hot now and what has been popular in the last 10 years.

Facebook seemed to be the biggest advertising/marketing trend of the year in 2010 and companies I work with have jumped on the bandwagon in 2010-2011. I think this is definitely where people are online for a large chunk of their day, turning it into a communication channel for your company isn’t as easy as it looks. I’ve been on FB since they opened it to people with a company email address and I have been hesitant to share that much personal info with a public database like that but the general public seems to either keep it fluffy in content or not care. Ads on the site do generate interest, but at lower click through rates than any other ad medium I’ve seen.

Twitter has also become laser-hot in the last 2 years and has exploded because of celebrity use and the popularity explosion of smartphones on the US market. Direct P2P marketing is the main method if twitter use in my opinion, and they really don’t charge for it in any way. The downsides here are that your tweets are really only alive for 1 day and then they die, and are taken out of the searchable database if someone is not a subscriber.

Blogs have been all the rage for the last 2-4 years but people have backed off lately because content farms were really making them look bad, content is expensive/time consuming to produce and all the blog ad networks that provided a reliable income from it have either gone under or are paying less than 20% of what they used to or have no inventory. So even if you’re hosting for $10 per month and paying some person in india $5 per article you really can’t make the Google AdSense $ to cover it anymore, and there are few networks paying more than $0.25 per CPM. And since you’re less likley to get blog traffic via search these days you have to build a loyal following, and that is either long hours researching cutting edge news content/analysis or going out and shaking a lot of hands in person. Bloggers typically don’t like people all that much. Also, RSS push notifications were supposed to make Blogs portable to any reader anwhere and instead they just became geeky things body understood and nobody used. Bummer. WordPress (and earlier TypePad and Blogger) were the real catalysts here. They gave regular non-programming people the ability to publish anything they want on the web for free without programming a site or knowing HTML. It was revolutionary until we all remembered how hard the Newspaper business really is and how it is far too time consuming to be profitable. Real bloggers blog because they love it, not to make money. Blogs are also a great way to publish content for free if your business is content, that’s not going away anytime soon.

Blogs were super valuable when they were super influential for Search. Search engines were the marketing darling of 2004-2006 and have slid in ROI ever since. Google has made higher minimum bids a regular practice and people have become desensitized to ads. These super targeted ways of reaching people with relevance have also been taken over by giant companies that used them for branding rather than content relevance and watered down their effectiveness. People have also noticed the spam in search and trust Google results less knowing people work the system. Some blogs gained traction as content/news sources that people subscribed to instead of newspapers and propelled real people into the reporting limelight, the rest became archives of people’s personal lives or were spammy and forgotten. Some people will probably stay with search as their core online activity for the rest of their lives because it made such an impact, but others are moving on.

SEO has been the secret marketing tactic of the last 5 years and it has only lasted that long because it has been so hard to build links for SEO and figure out how the algorithm has changed. Lately though companies have been gaming it more than ever and there is too much knowledge on how to Google Bomb something and people know garbage results when they see them. So, there has been more trust transferred to social networks where people rely on their network of friends to filter the news and just pass on what is really meaningful. This method isn’t about discovery or archiving like search was, it is about instant feedback and the trust of the people you know. Bing has not gained much traction and with Google as the only worldwide player, they will continue to do what they want to maximize profits and favor big companies rather than work on the algorithm and better understanding how people want information. SEO will always be needed and always be challenging.

Email is the old skool way to do things online and time spent in email these days is dropping significantly. People have taken their communication with friends to FB & Twitter and we know how to read/process email a lot faster than we did years ago, so less time is needed. Yet it is still the main method of communication/task management for businesses because of the electronic paper trail it creates for projects/accountability. Real Spam, marketing spam, inbox “work” association and other instant means of communication over the years have tarnished Email’s image. That said, millions of people are still tied to their email as an official method of communication that can reach the most people because it has been around the longest.

Analytics is also a trend but in my opinion this has been the most consistent of all in the last 10 years. It is basically looking at and interpreting data from websites and advertising campaigns and making sense of them in a way to make positive changes in the media/ad choices and web content/development to better serve customer’s and the companies’ needs. I hope more analytics programs allow better/easier integration with all links/ads/impressions across the web because this is the key to understanding customers. There have not been many companies willing to get into this ginormous database product area over the years because it is so costly and complicated to get it right. The looming battle over cookies and privacy could change some of the validity of the data if it means that we lose 50% of the data on visitors. More disclosure is needed with consumers to get a better understanding of how these systems work in order to overcome this.

Display Advertising online is the unpopular element to talk about here but this type of ad had grown dramatically in the last decade. You may think back to old times when Gator or WeatherBug installed spyware on your computer from banners and wonder how it would grow. Well a lot has changed. Seriously. As soon as post impression conversion tracking was created we understood that people see and read banners even though they don’t usually click. Waiting for someone to click is pointless in banner advertising. If you track who views each ad (with a random ID number in a cookie) and then who converts and lands on the thank you for purchasing page that is all you need to know. In this space we’ve also seen advances in brhavioral targeting based on demographic data people share with networks (Like your Yahoo or Google profiles) and retargeting based on which sites you’ve visited in the past and may be interested in again. The end result is that Display advertising works, but only if you buy a lot of it. Like millions of impressions and you track from the impression through conversion and not just the click.

Some recent trends that have fizzled are:

Surveys/Customer sentiment measurement gauges. They’re more annoying than useful for the consumer, pretty much a waste of time even with some small incentive. Unless you pay someone $10-$20 they’re not going to care enough to tell you the truth. Nobody wants to say something negative that gets someone else’s job in trouble. If you pay attention to your feedback through customer service you will probably find out more useful information.

Feedback/Comments/Rating Systems. These are a good tool if you have an engaged customer base. I’ve seen some work well like Amazon and Nordstrom, but others like travel sites and restaurant ratings just get slurped into Google as content and your site doesn’t benefit from the functionality. People do trust ratings from customers (real people) more than ads or third party rating systems.

IM Instant Messenger. Some people still use IM as a method of chat, but it never became the hub for activity that we thought it would. AIM and Yahoo had it after ICQ and never really capitalized on it. GMail and Facebook added this as an additional functionality making the original IM programs kinda obsolete when people could do everything in one place.  Skype is the one standalone place this may live on. Skype’s claim to fame is video calls via internet and free voice over internet calls to anyone else online with Skype. Yahoo IM does this too but nobody really seems to use it there. Maybe they should have had that featured in their TV commercials.

Affiliate networks. These were all the rage in 2003-2004 and they have been a big reason for the prevalence of spam in blogs, social networks and search. Farming your online marketing out to people who are not responsible for the brand of your company and will do anything to make a buck is an invitation to get played. A lot of the payouts have dropped from these systems have been shut down or have less than 20% of the payout they once did for a conversion/lead. The message here, don’t trust anyone who says it’s “easy”. Some high level revenue sharing or lead trading relationships between large companies make sense but should always be handled in person by people not through 3rd party electronic networks.

Video may be a success for many people (including cats) but for most of us (and companies) it is still out of reach and vastly misunderstood. From a behavior standpoint, people can’t watch video/audio at work while at their desk because it is too noticeable that they’re not working (the largest audience base that the internet has) and the video content is not searchable because there is no transcription of the content automatically to make it searchable or translateable into different languages. Most people don’t know how to edit video and companies don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for this either. Editors may also have a tough job going through thousands of hours of content in the future to find the meaningful stuff. Professional content creators like TV/Movie studios still have the upperhand here in creating really good quality video and we may not have affordable tools and education for a while yet. Monetizing it is another problem and YouTube is an example of really popular sites not making enough money to really pay the bills since they rely on Google to subsidize them. I think Video may get easier if there are good online video editors (with good tutorials) that become available cheaply.

The Question & Answer format completed by volunteers/users of the site. Yahoo Answers is moderately successful from a search perspective but the general public never caught on and a lot of the answers were pretty bad. I never understood why companies never took advantage of answering questions as a way to create permanent links to their site for people looking for their products/solutions. Now Quora is trying to do the same thing somehow combined with Twitter. More companies seem to be embracing it but again the success of the site depends on the quality of the answers and without paying someone how good do you think it will be when the newness wears off?

Wikis. I wanted Wikis to be big. I am such a fan of Wikipedia and I also work in an industry where sharing content is a daily occurence. Wikis help when you need a reference material to be updateable quickly within a group. It served the encyclopedia niche really well and not many other companies needed something like this.

Now that I have rehashed the past and the present, where does that leave us on the footsteps of SXSW needing to understand what is next?  Some ideas I have may not be fully developed, but that is what the future is all about, speculating.

1. We need more databases, more user friendly-visually configurable-cheap-secure-web based databases. We have a lack of public knowledge about how to collect, maintain and report on multiple databases in marketing. This has only been for the IT and Web departments in the past, we need to free the data to become accessible to more people, although probably not everyone wants that. Some people may find that overwhelming and it does take experience to understand multiple layers of marketing and the effects it has on the data. We also need to find more user friendly ways to link separate database systems like analytics with accounting or orders and web ad servers. We need to resolve traffic flow/identity across all of them in order to understand things better, and we need more processing power to do this. It is also getting easier to collect data at so many points in everyone’s day on so many networks. We need ways to process all these potential new forms of data from wearable sensors to car/directional related sensors to all the video people post online that has no text for content. Basically we need to find better ways to process and understand all this data.

2. Mobile use is exploding but in my opinion very few web functions work well on phones due to the small screen and the variable network connectivity. Email works, Facebook also works. Twitter was made for phones. Advertising was not. How to monetize this channel is a challenge, as is how to reach new consumers in a relevant way while on these devices. One thing is clear, a mobile phone is with someone all the time, possibly even while they sleep, and people very loyal to their smartphones. The checkin-foursquare thing has caught on for some functions and some needs but it is not widely excepted. (more relevant to brick and mortar businesses offline) There is still frustration when full website functionality isn’t included in a mobile design and there is confusion between apps and mobile websites for consumers and marketers. This all may get resolved in time because of popularity. A Nielsen poll found that 41% of the respondents used their cell phone in the bathroom. We’re also not sure if tablet computers fit into this category or not yet. We will see more advertising opportunity on Mobile in the future but it should always be paired with regular Display & Search advertising (and offline) to make the connection.

3. Cloud computing, bye to VPNs and servers and hello to clouds. Also hello to more hacking, more data loss and more outsourcing of IT jobs to somewhere else. This can be a good technology to make your content/data/work available wherever you are.

4. QR codes, maybe? Eh? We get how to use them, not sure what the point is for the consumer? Coupons? Wireless rewards points systems? How do you get this data into your existing order and web analytics database systems?

5. Internet on TV and vice versa. The internet being an on demand database of content you can choose to watch at any time makes a programming schedule obsolete. Live events will have a certain lure but otherwise people will use Google TV, Apple TV, Netflix to access content while using the web in their living rooms all at the same time. Video chat will be better when its on your TV too. This will be very tricky for advertisers. In an on-demand world nobody will wait for a commercial anymore and it will have to be all subscription based. Companies will have to partner with content creators to get products seen, mentioned if there are no commercials.

6. Fragmentation. People may get tired of the constant need to reformulate their entire communication method with family/friends/work every two years and just pick something and stick with it at some point, but in the mean time we will have a lot of noise from a lot of signals all clamoring for a consumer’s attention and that means that they listen less to each of them. This makes marketers have to work harder to be louder and more frequent in their messaging and in turn makes consumers turn it off or change methods yet again. I find that to combat fragmentation you have to advertise on more mediums to be seen in more places. Billboards, Radio, Online & Mobile for example all at 4:30 pm advertising the evening news.

7. Task management - this is the factorization of web and white collar workers. Log into a closed system and a task list tells you what you have to do today and how long you have to do it. No critical thinking allowed without flexibility and more of a contractual-short term-task relationship with highly skilled workers. This could mean people work from home from anywhere, but forget the benefits of collaboration or connection with your job. It may improve productivity to a point, but at some point it is hard to motivate someone to do something as fast as possible when they’re not personally invested in the business (or getting rewarded that way) and working remotely.

8. Digital Archives - People are not able to really keep tabs on all the digital information in their lives. I feel this with digital photos. If Flickr didn’t exist with all my photos tagged and dated I wouldn’t be able to find anything with image names like DCIM21531 and file folders of random events on my computer that aren’t backed up. (ok that isn’t true, my tech husband just started an automated backup on an external drive he put away in a safe place, but until now it had never happened before). What about medical records for someone’s entire life history? What about family history? Emails, correspondence, daily diary blogs and other forms of electronic data? My brain can’t really remember everything and creating an archive to refer back to is an appealing idea. I also feel like I need a secure place to subscribe to in order to save/manage all this content and I’d pay for it gladly. Especially f they sent me a backup version of it on a drive in the mail. It also would serve as an archive for people if someone passes away.

9. Content managers – they used to be called Editors and paid a lot more money. Now they get paid to know the content subject matter and be an expert and may be responsible for writing the content themselves.

How to create a webtrends custom report

the webtrends menu in my old company login, new one isn’t as nice.

First off I am going toclarify that I am working in WebTrends self hosted software version 8 and that I have administrator access to do this. Without those factors you won’t neccissarily have the same experience setting up custom reports.

I have already had the developers add tags to the site to track custom events (SDC tags, DCS MultiTrack events) and I don’t work with the actuall tagging on the website so I will not address those concerns here.

I’m starting from the point where the tags are live on the site and I need to set up this custom report so we can start gathering data. If you need retroactive data because the tags were placed on the site months ago and you didn’t create the report, it is only possible if you create the report and re-process all the data from scratch for that time period and this is usually done in a new profile. This takes a long time (sometimes weeks if you have years of data) and the people maintaining the servers and data for your webtrends setup usually hate you if you ask. So, let’s stay out of that area and go build a report that will collect data in a table from this point forward.

One of the most frustrating thing about WebTrends is that nothing is connected and it is a bunch of database tables. Nobody in Marketing thinks that way or interacts with a system like this so it is completley foregin. (‘m getting the feeling that the developers feel the same way too) You have to go into several tables in the database behind the webtrends software and create the structure for the report. It sucks but that is the way it works.

For every custom report you need at least three things. A Measure, A Dimension and A Report. (you may also want a filter but that isn’t required).

1. Testing - Some people (webtrends actually advises this) like to create a copy of the profile to test the reports (or any changes to the profile) before they add or change anything for real. This reduces the probablility that you will have some change corrupt or crash your data. If you depend on this data and have a lot of custom reports and data already set in the profile you’re working with, start with a copy profile first and don’t endanger the main data set. Work in that sandbox until you find the right combination of settings, write them down and then go back to the main profile when you’re sure the report exports the right data in the right format. There is a one day waiting period to collect data to test in most cases unless you’re running on-demand (of which most of my advice may not apply to) or you have updates and processing every few hours. Also only select the most recent month’s data in the copy profile, you don’t need all the data to run a test.

2. A Dimension is what most people would call a metric name. It is the data being collected from those custom tags. Just because the tags are in the WebTrends format and live on the site doesn’t mean that the WebTrends software knows that they are there or what to do with that data. You need to create a dimension to name this data and create a table to collect it in. Go to Dimensions in the admin menu. (some systems show custom report menus under reports & profiles others in Admin, check both) Select new on the upper right corner. Name it. Give it a column name for reports. Use the navigation to go through the process steps to finish creating this measure. You will need the actual tag names for this. In my case it is WT.it. Not terribly descriptive but hopefully functional. Do not select to activate across all profiles because you also need to go into the profiles (the main one and the copy) you are working with and enable this dimension there so it knows which profile it is working with. You don’t want to affect everyone elses profiles with this extra data, just yours. They need a drop down within the dimension setup to allow you to select this all at once but of course that doesn’t exist to confuse us more.

3. A Measure is another function you need to set up manually (in a database table?) and tell WebTrends that along with the Dimension you just created a table for, should you count or sum this data? In a system like DART, this is so simple it is a drop down choice on an export menu, here you have to configure the backend system of the millennium falcon to get it set. Silly but true. Go to Measures on the custom reports menu. Select new on the upper right corner. Name it. Give it a column name for reports. Use the navigation to go through the process steps to finish creating this measure. You will need the actual tag names for this. You must also go into the profiles (the main one and the copy) you are working with and enable this measure there so it is activated. Ditto about not selecting all profiles on the measure setup so that this works. For my purposes I had the WT.ti (page title tag) and 4 parameters that were possible when that tag was used. (ShareThis: Facebook, Twitter, Email & MySpace) and they all got created as additional measures also. This will give us more granularity in the data showing us not only which pages had share this activity but which site it was shared to.

4. The Custom Report finally! – After about 4 hours of setup for the setup you can finally go do what you originally set out to do. Go to the reports link under custom reports.

The menu for setting up the report asks for the info about the dimensions and measures you just set up as well as how you want the data compiled. I always allow for sorting ability but you don’t have to if you want to save space and if you just export it all anyway it may not matter.

The setup for the report makes more sense having seen everything we’ve already talked through. It is also worth noting that if your template for webtrends software doesn’t have a left nav bar location for the custom reports you have to find the template being used now for your back-end-interface then you have to go into that version of template and add custom reports to that list. I found mine under report configuration, report designer in the report and profiles section of the menu. See screen shot at left. Click the top line of the left nav in the template to deselect the chapters already there and add a new report and list it in a new chapter for custom reports.

You also need to enable the report in the profile itself. Each version of WebTrends has a slightly different menu, but in the edit-report menu of the profile there is a reports tab that lists all the custom reports set up in the system and you select the ones you want to enable.

After this your data in the test copy profile should work, then the trick is repeating it all over again in the main profile and remembering all the steps.

Why is Black Friday such a big deal?

I’ve been thinking about the holiday shopping season and why Black Friday and the entire Thankgsiving weekend is so crazy for shoppers. Why do all these people go crazy trying to get the best deals? Why do they spend so much time out in the malls that weekend buying things? Why is it specifically just this weekend that is crazy?

Some things have occurred to me this year since it is the first one I have had living with my husband in a house vs a condo/townhome setup. One thing has struck me for sure this year. People are scheduled. Everyone has events to attend, multiple family members to see, possibly neighbors or coworkers also and way more work around the house and at their day job than anyone can really handle.

What does this really mean?

People don’t have a lot of time to prepare for Christmas even though they feel the weight of the expectations from kids, family members and themselves after seeing the onslaught of advertising and promotional decorating that happens around town every year.

With way too much going on you usually end up with all your time too busy and scheduled to start shopping until the Thanksgiving event is checked off the list. Then you luckily have a three day weekend with the family that people tend to sacrifice on doing all this work in prep for the bigger deal holiday down the road.

This may be the one weekend  that moms can get out of the house to shop without the kids in tow, since their husbands/relatives are likely off from work also and can watch the kids at home. suprising the kids is impossible if they’re in the store with you so this weekend is important for the element of surprise.

Stores have long made a big deal out of this being the “busiest shopping day of the year” because it is the “first official day of the Christmas Season” even though Holiday decorations usually pop up the day after Halloween. The inside lingo of calling the day “Black Friday” became public about 6-7 years ago as companies admitted that stores may be in the red financially (operating at a loss) for the year until this day because so much of their business is done in the Christmas Holiday Season.

Since then people and marketers have been even more obsessed with having the biggest sales to attract the most buyers and people want the best deals. Entire websites have sprung up (and mobile apps) to track all the prices from competing stores and give you the inside scoop on getting the lowest prices for those items your kids and relatives want.

Some people shop online but how many of us hate it when something is pictured on a site and looks different/color/size/texture than you thought and has to be mailed back and it is twice the hassle of getting it at the store? It is also equally frustrating to see something online and then go to the store to find it isn’t even stocked and you wasted a trip.

So are these special sale prices on Black Friday really all that great? From what I have seen most of the really low prices on high demand items are very limited (4-6 per store, hence the waiting in line to get in first) and most people don’t get them. The other aspect of the deals that you hear less about is that these items are never the high end good quality items on sale. We have been looking at LED TVs this year and none of the ones I’ve seen on sale have been the 240 hz models. Only the 60hz and 120 hz models are on sale. It seems like a way to make a big fuss about people going to your store to get a good deal and limiting the sales to lower quality items and in limited quantity.

In addition to that, the Christmas holiday seems to have little or no religious meaning for most Americans at this point. It is a family oriented economic event. I agree with the ideas of getting together with family and spending time with those who really mean a lot to you in your life. I also believe that everyone has a few things they can’t afford or won’t quite go buy even though they need them and it is family and friends that should help them out this time of year and that is where the gifts come in. But this Santa brings everyone everything they ever wanted thing has to stop. As does the over-buying that the TV/Radio ads tend to promote.

I don’t know if it is worth going through all the craziness of shopping on Black Friday or Thanksgiving Weekend unless you are like us, both employed and scheduled for something on every day of all the weekends from Thanksgiving until the end of the year. Then it is your only chance to get things bought and decorated before family starts arriving expecting your house to look perfect. I am just trying to figure out when I will have time to clean it.

If you’re into Black Friday Sales you probably have: Kids, Inlaws, Someone staying with you over the holidays or a million christmas lights on your house and lawn. You probably live near a large metro area or in a city that has big box stores.

If you’re not you may be a: College Student, Single Guy or Girl or just not have kids. You probably don’t get into the decorating thing either. Someone else in the family probably hosts all the events and you get more sleep per night than they do per week.

A side note: It has also been reported that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving has become the second most crowded night in bars in the year. This used to be a big binge night for College students becasue they didn’t have class the next day and would be back home with all their old friends to meet up and hang out. It is interesting that it has flowed into the single people at older ages category and possibly others also. Maybe they drink because they know what is coming?

WebTrends won’t export data, what’s wrong?

I thought I would share another WebTrends Analytics morsel of information since it is so hard to find information about this analytics software that is quick and concise.

Today I was working from home and our self hosted software would not let me download the WebTrends reports that a client requested. It would abort the process and return to the login landing page each time.

We’re using WebTrends self hosted 8.1 software (not the most recent, yet still solid) and we found that WebTrends 8.1 does not play well with Internet Exporer 8.

We found that if I ran my browser in standard IE8 settings it would not export data and the popup of data processing screen was supressed and the system couldn’t complete the request.

There is a setting in the IE8 browser though that is called “compatibility view” that fixes this problem. Just set it to run in compatibility mode for the data site or all sites if you want and your analytics data is available for download again.

On another note, our recently update McAfee security and virus protection software is also blocking the javascript prompted popup window where the data is usually exported and I can’t download any data at work anymore either. We haven’t found a solution to this problem because the security settings get reset to the standard again when the system finds that the administrator has changed them, usually within a 1/2 hour. No word on if the powers that be would make an exception for my computer somehow or if our maintenance systems even allow that.  

It’s going to be a fun month.

What Should TopGear do about the Stig? get a new one?

We all know by now that the TopGear white Stig has written a book and revealed his long kept secret identity. How could he do this? (maybe I will find out when the book arrives)

The Stig was a great character that adds a lot of life to the show, although he doesn’t publicly get acknowledged for his work. (Maybe that is what he needed?) Still, his mysterious identity was the way that fans related to him. Nobody wanted to be like the Stig when he was jokingly shown as Michael Schumacher. That is just way too intimidating. And keeping the role anonymous also kept racing enthusiasts from arguing over the bias/skills that he has because of the driver’s specific experience. It was pure genius for the show and the robotic slightly alien personality they adopted for the Stig over time really brought a comedic element to the show also. (anyone remember the stig’s credit card or how he used it?) 

I’m not sure what the answer is to this question. Mr Ben Collins has lost the best gig he has had yet and now they have to reinvent the Stig in a new form because Jeremy Clarkson has said that Ben was fired for this breach of confidentiality and contract with the BBC.

Does this mean there will be a Blue Stig? Or other colors and shapes and sizes? Or will they bring real race car drivers into the show as regular presenters? I think Tanner Faust is a good example of why not. Race car drivers tend to be emotionless trash talking robots. Look at Tanner and Paul Tracy in that car crash of a show they have on cable. It’s painful because there is no real-person-experiencing-the-car type element that people can identify with and the guys seem a bit wooden on camera. So, I don’t recommend bringing in more race car drivers in as hosts.

Maybe the stig can be reinvented in an interesting way. Maybe there is a recall and they can get another Stig sent from the factory? Maybe borrow the Stig’s Fat American Cousin for a while? Maybe recruit new stigs and make it a competition between the different colored race suited Stigs? Maybe there is a story behind how each stig is born or made that can be amusing to us all. Or a school full of little Stigs running around to recruit from in the coming years? Or can they get a local car rental place to rent a stig with the VW Rabbit for a slight upcharge? This is the joy of writing for characters like this, you can just make it all up as it comes, and that has made it quirky and interesting for the last 10 years or so.

Some people may want them to get someone like Sabine in there (as herself), which could be interesting, but even she isn’t the same element to the show and she likes to trash talk too much. I don’t understand what that adds to a show. They could very well hire a driver to “play a robot/alien guy driver character” with their face shown but acting isn’t really what race car drivers are known for.  They could turn ridiculous and audition a bunch of other people in bear suits, or whatever but thats kind of jumping the shark. Maybe they could recruit one of the guys from Clarkson Island?

Anyway, back to reality. I really liked the impartial comparison of each car by this independent yet authoritative source in the show. I really liked it being anonymous and I also think the story/character adds a lot of fun. I’m not sure what Jeremy Clarkson & team have up their sleeves but I hope its good because he has 350 million people waiting on this decision.  This is the most universally popular show in the world because of how it represents people’s love affair with cars and irreverence about conventions. It’s the biggest thing to come from the UK since Monty Python in the irreverence department and we would like more please.  Whatever they do, they may want to consider a higher salary for the role or just pick a new stig every year. I’m sure that if the show ends they would be able to reveal this info since it wouldn’t be necessary anymore and have  Stig reunion episode or something.

 Update:  Maybe TopGear should hire Daft Punk as the next stigs, have one drive and the other with a digital mixing board making music during the test drives? They’ve already got the right wardrobe.

WebTrends Email Stats Reports How To Setup

I love that WebTrends is a good solid web analytics reporting solution, but I really find the setup process for just about anything with this system to be very confusing and lengthy. I’m sure there is a reason for this (could be data integrity processes or cost savings) but I really just need a step by step list when I need to get something done quickly and someone to tell me where these oddball parts of the process exist. Therefore I’m writing a list to explain this process so I have it written down and other people can find this info too.

(technical note I’m using webtrends software 8.1, not the webtrends hosted solution)

Today the task at hand is setting up automated reports of webtrends data to be sent monthly by email. The duration of the data collected and the frequency of the reporting schedule are both flexible, it can be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly.

The first step is to go to the administration menu from your login. There go to Report Designer and Templates. You can select one of their templates, I needed to create a new one.

Then name your template. Go to next, select the content by adding (and naming) a new chapter, then adding content to that chapter from the add report link on the menu above. Select the “built in report” list from the drop down to get the standard metrics available in webtrends. Check the boxes of the metrics you want included, I would say 4-8 per report is enough before you have too much data for someone to really use. You can make changes to the layout, although I was not looking for that level of detail now.

Click next at the bottom of the page. Then you have some configuration settings, like for wrapping text lines on long urls (ok) and how many rows of data in the reports (20-50 max for readability, top 5 is good).

Click next again and give profiles access to this report. I noticed mine are already given universal access and grey-ed out so nothing much to do with this screen. Then click save.

Next you then go back to the profiles list (admin menu and web analysis and reports & profiles) and edit the profile you want to get this report to add the report to the profile. This is one of those steps I think is redundant and should be automated or brought into the setup process before this because its confusing. You wave over the profile in the list (don’t click it) and get a menu with “actions” and edit is one of them.

From there go to reports in the top menu and on the drop down go to report templates. Click the box by your report to select it, ignore the second checkbox that is labeled default because it will change the default reporting style in the profile to this new report, and that isn’t the intention here.

Then go back to the admin menu a third time and to the scheduler menu (bottom) and then schedule jobs and click the button for a new job. This is the email setup part. Under job type select scheduled report and follow through the pieces of menu from left to right as you fill out each section. First select your profile you want reported on, next give the report a name and assign it to a user (yourself). (note this is also how to disable the emails with the check box below, no idea why this is hidden here). Report type: general report. Output type can me a database, pdf, excel/csv or pdf. I chose pdf because it looks professional and we don’t have to install Microsoft office/word on the server in order to export it. Its the only option that does not require that except the database. Number of data rows to report is up to you, I usually do top 20.

Next add the report destinations, this is where you need the email info. Add your email as the from, add theirs as the to address. Also, cc yourself on these reports so you get them too. Add the SMTP server address (if you don’t have the SMTP address it will hold up all of your other scheduled jobs, so don’t set this up without it.) So, the software knows where to connect to send it from. (contact IT about this if you don’t have it) You can also FTP it if you like your data that way, or save to a folder on the server. (not as exec friendly though) 

Under templates, complete view is ok. Under reports, here you select the reports you want to include. These are a duplicate of the ones you selected above, maybe redundant but this is literally the process we took on the phone with the WebTrends helpdesk people. Report type: standard again, date range: its up to you. Scheduling is next on the menu, you can’t run it on the 1st of the month because data may not have compiled yet in all time zones so the 2nd of the month is the first you can run a monthly report with the most recent previous month’s data. Ditto lag time for dailies, weeklies etc. Run once or run weekly/monthly/daily, as you choose.

The host binding section he literally told me to ignore. So I have no idea what that means. Then you get a summary page at the end and click save.

You just wait now and see if everything gets delivered correctly. It is good that the report is only generated once per month on the date you specify as a job that processes, so it can run data in the past (vs only from the point you created the report, forward like custom reports do because they create their own database table) and it won’t clog up your processing queue with a lot of memory/processing because it’s just once.

I wish there were short concise directions for setting up webtrends email reports like this on the web already but I realize that nothing is easy or self explanatory with database systems or webtrends. It’s just part of the territory until next generation tools come around, and no I don’t mean Google Analytics (which is almost as confusing now to beginners). Someday this has to get simpler in process so more people can use it.

Top 5 Web Analytics Metrics

I’ve been working with (Google/WebTrends/Omniture) Analytics data for 4 years now and the requests for Analytics data usually come in 2 styles.

1. The super basic: just tell me my site is still running, whatever everyone else looks at.

2. The super detailed auditors: tell me each of 180 customer segment’s data sliced and diced 10 ways and the month to month change, YOY change and a dozen other things the software doesn’t calculate for you. This could take months to implement and most of the time they have lost interest in it by the time you get it working properly.

I get frustrated with both. The super simple manager needs to look at more than just visits from month to month. The uber detailed guy needs to hire a developer to implement all that and not make changes each month to how they want data tracked and processed because all the time is spent on implementation and none on analysis and most of the time nobody even looks at all the 180 segments of reports.

They also need to realize that all the systems take the data and summarize it or cut off tracking at a max number of log files, web pages or analysis processes to maintain the integrity and size of the database tables. Try and do a full audit of every page view and click and you will crash WebTrends and re-processing it can take months. Google Analytics doesn’t even give you options to do more than what they summarize. Omniture really tries, but its a slow slow process.

Instead I am supporting the idea that web analytics data is really about trends and not audits. These numbers will never match your server logs perfectly nor your clicks from campaigns and that is OK. I also have listed here 5 metrics to look at and why they are important for your online site. One caveat is that I do not work for an e-commerce website so that has not been our focus. The focus is on conversion to application for recruitment purposes for companies. 

1. Visits - yes month over month traffic is important. What is more important is to look at the difference in traffic and drill down into what gained or lost traffic in the way of pages/content on the site and what sources changed in their contribution of the total traffic. This is actionable where as just visits aren’t. Also check back with the costs for each of these budget areas and compare the cost per visit provided by each.

2. Referrers - in a nutshell you should know how much traffic is coming from search, direct and your advertising/marketing plans online and offline. Within those groups you can drill down further but the direct category is always problematic because many analytics packages track page pop-up forms as new visits as well as returning to the site after a conversion process. Also remember that a session is usually 30 min, after that its reset as new.

3. Implementation - no this isn’t a metric but it is a focus you should have on a monthly basis to make sure new sites, pages get tracking added, new campaigns get tracked and that you keep researching new technology developments with your analytics package that may change everything. Having a good web developer along that has access to the servers and can make these changes is key if you’re not a developer (and no developers don’t make good analysts, a best case scenario is a dynamic duo where they are paired up and both work on projects together and learn from eachother) and the helpdesk type services available through Google are non-existent so good luck there interpreting the overly simplified online tutorials that don’t match what your clients want or answer your client’s specific needs/questions. WebTrends and Omniture are slightly better with web support but they expect you to pay a lot for it. A good independent consultant may be the fastest most reliable way to go here.

4. What people search for on your site. This can be tricky to implement but if you get this data it can be very telling. if people can’t find something on your site and search for it, you get a window into what they were thinking. this may tell you that the content you have isn’t what they want or that it isn’t as navigable as you thought. New product ideas also come from this data.

5. Where people exit from your site. This is classic application drop off analysis within any online linear process. But guess what? People don’t always think linear-ly. Expect some of this data to drop off in chunks but a small amount to drop off at all points for unknown reasons.  Its more actionable to focus on the large chunks and look at each page and the click maps for them but sometimes only so much optimization is possible here without doing real life usability testing with 5-10 people.

I’m sure there are more things that people can look into with geographic data and time on site but sometimes I think those are less actionable because you have little control over where your ads run because geo-targeting doesn’t always work well (excluding more than it includes) and time on site can be good or bad at short and long times. The content/pages that are popular on your site are also important but this is one of those custom setups that each division will need tracking by their geo-location and they never admit that so much traffic cross pollinated from each other’s campaigns. You have to read into the specific needs of your client to see if these apply and how to evaluate them without over complicating the reports. I really believe you should look at 5 key metrics or less in a report, more than that is not actionable and is distracting from your purpose/process of improvement. 

There is also a difference between researching a question/metric once, and doing it monthly when it never changes. I don’t believe its a good use of time to report on time on site if its been consistent month over month for the last 2 years. Check in once a year and leave the other data to be reported monthly, save the analyst’s energy for the new questions that need answering and trust your site.

What else do you think is applicable? Any feedback?

The Negatives of Social Networking Media

All the world is a Buzz about Facebook & Twitter these days. It’s almost like MySpace circa 2007, Google circa 2003 or Microsoft circa 1998. I don’t doubt the success, innovation or long-term viability of these social networking sites but I have seen that there are flaws in the system that mean that things won’t be perfect with the business along the way and we’re in for a bumpy road. Basically my point is that for all these sites give us in entertainment, social connections and opportunity they also have some negatives that are almost the equal and opposite pendulum action.

1. Time Suck – all social networking sites are using your time that you used to devote to other things. Maybe in some cases this is actually a better use of your time (instead of TV) but in most cases its time spent that you used to use for researching new information for work projects,  time actually spent talking with people in person (family/friends) or time spent doing things that really need to be done at work or home. Once the brain gets trained that you can go socialize instead of work at those times of day it’s a habit extremely hard to break. For all of us procrastinators looking for instant gratification its a real problem keeping up with work and affects the overall productivity of companies and the country as a whole. Internet access is much more prevalent and has far more users during the business day than it does at night, so there’s the proof. Unless your job is trolling these sites for sales prospects by “connecting” and making “relationships” with your customers, its a waste of time to spend more than 15 min a day.

2. Privacy – Of all the details analyzed about consumer privacy online (on Facebook) in the last few weeks the most suprising thing I’ve seen is that people really don’t care about their information online. Sure, nobody is going to post a ss number or cc number on their profile (duh) but they don’t really seem to realize the power of logging all their social interactions in one database and selling access to retailers and cpg companies who have even larger databases of information to analyze and strategize with. Is it really as fun when most of your friends are companies selling you things all the time? Twitter already has morphed into the largest opt in direct marketing platform I’ve ever seen. If people keep using it at this rate it will surpass email. The other obvious issues come with the work life balance thing and when people friend work makes and think nobody will see them rant about work or post drunk pictures on a sick day, but then again I’ve heard that its just people naturally selecting themselves out of the working pool.

3. Logic – the other issues I’ve seen coming for a while have to do with how everything that is built from large databases online with lots of consumer data seems to not work properly. There is always some algorithm developed by a science tech guy based on some theoretical calculus and it doesn’t provide relevant results. Which brings me to a repeating theme of data right now: we don’t really know what to do with it yet. Nobody knows enough real info about their customers to target them. (who has a budget for that?) And the database people just like to say they improved things a statistically insignificant amount with an algorithm tweak. The marketing strategy/process should always start with offline real life information about people and products and then develop an algorithm to show you information in that way. I don’t know why it’s always done backwards but it will keep our results irrelevant and marketing dollars wasted for a long time to come.

Bounce Rates on Google Analytics

I was just discussing what Bounce Rates were in Google Analytics and thought this could be a potentially confusing term and would be helpful to blog about. I also work with WebTrends .

We have a client that has a site with us that had a high bounce rate and a high exit rate. (50% for some pages) Anything above 20% would be something worth looking into in my opinion, but the differences change depending on the site, product, sales process and design so everyone has their owne level of normal as a benchmark and you try and improve from there.

They wondered if this Bounce Rate was an issue, as many clients would.

The thing is, it may not be an issue to have a high Bounce Rate because if people land on a product description page and then click to buy (or in our case, apply) is this really bad?

Well the qualifier for a Bounce Rate is that they viewed that one page and left. This does not include someone clicking on a link on the page to buy/apply. That would be an exit. They would not have viewed any other page on the site or interacted (clicked) anything else either. This bounce would be from hitting the back button or clicking the x button on the browser.

Exits from the site are considered people who have viewed more than one page and finished their visit. They may click to apply/buy or they may x-out of the window or they may reload the home page. (just a few of many examples) One tricky thing is when someone gets a site that launches a new window for a page you click on. That is typically an exit and new site visit. 

So, is this good or bad? For this client I think it is ok, because they are very stringent about who they are looking to hire and when people see the extensive requirements I am pretty sure most people would realize whether they had a shot at the job or not very quickly and either click forwards in the path to apply (on an Applicant Tracking System application site, (don’t ask, too many sites linked with too many processes)) or back out. It is very straight forward and very few other options are on the page.

How do you reduce bounce rates?

I never hear people talk about strategies to get more qualified traffic to these pages, I just hear about providing more info on the page to help them convert. That is a great strategy and if you can link exact search terms to the appropriate products/jobs with a page designed for one clear desired action then you are doing well. If you can suggest other related alternatives on the same page, maybe on the right sidebar, you are doing even better. If you have an email sign-up that says, not what you are looking for? Sign up here and we’ll email you when new ones come up. Great. But if you have a lot of traffic bouncing even then, you may want to look at the source. What words are your pages optimized for and why do those keywords not match what you’re providing or asking people to do? Maybe search is also not the right medium to find people based on the Google Insights search volume for that term and you are getting similar searches/clicks but not for what you offer. Maybe reel in the search efforts and go for more qualified means of finding these specific people like email, targeted display ads (by content/interest, behavior or location) or offline communication. (gasp!)

Remember Google Analytics (or any analytics package) is not just about a bunch of numbers and bunk. If you can’t figure out what the human behavior is behind the numbers or what the actual user/customer wants they don’t mean much of anything except that your site is up and running.

Ways Google Has Changed Media Consumption Behaviors

I was glancing at Google Fast Flip today and it struck me that they have been successful not only in providing what people want but in some ways changing human media consumption behavior.

We all know that Google has turned the media world upside down with the humble text ad because of it’s ad matching relevance and pay-per-click business model.

They have up-ended the rest of the media world because they have influenced people to stop using it. This may be completely un-intentional, but I think it has happened.

The obvious way is that Google has  gained brand preference as a reference tool and a information source on limitless topics. But there is another behavior that they have changed is not usually talked about.

This change in how people consume information is that they can scan headlines now and glean what has happened in the world without actually viewing the ads around the content. (or visiting the content site, via rss, email, search engine, aggregator or google news) This has been bad for online ad inventory (although some may say we need less inventory to drive up prices, not more) and worse for recouping the cost of producing the content.

I don’t think that Google is stealing anything like copyrighted material by linking headlines from Google News, the search engine or screen shots Google Fast Flip. That would be like saying you are stealing copyrighted material by cutting out an article about a local festival coming up and posting it on the break room bulletin board for your coworkers to see.

I do think there does need to be revenue sharing for content sharing on some level though. How this should come about, I haven’t the slightest clue yet. And it can’t happen in the search engine because it seems to vast to fully comprehend let alone orchestrate.

I do think Google wants to be in the media business without actually producing any content, and they don’t usually ask for exclusivity with that content. Google wants to provide more products for consumer use and consumption of information branded offline. If they offer basic content for free on these product/services and upgraded content for a fee they should share the fee with the content providers. The rates may depend on usage and of course demand, and they will probably always be in flux. (no more rate card anything)

Yet I think it’s important that these shared fees (content payments) should be as low as Adsense revenue share since Adsense revenue is largely regarded as welfare for website owners. It needs to be enough to incentivize content providers to really feel like Google is a partner in their business and devoted to a positive business relationship.

The alternative may be that someday you have to pay a large content creator to crawl its site and republish parts of the content. Yes sharing is good, but if the content borrower doesn’t bring in enough revenue (analytics can tell you if your google news readers view, click or buy things) then is it profitable to be hosting the traffic from that source? (yes, hosting costs a ton of money for large content sites) I guess everyone thought they could replace millions of dollars in branding with a simple search engine relevance project and all their traffic generation problems would be solved. It’s never that easy. You have to own the relationship with your customer, you can’t outsource that to Google or anyone else.

Trust is also one of the BIG hurdles Google has to overcome to really being a star in the B2B space. Google has always believed that any process can be automated by a computer and nobody needs to talk to a human because humans are either too expensive or busy engineering things. This seems to enrage some humans, mostly the ones that run large companies. Also, No customer service and No sales people that can actually answer your questions along with ridiculous inflated PPC rates have actually eroded their text ad client base in the last 2-3 years. (and that whole display thing isn’t really looking great for ROI either when you consider people under 30 don’t respond to them at all)

So, in order for Google to really keep that growth going, they need to compensate content creators when re-publishing their content on/in their branded products in the future or the content creators with the greatest authority won’t be there for very long. Yes, some laid-off journalists are blogging but in 20 years how many will be left doing any journalism at all if it doesn’t pay and very few newspapers exist?

I also think all businesses need to stop every few months and think about the future. We’re too busy overloaded with tasks from laid off coworkers to really do this, but in a profitable world we would make time to consider where things are going in 3,6,12 and 24 months out (not a swat analysis, those take too long and are somewhat cumbersome) and really think about what they think the business should be doing to compete and win and innovate.

Why I dislike Large Blogs

I love blogs. I have been blogging since 2002 when my friend Mugsy emailed me and told me to sign up for LiveJournal. A lot has changed about blogging since then, but the revolutionary idea that if you can type, you can publish easily in a word-processing-like interface on the internet has not. The method of blogging to share knowledge by and for non-programming type people is still spreading to the corners of the globe and helping people’s voices be heard in ways we never thought possible.

At the same time I am growing more frustrated with the technorati and the overload of emails, posts, rss feeds and spam arriving on my accounts daily. I am trying my best to stay on top of the active topics in  the  user generated content world as it has forked into many roads that include blogging, social networking, social ads, microblogging and a whole host of a million little startups with other concepts they want to share with the world. (more than can be kept up with or can survive even if they do all innovate)

I have had to scale back my online content consumption several times over the years when it was in danger of taking over my life and all my time. But lately this getting married thing has taken a large chunk of time out of my life too, (even after the wedding) and as a result I am trying to glean all my updates and news knowledge into smaller and smaller bits of time. (apparently being married means I have to do work around the house and spend a lot of time trying to motivate my husband to stop watching hours of TV and do things around the house. Life just got more complicated and we have to learn how to cook, fix things, do laundry and empty the cat-poop-box with much larger quantities now). My work is also very busy (analytics and metrics seem to go nuts in recessions) and no spare time is to be had anywhere in the schedule.

Therefore, I have gone through many iterations of un-subscribe weeks in my email boxes and cut back drastically on email newsletters, of which once I found very enlightening. Most marketing/advertising/analytics/metrics/SEO/SEM email newsletters  these days aren’t as willing to share any real actionable info without you spending a lot of $ so out they go.

I tried to update myself by trying an RSS reader again (3rd try) and I think its been a few months but I am overwhelmed by that too. Its way to easy to get more than 1,000 unread items in the reader and when it doesn’t tell me the exact number anymore I am less motivated to tackle it because it seems impossible.

I have found Google Reader to be good for sunday afternoon fun feed reading and more personal fun  topics/blogs though. Home design is a great topic in the reader since you really have to see it all to learn.

On the other hand I am re-subscribing to some email newsletters and just un-subscribing altogether to others who insist on posting 30-50 items per day! (assholes!) How is one person supposed to read that many posts per blog per day? It’s impossible and on some level, rude.

I know why they do this. It is partially a play to keep new items being published every few hours to keep the Internet addicts coming back for more traffic and it is also a play for search engine dominance by having more content in the engine for every possible term than anyone else. These teams of writers churn out mostly regurgitated posts about content repurposed from other blogs without much new insight. Some do deliver genuine news and content you can use but scanning through 50 posts is way slower than scanning 5 emails. The content and pics seem to load soooo sloooowly and an email you read, scan and go to what you want quickly. Big offenders of this are ReadWriteWeb (on volume and not separating feeds), Silicon Valley Insider (regurgitating and trying to predict the future even though they’re usually wrong), SEO Roundtable, Apartment Therapy (OMG, holy re-post everyone elses content and fill up with summary posts daily to waste everyones time, generate page views and sell ads), Jalopnik (jebus stop showing us every detail of the 24 hours of Lemons in every city across the country and asking us what our favorite imaginary dream car in a movie with Bruce Willis: waste of space, use summary feeds please! On a cable bandwidth line it takes forever to load all these damn images!) and Media Post (phhbbtt). ALL THESE BLOGS have been banned from my RSS Reader. Some have been demoted to email updates but others are just gone.

Also, I’m not programmed to think to go see my rss feeds yet either so I often forget about them for several days after a good several hour scanning session finally getting the numbers down to below 200 new items. then I return the next time to see 1,000+ again and feel defeated. In contrast I have OCD about keeping a clean email box, and completely forget about facebook until I am completely bored. I guess that is a sign of my age bracket. (34)

I wish that this spammy fluf put out there to fill space could be eliminated. I also wish that these blogs would split their feeds into sections so you would be able to just get the posts you were interested in. Like if new original content and re-purposed other people’s content were separated in 2 feeds, it would be a big help.

I would also recommend that they stop doing summary posts. They piss me off. I wait a minute or 2 for something to load in the darn reader only to see its the same posts from the local editions of the same blog.  Poo, if that happens 15 times in a day I could have spent that time sleeping and then I’m annoyed. 

These blogs also do this because they are in some get-rich-quick rush to make money as a profitable business before Google figures it out and bans them or something. Yes, blogs have an elitism to them that says, duh, if I can make a slice of the money publishing from what the Tribune used to, I am going to do this as fast and as hard as I can. And it over saturates the web with watered down content that is just filler mostly, even if it does increase ad impressions and some adsense revenue if you’re into web-welfare payments.

I also would like to recommend that if you want to start a blog you keep the posts to no more than 2-3 a day and resist the urge to just regurgitate other people’s posts and link to them saying how great they are. Research things you are really interested in and share your own unique experiences. Any web-bot can be an aggregator, what we need more of is real people sharing experiences and knowledge to make social media stick and not die out because of spam/splogs and info-overload. It is these people who become trusted advisors and get the visitors who come back again and again.

And this is also better for the rest of us who have to go clean the cat-poop-box and have a life offline now that they are married.

Update 10/29/09

http://scobleizer.posterous.com/why-i-dont-use-google-reader-anymore

I guess Robert Scoble agrees with me to a point, though he blames Google Reader for a bad format and experience and not the blog owners for copious amounts of useless content hiding the good stuff. I guess there is always room for improvement and certain people discover it before others depending on how they use the info/product.

Update 11/5/09

How much content is too much content? Read Write Web chronicles these mega content sites and their race to populate the web all by themselves by posting 200+ posts per day. We should call it the Answers.com business model.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_age_of_mega_content_sites.php