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.

Predictions for the next 10 years

Back in 1999 I went to a conference at the Field Museum in Chicago called The Next 20 Years (sponsored by ZDNet, I still have the button that says Believe in Technology).

Now that we’re rolling over the odometer to 2010 I can honestly say that none of the predictions about string theory have come true.

It was an interesting idea though, to think about what is possible now and in the future and speculate in ways that may inspire people to do more, make things better and improve life.

I have been thinking a lot about this decade ending in the last few weeks and aside from an obvious comment about how blindingly fast it went by, I’m skipping the recap and these are some thoughts for the next ten to twenty years.

Disclaimer: These are just my ideas as one person, who analyzes things for a living, and I don’t have a lot of data to prove any of it. Take it with a grain of salt or as entertainment only.

1. Photo Recognition will be big. And I am not talking about face recognition software. But with smartphones we mostly have decent cameras at our disposal that are connected to the internet 24/7. I have been thinking I’d like to be able to redeem the coke-points my husband collects by snapping a picture of the cap rather than entering the number on a form online (boring and slow). This is the exact stuff that QR code readers are used for that work for UPS tracking and a whole bunch of other applications. Expect them to be used as the new coupons, contests, offline-online gaming and a whole bunch of other stuff. Then maybe by the time all that is common place facial recognition of images will be working online.

2. You will probably work in an industry that does not exist yet. Continuing education is a must. I say this because my life is an example. I work in Online Marketing and data tracking for ad agencies and this didn’t exist as a job or a technology available to most companies in 1999. I have to make sure I spend time learning on the job and off the job each year because things change a lot. This does not make having a family easy and we have no idea if we will do that as a result, but it means that you have to be curious about new stuff and be willing to investigate it and you may end up the local expert when you’re the only one with that knowledge. And learn a lot of math.

3. Taxes will go up. All this BS about lowering taxes to stimulate business and rich people spending will go away since we can’t fund the programs required, can’t borrow any more as a government and we would still have the lowest taxes for those rich people to pay when compared to other developed economies. Interest rates and inflation may follow, and of course oil prices crunching a lot of people out of the middle class. Someone will finally do the math proving that investment in hiring new people at a company and creating jobs is inversely related to lowering taxes on the rich and everyone else.

4. There will be a whole new batch of media mavens that we listen to and we will like them because they are curators not experts. No one person will be able to create enough content or be syndicated to as many channels, mediums and messages as would be possible in this fragmented media world. The people you will look to for advice are blogging now, looking at thousands of sources of information, knowing how to process it, evaluate what is good-bad-meaningless and just filter down to the good stuff. We need people like this because the big media push to produce new stuff 24/7/365 is too much for one person to go through and we all still have jobs/families/houses to attend to. And not everyone wants to spend every day plugged into a screen reading constantly. We just want those wow, aha moments. Eventually maybe this 1000 cable channels, commercials every 10 minutes, 100 blog posts a day, constant content model will streamline due to lack of popularity of most of it (no ROI) but as there is more digital space available someone will put something on it, with no guarantee of quality because people seem to randomly stumble upon things still and listen/watch/interact with amusement/laziness/procrastination of their day job. 

5. Expect more digital sensors everywhere. And this could mean in our clothing, in our fridges, on the roads, in our homes. There is a lot of bandwidth for transmitting data and ways are improving for processing data and analyzing it (without human intervention, or programming needed). I foresee more real-time data on traffic and alternate routes in my car guided by my voice requests (like Knight Rider’s Kit?). I foresee clothing measuring weight and texting me that I shouldn’t eat any more calories today. I foresee my fridge telling me the milk has gone bad again and there is a cracked egg leaking all over it. We may spend all day responding to automated messages. These may be an upgrade fee kind of thing but I think at some point the regular cost will include it because the data will be so valuable and targetable for marketers. The recent privacy discussions prove that people are becoming more aware of ad tracking as well as digital capabilities and the younger generations don’t want to go back to a time without it. But we do need better security options for this to work or an opt in policy for managing what companies know and how we want to get/share/target this info.

6. We’re going to get a whole lot more competition from China, South America and Africa for jobs. Companies are going there for operations now and not just to supply their own regions with goods and services. All the Bill & Melinda Gates (plus Oprah, Warren Buffet & That Facebook guy too) funding health/education programs in Africa will create a continent of healthy people who have jobs that used to be here related to their natural resources and possibly other areas as well. China will continue to be a leader in growth and the US needs to define itself. I always wonder why there is such an emphasis on making sure all the other countries have the help they need to solve their problems by these foundations and not the ones with people starving/not getting educated or employed in the USA. Also Immigration, population growth and birth rates in the US will all drop by 2020. (based on what I saw from the census in 2010)

7. The market will continue to be tumultuous. Up, down, sideways. It isn’t connected to real people or the economy as we know it anymore. We’re not sure how to gauge it or if it will make any positive growth in 10 years. With higher interest rates in 2012-2013 CDs may be the hot investment again.

That is it for now, but I may have more ideas later. One thing is for sure, let’s get out there and party like it’s 1999.

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.

Last Day At Job Checklist for Work

Today is my last day at the company I work for. I have a new job starting next Tuesday that took 6 months to find. I’m excited to be moving into a cool new job but there are loose ends to tie up here first. This made me think about the process that we use to exit jobs that aren’t because of a layoff or a company shutting down (these take much longer). These are the things I’ve been doing that I realized weren’t things I had thought about before:

1. Distribute the knowledge – I’ve spent all week training people on what it is that I mysteriously do to create the reports I have been doing over the last 4.5 years. Also training a new person this week on how to do analysis from scratch has been a large chunk of the time spent.

2. Clean out personal stuff – I took home all my personal stuff yesterday and then I have today to look over things again in case I missed anything.

3. Distribute valuables – in a controlled economy like the office, good monitors, good chairs and the nick knacks that amuse us are all in limited supply. Distribute these items to those who have been gracious to you over the years and could genuinely use them.

4. Summary Goodbye email – say something witty and genuine to the office or department and leave your contact info for them if they need it.

5. Tie up all paperwork – COBRA insurance paperwork comes in the mail but they may need a paper copy of  your resignation letter with a signature to officially process things. Check when your health insurance ends, mine goes through the end of the month if I don’t opt for COBRA although I probably will until I’m sure that the new insurance will be set up and active. 401K’s can stay put, this one doesn’t charge to stay in the plan so I’m keeping it where it is at the moment.

6. Take any last pictures if you want to remember it. I have a view of Chicago from the 31st floor so I took a lot of pictures.

7. Go out drinking one last time with the gang. And take pictures.

Did I miss anything?

I’m sad that I’m loosing my view of the beautiful yet grizzly city. I’m sad I’m going to miss some great people. I am also dissapointed that I am loosing my great insurance.

I’m happy I’m moving to a manager role. I’m happy to jump into new projects. I’m happy to delve into consumer marketing after 10 years with recruitment marketing and media. I’m happy to never do data entry again or see another media matrix. I’m happy to learn more about webtrends and do more SEM work again. I’m happy to cut my commute time in half, gain my NPR back in the mornings and never ride a diesel fume filled METRA train again.

As you can see the positives out weigh the negatives. So, I’ll be blogging from a much lower altitude in OPRF as of next week.

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.

Blog Template Redesign

I just noticed that WordPress had some new template CSS designs available and I decided to update around here a bit. I hope you like this clean white bright design from their library of options, I thought it looked cool.

I am in a bit of a blog catch up month since the wedding is past and work is now the crazy part of my life. I hope that by month’s end (Aug 09) I will be updating my collection of blogs more than once a week. (each!) I know its a challenge but I really enjoy how different Blogging is than my regular day job in data analysis of online advertising. Sure numbers are cool, but sometimes you need a break from all the format requests for millions of little excel tables in minuscule fonts. (that are of course needed all on the same day and only with 24 hours notice or less).

All in all I am tired, but blogging still excites me and I am happy to have a job in the current market, even though I get frustrated just like everyone else at some point. So, I will hopefully be more active on the Protagonist5 blog again soon.

ps- Why does WordPress come up as a mis-spelled word in the spellcheck of the WordPress.com editor?

Can ordinary people manage the risk in the stock market for their retirement?

I am beginning to think there is no way an average American can invest in the market and make any money for their retirement in a 401K. I was reading this morning that 5 and 10 year returns in the portfolios of most mutual funds are negative now when they calculated in the huge losses from recessions in 2001 and 2008 and the beginning of 2009. (Q1 hasn’t been kind) 

As an investor (for my 401K) I look at that and say: yuck! Why would I put my money in something that has no long term value?

My fiance sent me this article saying that now 20 and 30 years are the benchmarks for best overall performance in mutual funds and stocks in the market. Yikes! 20-30 years? Who has that much time before retirement? Who can invest for that long anyway?

When you consider that most people’s salary starts dropping when they reach their 50′s (because employers don’t value old employees and can’t spend time/money updating their skills) you really have 25 years max to work with as far as investments for retirement.

You start your first real paying job with a 401K at age 25 and you may not be fully employable by age 50 although you will likely live to the age of 80 or 90.  There’s your 25 years to save and invest for 30-50 years of retirement.

I also think there is something else going on here affecting the 20-30 year market profit numbers. The US Markets benefited from a long term technology/innovation and growth curve from WWII to the 1980s. Personally, I think that was a one time deal and we will never see that kind of long term prosperity again.

Why? 1. Because we don’t understand enough about technology to innovate on that level again to create that much growth. 2. Because the US has higher paid workers than anywhere else in the world and everything gets manufactured and produced (and serviced) somewhere else. 3. Because we’re too complacent and have too much entitlement as a country of workers. Work creates wealth, not shell games with securities.

That brings up another point: We’ve been playing a shell game with our economy since the 1980′s. De-regulate, re-regulate, stimulus, fix, fund, trade, outsource, sell, leverage, whatever… It’s all a shell game to us worker bees and the internet has been the only significant improvement in technology to create new industries and jobs in the last 20 years. We need more than that to survive and prosper as a nation and a world.

I don’t know about you but I can’t stand to take that much risk with my money. I have some in a 401K but mostly my retirement is locked in a 5 year CD IRA at 5.25% that was a promotion this fall when banks wanted more cash reserves. I changed companies in 2006 and rolled over the old 401K to a bank in 2007 because I knew the 10 year recession was coming soon and I didn’t want to risk timing it.

There will always be people who game the market and come out ahead, but those of us without finance degrees, huge money to invest in undervalued markets or inside scoops will never really profit on the whole. Many of us will get out exactly what we put in and maybe less considering our lack of  investment prowess. So, in that level of risky why not just put it in the bank? Positive 3-5% sounds a lot better than negative 40%.

I hate the inflation argument that says that 3-5% isn’t enough to make money after inflation. Guess what? Inflation has been very low and inflation doesn’t stop when you have negative returns either. I’d rather have some money dependably than none at all when prices are higher. 

You may be asking why I want more innovation and less investment in the market? Doesn’t investment in the market lead to more innovation?

NO. Most of the mutual finds and stocks you can buy that are highly rated are in huge old (one trick pony) risk averse companies that have already peaked and can’t figure out how to do anything new. They sell shares to raise cash and then have old people make decisions like the old days. Venture Capital,  new small businesses and Universities are the place where innovation happens. If I could invest in those, I would. But then again I don’t have millions of dollars and apparently I won’t any time soon.

What are the best proven ways to fund your retirement and create wealth then?

1. Have a side job for extra income you can save (part-time weekends or evenings a few nights a week)

2. Own rental property for extra income (you need to live near it for this to work)

3. Have fewer kids if you’re contemplating having a family (ok we don’t always control this, and we love kids, but nobody is going to debate that they are expensive) 

4. Own a smaller home (smaller mortgage = smaller amount in interest paid (lost) to the bank)

5. Don’t go into debt on credit cards or car loans (hello! 25% interest, MONTHLY! on some cards)

6. Live frugally generally, keep your cars 10 years, don’t buy new clothes every month and don’t buy big ticket items like TVs and Computers every few years. Spread out the expenses over the long term.

7. Share what you have with others. Seriously, knowledge, help with projects, donating time and donating items you no longer need, as well as hand me downs between families help kids and neighbors live better within their means and help the community live better too.

8. Take care of your health. Eat less junk, lower fat, lower salt, lower carbs. Exercise daily. Take vitamins. Don’t work in an industry that has a side effect of cancer. Visit the doctor regularly and if something comes up treat it early, it will cost so much less in the long run. Heath issues start in your 30′s and get more frequent in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s. Expect to pay more every decade for health costs in your life/budget.

These are all real tactical changes we can make to save more money monthy and yearly that will get better returns than the stock market and help prepare for inflation. What else do you think can help?

Chicago CTA Rant – Where are the Busses? Commuting Problems

I have been a commuter in Chicago for about 3 years now. I was initially excited to abandon my car in it’s parking space during the week and walk to the EL train and then to work every day. I have saved a bucket-load of cash not paying for gas or parking downtown since I have worked in that area. I was able to get to work in 1 hour from door to door, and it would be faster if I caught the CTA Train right when I got to the station. It was never more than a 10 minute wait for a green line though.

All these things changed recently when I moved in with my Fiance in Warrenville. (I had been living in Oak Park for the last 7 years) Now I am only tied to downtown Chicago by the METRA trains. Which is very frustrating since the BNSF only comes in to Union Station which is all the F way over west of the loop and not walkable to Michigan Avenue. 

This means you have to fill that gap with more public transport since cabs are too expensive to take every day. Your choices are the CTA elevated Trains which aren’t really by Union Station or Michigan Avenue either or the CTA Buses. Everyone said the Buses were the way to go. And for all the ranting about Metra, the CTA Buses have ended up being far more problematic than the Train. (although the train has been so packed the last 2 days that people have been standing in the isles in all the cars)

This morning for example it was a 1/2 hour wait for a 121 bus by Union Station. WTF? They are supposed to run every 12-15 minutes per the CTA Site. Last night was no better. I caught the 151 bus to Union Station for a change (most days I wait a 1/2 hour for that at 6 pm also) and then there was no Train until 6:50 pm. I spent a 1/2 hour sitting in the train station doing nothing. Where was the 6:20 BNSF?

That is the first time a METRA train has been missing but the CTA buses are there at about a 50% rate . I can walk to the train station in a 1/2 hour, but if I can get a bus it only takes 15 minutes (even stopping on every block). But if I knew there would not be a bus for a 1/2 hour I would just F-ing walk.

I get to start working from home on Fridays this week. I won’t miss the 1.5-2 hour commute each way.

How have your experiences been with Chicago CTA & METRA commuting?

We Can Save Washington Mutual and other Banks by Overpaying our Mortgages

Washington Mutual Home Loans Logo - My Mortgage Company

I think we, the mortgage holders and general citizens might be able to help in the credit crunch going on right now in the news. I am hearing so much about the Lehman bankruptcy and the AIG de-valuing today. Certain sectors of the economy are in shambles due to over leveraging and greed on the part of the top level executives in these banks and financial institutions and we really don’t know how deep this will go.

As much as I hate their greedy asses for getting us into this mess, (just to get another bonus to buy another yacht) I think you and I may be able to help so things don’t get worse. I think that if everyone that has a Washington Mutual (WAMU) Mortgage (like me) pays extra principle over the minimum ammount every month the cash on hand will rise above expectations and help keep the company running. I am currently paying $150.00 over my minimum now and my brother pays $250.00 over his minimum payment also.

The thing is it benefits you too! If you pay extra on your mortgage now it cuts payments off at the end of the mortgage and that saves you the interest that you would be paying on those payments. So, in my book this is a win-win situation. And don’t give me that line about mortgage interest tax deductions, that is only 25% back in credits on your money. It’s not like you get all of it back from tax deductions. Its still better to not pay the interest all together and save 100%. Duh.

You may be “saving” that money for when “financial armageddon” happens but really… those of us savers have been saving for years and have plenty of “cash on hand” now. We should pony up and get these mortgages paid down. It seems like the responsible and needed thing to do. Plus it gets a better return than a new handbag.

If 1,000 people pay $100.00 extra on their mortgage that is an extra $100,000.00 a month and an extra $1.2 Million a year for WAMU to keep afloat. If 5,000 people pay $150.00 extra on their WAMU mortgage that is $750,000.00 extra cash per month and $9 Million more per year. And 10,000 people paying an extra $200 a month is $24 Million a year. (which should do some good)  This may be small potatoes for a banking snob but it all adds up and is scalable since WAMU must have thousands upon thousands of mortgages out there.

Anyway, take it for what its worth and see if you feel like making a contribution to the capital that banks and mortgage institutions have on hand in this economy.

Now I do need to add a few disclaimers to this idea:

1. If you are having trouble making ends meet, this post or idea is not for you. Keep paying the minimum each month and move on to cash saving strategies pronto.

2. It is no one’s individual responsibility to do this especially if the job market is not good and they say to have a year in cash living costs on hand if you loose your job. Make sure you have that reserve first to protect yourself. 

3. We don’t owe those rich asses anything extra beyond minimum payments, but it might help the general economy and us all in the long run. And if you know one of those greedy financial execs, egg their car or something. Make it personal.

 

Update; um, this didn’t work. WAMU got bought, eaten and taken over by Chase bank. Poo.

Google is not making us Stoopid in the Attention Crash Its Productivity Stupid

This article by Nick Carr in the Atlantic last month brought up some interesting points about the attention crash and Google in regards to whether these innovations are hurting us more than helping in productivity. This article on marketing brought up some more points today.  I have been through this internet addict cycle and back again and maybe some of my experience can help those looking to prune back the hedges of web information overload (or overlord) in their life.

Is Google Making us Stopid? I think not!

First off, I don’t agree that Google makes us stupid (or stoopid) but I do think it influences how we consume information and creates a false sense of know everything because we are plugged in every day, searching on every idea that comes to mind and reading a million blogs, emails, widgets and feeds every day. If we have full Internet access at work, good luck getting any work done if your company doesn’t block perezhilton and facebook.

We live in an era of information overload and we skim everything and really read and absorb nothing. No one can consume at this rate. People are stressed out by the number of media sources they have to keep up with daily (and on weekends) and we feel constantly inadequate because of all the bragging that goes on about successful products launched, and big money made on the net.  It’s no surprise then that we are constantly driven to consume more information and media to fill the brain with more discovery serotonin and yet we feel that we aren’t getting anywhere since most of us aren’t paid to consume this information and analyze it for a living. It is very contrary to most of our life goals with our jobs and families.

I started blogging and consuming massive amounts of media in 2002 and was completely burnt out by  2005 from a mix of Scoble, MicroPersuasion and every social networking site available plus news, alerts and emails. (plus following every move of the google monster as it grew) I did not really get much done at work, luckily I was very good at my job so I could get it done in less than the time allotted and I tried to move my real job towards this social media category. I was consumed by all the feeds, blogs, feedbliz emails, IMs, regular emails, networking sites and Flickr. It didn’t get me anywhere I wanted to go though, except the inside track on some new things I could talk about socially before other people knew about them.  (big deal) I ended up looking for a new job instead. My job seemed uninteresting and unimportant compared to the new, exciting and really important things happening on the web. This despite being the one thing that paid my mortgage.

So,what’s an internet marketing girl to do when all this media does relate to your job somewhat but it is also crushing your life? 

1. I did find a job with greater flexibility and more use of my media knowledge. But I also turned a lot of the media off.

2. I abandoned RSS feeds. Too many to keep up with. Too little importance to my life.

3. I stopped blogging everywhere for nothing and just maintained a few blogs that really mattered and one that provides some small side income.  

4. I cut out radio, TV, papers and magazines with the exception of TIME Magazine (because I need something to read on the train) and Netflix (because I don’t have cable and like to have something decent to watch once or twice a week after work). (radio was cut out because of the train also, if I was still driving to work I would listen to NPR)

5. I won’t lifestream (too invading of my privacy) and dislike twitter (I don’t need another internet addiction). This means I miss a lot of info and some trends but I don’t get worked up about it because I found that most of these super mini-micro-trends never make it to mainstream anyway.

6. I unsubscribed to a boatload of emails and started a new email account that was less spammy.

7. I also stopped reading a lot of blogs. The only ones I read now are bookmarked as links in my browser and if I don’t find something useful there for a few weeks I delete them. (or if they are friends they get linked into LJ) And I can’t read the buzz building blogs of Forester, Scoble and Giga Om. Scoble is great but no one can keep up with that man. (he is a 24 hour blogging machine!) Forrester and GigaOm are always wrong. I am sick of being led astray into an area that doesn’t fit or benefit mainstream business. I did start reading PerezHilton though. Its quick, about 5 minutes, scan through what looks interesting/funny and skip the rest.

8. I also have kind of cut back on signing up for every site beta that comes up because there are millions of them and the purpose of these sites has gotten further away from positively influencing my life in the past few years and more about distracting me. I still sign up for some, but by the time the beta password comes in, I usually find it wasn’t that relevant after all.

9. I stopped checking in on social networks daily. Once a week is enough. And flickr gets updated maybe once a month.

10. Oh yea, I also got a boyfriend and found that being with him was much more rewarding than being online all the time consuming information about everyone else’s successes.

I have come back from the attention crash and maybe some of these tips can help others. Yea, some of these blogs are going to see traffic drop but we will all be able to sleep better at night and work better during the day as a result. And when your family and mortgage are counting on it isn’t that really what is most important?

Some things I still do that have survived the internet pruning:

1. Subscribe to feedbliz emails for about 10 blogs directly related to the media I work with and personal finances. (frugal living type topics since we are in the middle of a recession)

2. I keep up with emails from work and friends.

3. Use IM to converse quickly and the phone (gasp!) for longer conversations.

4. Read TIME magazine weekly. It has evolved into a much hipper, savy, snarkier mag than you think.

5. Check the news on the yahoo login page for my personal email for news.

6. Keep up with google alerts on terms related to my work, friends and family. I guess this is super targeted and as behavioral as one can get. You would have thought they would have put ads in Google alerts by now.

7. Blog on my personal blog, marketing blog and other blog about once a week. That is about all I can keep up with.

8. Most weekends I am offline entirely. If I want to spend time with real people it has to be out of the house and therefore offline. Plus laundry and dishes need to be done sometime!

9. I have a cut off time whether all the stuff is done or not because sleep is more important to me than you might think. I try and got to bed by 10 or 11 but 12 is the cutoff for sure.

10. I remain anonymous and aliased online because I want to be able to say what I think when I want without the fear of someone’s difference of personal opinion affecting my professional or personal life.

So, in summary I think my findings indicate that it’s not Google that is making us Stupid (or Stoopid) it’s ourselves and the decisions we make about how we will spend our time (and money).

New Year’s Resolutions 2008 Check in

Well, it is at about the 1/2 year point in 2008 (ok a little late) and I thought I would check in and blog about my new year’s resolutions that I posted about back in January. I know everyone makes resolutions (well most of us do) and then forget about them when we can’t hold on past the 2 week mark. Yet it is a marketing boom for companies that want to capitalize on people’s need to feel like they have solved a problem by buying something. Millions of Gym memberships are sold and then forgotten in January. I hope I didn’t fall into a buy something trap this year, and I hope you didn’t either.

My goals were no different than anyone else’s this year. This was my actual list:

1. Loose 20 lbs. It’s a necessity. (result: well I lost 5 lbs. Not much really and I am struggling with getting it to go any further but Kashi go lean products seem to help keep me feeling full longer and therefore less likely to snack)

2. Save 5K more in savings again. (Result: surprisingly I completed this already despite having a 2K car repair bill earlier this year. I did have referral a bonus from referring a friend that got hired at work which helped a lot, but the rest has been in cutting back. The things I have cut costs on are: Car insurance, driving, clothes, eating out for lunch and dinner, vacations and random household stuff that I probably didn;t need anyway. Crate and Barrel has been filling my house with stuff for years) My new goal here is to make it a total of 7K saved for the year now that I have reached 5.

3. To keep things going along well with Steve. (Result: This is going well. No problems at all except that we both work a lot and it is difficult to find time together some weeks, but otherwise all ok)

4. To keep up the HPV  Cervical Pre-Cancer Dysplasia health related follow ups. (Result: I have been back for more followups but no change. Still CIN-1 cells they are very determined to do harm no matter what. No talk of more surgery but I suppose it is still a possibility again)

5. To take some kind of web or HTML class. (Result: I did this early in the year, using my company education credit but I have to say that as much as it felt like I learned a lot at the time, I really don’t remember much because it was so fast)

6. To be better at time management. (Result: I have been better with this too. Getting up earlier and being more on task. Hence less blogging. I also use an app called rescue time that helps me see where my time is being spent. The thing is when I am more involved in creating what happens at work I am happier. When I have no say in anything it becomes boring and without much motivation. I think everyone enjoys being more of a stakeholder in their company and work situation than not.)

7. To learn to cook some things. (Result: I haven’t really learned to cook anything specifically but Steve and I try and cook together once in a while)

8. To get back into being more career goal oriented again. (Result: I guess but there aren’t any new positions to move to in the company and the economy sux so I will be here for a while appreciating my current job and taking more classes. No climbing the ladder this year)

TIME Magazine Article – The Social Contract in America

I was reading my parent’s TIME Magazine this week (that I usually swipe to read on the train) and they had polled Americans on the state of the economy and their take on how they plan to personally ”get by” in the coming years. You can read the survey results and the article about this concept of a social contract online at TIME.com.

I had never heard of this concept of a “social contract” that business and government have with America. I work in a recruitment related field so if it existed, I thought I would know about it. As a human being I was aware of it as a colloquial dream we have perpetuated by the stories told by our parents and grandparents.

My family history doesn’t go back that far here in America. My great grandparents arrived from Poland and the Ukraine pre-WW1 and went to work in the gritty factories of Chicago because it was a better living and opportunity than they had back in Europe. (poor peasant potato farmers I usually say) and the economic opportunity has kept us here in Chicago ever since.

My grandparents generation went on to slightly boring but consistent blue collar jobs with pensions and my parent’s generation went on to white collar jobs after getting college educations. Some of them got a pension and health insurance and others did not. My generation doesn’t even get a shot at a pension. Companies have found that they can hire good people without it and they tell us that a 401K is really the same thing. (for reference I am 33)

So, we have these 401Ks that seem to never make money fast enough to accrue enough funds to equal what a pension would. They plummet in value every 10 years or so in recessions, and someone changes the funds available without asking or telling us. Most of us have health insurance through our jobs. We pay handsomely for it, between $100 and $300 per month per person.  And then when something happens that requires medical care, the insurance only covers 1/2 the costs. It is totally possible to go bankrupt with health insurance coverage these days because most coverage is crap compared to what my family had back in the 1980′s.

TIME says that there is an “implied” social contract in America where you give a company (or number of companies) your time and energy and they give you “a basic level of economic security provided you work hard and took responsibility for your family”. (direct quote from TIME July 28, 2008 p 42) And I think things have changed. This contract implied or not doesn’t really exist anymore. I see businesses every day making decisions to give workers less and people have to get more creative trying to survive.

I think the social contract is more like this now.

1. A company promises to pay you as little as they can for your time. This sounds pessimistic but I have seen the proof on paper that you are paid what they can get you for with your experience rather than what you are worth or how much “the job” pays. You have to wait years to work your way up the ladder to make a good wage and then marketers and your neighbors taunt you daily to buy everything in sight to keep up with the Joneses. 56% of the people who made over 100K a year said even they can’t expect to afford health care, college or a secure retirement anymore.  And 100K a year is a lot of clams. (I don’t make anywhere near that. ) I do realize that these businesses have to keep costs low in order to compete with India and China, but somehow I’d rather see the cuts come from other areas that don’t erode the culture in America and impede our ability to raise families. 

2. Marketers will prey on you from every direction. A lot more people could make it through hard times if they had savings but the national savings rate is negative now. All the “stuff” and services you “must” have seems to replace the financial security your grandparents achieved. Just say no didn’t work for reducing drug use in the 80′s and I think that the disposable consumer culture will probably continue here too.

3. Health Issues will cost you. Most young people don’t need much care because you haven’t gotten to the age where things start falling apart yet and we don’t have any concept of how much it costs to survive a serious health issue like cancer or bypass surgery. Both my parents had heart surgery in the late 1990′s and they were 50 & 60K each. We paid about 10K each of those costs and the insurance paid the rest. I just heard someone at my dad’s workplace had bypass surgery last month and it cost $100K. I know they have really poor health insurance there, and I can guess that the guy might have had to pay 50K out of pocket. Even dental issues are expensive. I need have needed a crown for about 5 years and because there is no pain or damage being done since the root canal and filling, I am holding off on the $1,000.00 price tag since dental insurance is only going to pay 1/2 and I would rather save the $ for a real emergency like fixing the 7 year old car I have or paying for the radiator heat to be fixed in my condo.

4. Retirement is going to be difficult. Very difficult. Some people wonder if social security will be around in 2040 when I turn 65. I personally, think it will be. It may not be nearly enough though. Most of us will have some 401K savings but as the Frontline Retirement special found, most people make crucial mistakes with managing their 401K and end up loosing a lot of money and getting little out at the end. (and then have to go back to work) Some tips include, never take a lump sum benefit, due to the tax penalty, never just let it ride and not watch the performance and watch for trading and management fees eating up your money. It also helps not to own a McMansion when you retire and live within your means before retirement. Saving money (like 10% of after tax income) on the side and investing it in some low risk but higher than inflation yields is also a smart way to prepare. And well let’s hope medicare still exists in 2040 also, and that doctors and hospitals still accept it as payment.

5. Creativity & Leverage are the new working hard. Money makes more money, it’s all who you know and being clever with side jobs or side businesses usually helps. Yes, saving a large percentage of your income by living simple and investing it can help you have the “power of compounding interest” as they say. Keeping in touch with people and maintaining your network helps with job opportunities and side opportunities to make some income. Starting weekend jobs or part time businesses online or otherwise helps too. I find people living simply and leveraging clever ways to work in more than one place are the ones that will have what they need later on. Getting into an industry that is doing well in the economy also helps but that may take pro-active skill re-training. Paying off your mortgage early and not moving also helps. You loose thousands of dollars on the services and fees associated with that transaction every time you move, and  we all know you pay 3x the value of your loan in interest if you really pay your mortgage over 30 years. After that you are seriously in the hole.

The only contract I think we really have now is that everything will change by the time the 30 somethings reach retirement age. The only thing we have to rely on is ourselves. In general business is struggling because the US has passed it’s peak and we will be in a pack of “also rans” soon. Companies in the US will not see the skyrocketing growth that they saw post-war in the last 60 years with China, India and Eastern Europe emerging as super-economic powers. This coupled with dwindling natural, energy and food resources will make the next 50 years a post US dominant era that will be much harder and more global.

I actually believe if the US was more competitive with skills and education we would do well in a world economy but I haven’t yet seen the expertise or drive to innovate. All I see every day is the drive to reduce expenses and cut resources in business and make short term gains with little or no thought about long term survival. I feel like the country is being run by the lowest common denominator MBAs right now and the next 10 years for us commoners are going to be difficult as a result, as we all lack the jobs/growth that they sucked/poached out in the short term and ran off with the profits.

So, enough about all that negativity.

How do you plan on coping with the changing game living and working in the US in the next 50 years?

Email management for overloaded email boxes circa 2008

I have noticed I spend a lot of time sifting through email these days. I have several accounts for different purposes and they fill up quickly with both subscriptions I have started and a lot of spam I never requested. I know that spam is just the price we pay right now for an app like email, but I hope that someday the spammers are put out of business because of the awful things they do stealing identities and personal information.

Anyway, my post wasn’t supposed to be about spam. It was about email volume circa 2008. I do get a lot of spam, and because one email address I have dates back to 1996 that one gets about 50% spam.  The spam filter I have does catch about 80% of it but the other 20% is annoying and dangerous.

The other 60% of that old email address mail is a lot of subscriptions since I am more likely to read an email than go find a bookmark of a blog every few days. The web based email is about 25% spam and the work email is maybe 1% spam, they are pretty good at blocking it.

I found this feedblitz and email update technology immensely helpful in the beginning since I check email anyway and it was a way to kill 2 tasks with one stone. Now though, things have gotten out of hand. I estimate that I get about 200 emails per day between 3 accounts. That is a bit more than I intended. True, it may be time to unsubscribe to some newsletters and updates but then it might go down to 150. Knowing this, you might understand why I gave up on RSS feeds in 2004.

Email is just too ingrained into our business and consumer culture as a communication medium. Or at least it is for Gen-Xers like myself. I do feel the pressure of the millennials and Gen-Yers to go to a social networking communication platform and I have profiles on all the major sites with plenty of contacts/friends but it’s just not home base for me. For a while one circle of people I knew were using MySpace as a hub for communication, but they were in the Arts, as many MySpacers are. Now that I no longer have time for extra cirricular activities I have lost touch with them and my MySpace page. I also have an online client email I use for personal stuff and of course the ubiquitous work email. I also have a 4th email that I don’t use because 3 is really enough.

I was reading this article today about how people manage their emails and BAM it was exactly how I managed them without me even really thinking about how I categorize things. Literally things just evolved the way they worked best over the past 10 years. The old old email became a place for all the sign ups you had to complete for one reason or another, login info for registrations and updates and such but not time sensitive stuff because I moved my most critical emails over to the web based email when it got too cluttered and I wanted to be able to access it anywhere rather than just at home on my computer in outlook. The second web based email also became a place to move personal communication off the work email account since in the beginning there was no line between them and then there suddenly was one day in about 2004. The work account also gets some alerts and such but only work related. (yes, that’s a blurry line since its online media and marketing that I work in)

Overall, I was surprised that I fit their archetype “to a tee” and that I evolved this way without even thinking of it. The gen-x and gen-y people have a hard time separating work from personal (especially if you work in onlinemedia, its all online anyway at the click of a mouse, it only takes a second!) and this will only provide harder in the future as more is expected of us as we balance family and work all in less time. I hope this setup satisfies the need for different urgencies, disclosures and personalizations of emails as well as productivity and time management. All this digital overload is consuming in a very empty way really. I feel like I must look through all this and read it every day yet very little is really going to impact my work or my life. I am mostly off email on weekends and I find it not that different but I have more time suddenly. Hmmm…must pare down email newsletters soon.

I have a compulsion to keep my email boxes cleaned out once a day and reply to anything that needs it from work or personal in 24 hours. I wonder if I will be able to keep that up in the future and if I will have to integrate more mandatory social networking at some point to keep up with those 10 years younger than me? 

I also recently started using the rescue time application to log and review where I am in a day and how much is actually spent on email and work. I have since cut my work email time in 1/2 and ditto for the personal email also. It’s a good application for self time management, but I wouldn’t want to use it for work purposes officially. I like that I have control over it and am not evaluated based on it since I have my days where I am not as productive. But the application helps me get back on track and out of the funk quicker.

As a consumer do I like being emailed by companies? Sometimes yes. If I opt in to your email I may be marginally or really interested in hearing from you depending on how much your product fits my life and work. If the emails provide no help or relevance whatsoever, they will get deleted and unsubscribed within a few months. If you send me discounts, new product info or other locally relevant information or content I am really into that helps me do my job, I am happy to read and click to help your ROI. I think email is better than direct mail because of the targeting and the lack of paper it uses. (save the trees) I would much rather an email from most companies than a flyer in the mail box. Plus it gives me the control to turn it off when it’s no longer relevant. Trust me, I will re-subscribe if the situation changes, I am a newsletter nut, that is for sure. And I think my generation is in general. But don’t expect us to buy-buy-buy stuff just because you emailed it to us. If we don’t need or want it we just consider the offer and decide no this time. It’s ok, we will find you when we need it, even if it is a month or two from now. And frequency is an issue. I am annoyed by some weekly emails because how often do you really need to know about the same product over and over again? Monthly is fine, or how about every other week?  

So, all of this is kind of my unwritten rules of email, work and business, and I hope that we continue to figure things out to make communication and information finding more efficient and less time consuming while still productive. Now if I could only find a way to maintain 3 blogs more efficiently too.

How to keep learning new skills as we get older

I used to think that it was weird to not be learning all the time. You spend 9 years in grammar school, 4 years in high school and if you are lucky, 4 years in college. All total,  that is 17 of your first 21 years in school with daily lessons, lectures, homework, required reading, tests, quizzes, projects, essays and exams. Then you have to make the jump to the working world whether it is in business or other areas and you still have to learn, but it is everything not included in your schooling. How your company works, how people work, what is required there and all their multitude of processes and products.

At that point you usually meet someone much older than yourself that has no idea what is happening in technology. And not just high technology, they don’t get basics that most people use just to function daily like email, pivot tables or search engine optimization. What you don’t know is that they are the future you. They don’t want to change because they say they have just done things this way all these years and it has always worked with paper files, binders, phone messages and post it noes. You look at them and their outdated clothes and rows of beanie babies around their cubicle like they have 3 heads. How can they work this way? How do they get anything done? How can a company value someone antiquated like this over me who has all this knowledge and ability (yet with 0 experience). 

Then time marches on. You become acclimated with the business environment and get promoted or jump to a better job a few times. You balance social, personal and work life stuff and think wow it’s a lot to manage and are always tired. Then some of you have kids and are even more tired. Then you wake up one day and realize that you have become that antiquated person you ran into years ago because they hired some younger workers that are all gung ho about getting ahead and talk about things you don’t understand. Now all college grads come to work knowing how to build databases and web sites even if they got a degree in English? How can they know so much so fast? 

You wonder how 10 years flew by and you haven’t really added anything new to your skill set because you work 50 hours a week, have a relationship on weekends and laundry/dishes/cat/cleaning/reading/few social things weeknights. (you don’t even watch TV for god’s sake) How can you go to school at the same time? If you have kids, how can you exist on less than the 4 hours of sleep you get now just so you can spend time learning? And when will you ever get around to painting the garage? How is this possible when some mornings you come to work 1/2 asleep with 2 different shoes on?

Are companies going to only hire new youngsters for all the positions because they make less money and have more tech skills? How much does experience matter?  Why did it piss me off for weeks when the new wordpress.com backend system was launched, and nothing made any sense anymore? I didn’t have time to spend looking for hours for where everything had been moved to and was just mad that it wasn’t where it was before and it took forever to post. And there was no communication from those adsense loving wordpress people about where everything had been moved to. They thought this was self explanitory? (Not!)

I think I started to recognize some of these changes happening to me in the past few months. I never planned on stopping learning and the things I chose to learn about in my spare (and fleeting) time were never really panned out useful things. So, back to the drawing board. I feel like I need a lot more technical skill to remain ahead of the curve in my job and be able to keep finding great work over the decades to come. And I want to do that along with have a family and marriage and the whole kit and kaboodle. I don’t think this is a women’s issue anymore either really. Men face the same questions as they get off the fashion bus and start looking, sounding and working more and more like their fathers.

Another thing I realized the other day is that I may try and shop at more contemporary stores, but I basically dress exactly like my mom. And she is 67 and I am 32. I used to hate how my mom dressed, and now I am her?  Is this just the arrival of the long plateau of middle age? Are the middle ages of me going to be anticlimactic and uneventful? Or how can you bridge multiple generations, technologies and social groups all at the same time while still getting 8 hours of sleep at night? 

I don’t know how this is all going to work. I suppose many people don’t write about it on blogs, or maybe even recognize the change until they can’t find bleached jeans and high tops at Kohl’s anymore. But it bothers me because I don’t want to stop learning and get left behind. Especially when the economy keeps changing so much every year and the jobs go with it. How do you not get outsourced when literally everything can be outsourced today? How do you keep going to school when most universities require full time attendance of a degree program and not piece mail courses as you need them? How do you find time to do homework when you have bills to pay and garbage to take out and emails from your boss? Even reading was hard to get back into after years of not focusing like that for an extended period of time.

Here is what I have been doing about it and working on over the past years and what I would like to continue to work on:

1. About 2 years ago I started reading books again. I read TIME every week, but that is pretty short. I found it hard at first to just read for an hour at a time because I had gotten so multitask happy with the internet and channel flipping.

2. I also decided it was time to start pushing back sometimes at work and saying No. You literally can’t do that when you start out, and sooner or later you have to set limits and not do everything for everyone else when you have a limited time to do it. The whole idea of urgency and priority come into play and they shouldn’t be anyone else’s priority or urgency but yours. People will negotiate and try and get as much from you as possible but it’s not in your best interest if it’s not really in your job description.

3. The last year was one where I decided it was time to have a self hosted blog. Everyone and their sister had one but me, and it wasn’t supposed to be impossible or anything. So, I bought a url and went to town for about 2 days straight truing to figure out how this wordpress thing worked, researching themes, plugins and all the possibilities and building it. It was a great learning experience although it has nothing to do with my work.

4. This year I had a client that insisted on a different data process than what we usually provided and I had to learn Pivot tables. I still don’t know them to the extent I need to probably, but it helps immensley. I still have more of the high end Excel stuff to learn.

5. I also had to learn Access. I guess 2 days in a class can’t really teach you everything though so I should either retake the class or take another one because my skills there still don’t match what I need them to.

6. I also wonder about math and statistics. I should really go back, take the prerequisites and then statistics. This is what I get for not taking it initially because I didn’t want to work in business. Sheesh. This is by far one of the hardest things to do because, I am not fantastic at math, it has been about 14 years since I have taken a math class and it means driving back to the community college I attended a million years ago. It also entails weekly classes and weekly homework. This could be 10 hours a week or more. Where am I going to find 10 hours a week? Where do people who have kids find that time?  Is sleep allowed?

7. I also think it is time I got better at this friends/networking thing at work and outside it. I have never been that great at the social stuff, but I am meeting more and more people who weren’t necessarily either, but because there are some ground rules in business and no need to act like Jr High kids anymore, they are pretty good at it now. This helps get things done faster when they need to be, and it makes work and life generally more fun. It also helps not to work with assholes.

8. What I would also like to do more of is learn about web pages and building them, coding and sleuthing out issues with them. This comes up with work and would be an asset.

9. Long term I have to get into databases and SQL. I have no choice. It will mean more classes and more time than I know I can find and afford, and that isn’t even the expensive part like tuition.

But what is the alternative? To be outsourced in a few years? To be relegated back to the minimum wage jobs that we had back in college but would be even more difficult to get since they would rather hire energetic young people now, with better tech skills?  The way I see it, the only way to survive is to go onwards and upwards. I have to keep learning things whether I have time for it or not.

Oscars, Trends and Once Movie Wins Best Song

I think people were generally happy with the outcomes of the Oscar awards last night. Although there weren’t any big blockbuster films this year that were box office smash hits or huge societal movements, there were some well made movies that got recognized for their hard work. I was especially happy to see that Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova won the Oscar for best original song. I felt like the Enchanted people were good at producing a Disney musical and Amy Adams sang and danced on stage twice (not easy when it is in addition to her regular attendance duties) but Once was a great movie with a lot more meaning and resonance than a Disney musical could possibly ever have. (especially for people over the age of 10, which I would think most of the academy is made up of)  I was also thrilled to see that Jon Stewart gave Marketa Irglova a moment to come back out and say her thank you for her award after the commercial break. Kudos to him for that. And we should all remember what she said quote: “fair play to those who dream and don’t give up“. Those are great words.

I think someone said on NPR this morning that international (foreign) stars dominated the awards last night and that may be true but I don’t think it was the trend that explains why they won. I think the academy awards are moving past the popularity contest that they used to be and really rewarding the most meaningful and powerful quality work in every category. It makes movies like la vie en rose or Once possible to win when they were only even shown at Art House theaters here in Chicago and most people never even heard about them. (in an unrelated event I went to a blockbuster video store this weekend and I didn’t recognize 1/2 the movies there either) I think this may help these indie, foreign or cutting edge films find an audience they would not have before but more importantly it rewards people with more work because of the award and makes the careers of talented people doing great work so they don’t have to sell out and just do what makes the most money. Its kind of like trying to positively influence capitalism’s negative affect on art.

I also think that it just so happens that the people willing to make these different movies that aren’t big blockbuster type films are more likely foreigners that are less influenced by the lure of the big Hollywood blockbuster that has no artistic quality but brings in a big paycheck and instead, these foreigin actors make movies for the love of making movies and the chance to do good work. And, they got rewarded for that. It is refreshing to find people who are interested in quality work over money. It seems that foreign people not only have the better work ethic and simpler lifestyle demands to be able to manufacture everything from our cars to our clothes but now they also have captured a more pure (not money only) sense of making movies also now. I think it’s kind of a sad sign in general for the U.S. but like always it doesn’t really mean anyone would really try and make a change. We’re not good at that.

I look forward to seeing some of the films that I had not seen yet by the Award telecast and hope to discover some new great actors and films that I can enjoy. And if you haven’t seen Once, go rent it on DVD from Netflix or wherever you rent DVDs today.