It’s also the first get together after eMetrics New York, which was a major, and had big time Canadian attendance. These tend to be among the more interesting evenings. It has also been some three months since the last WAWTO event, so there should be quite a few fresh stories.

Among other reasons:

• 43% said “My wall was becoming way too crowded with marketing posts and I needed to get rid of some of them”.

• 38% said “The content became repetitive or boring over time”.

• 19% said “The content wasn’t relevant to me from the start”,

• 17% “The company’s posts were too chit-chatty – not focused on real value”.

All of these reasons cited go directly to the concept of relevancy.

When does content become too much? When it ceases to be relevant.

When do you want to make some content go away? When it ceases to be relevant.

When does content become boring? When it ceases to be relevant.

This competition for relevance is one half of the defining challenge for social media marketers. To a certain extent, paying for the privileged of pushing an unwanted message into the yawning maw of consumers provided a specific degree of insurance. Relevancy was always theoretically important to marketing effectiveness. It’s just that it wasn’t a big enough factor to truly matter. Or rather, it didn’t matter to enough people.

It’s not a new problem. Rather, it’s an intensification of a latent one.

8. They deliberately use an odd sounding number for the length of a list. Round numbers like 10 sound engineered.

7. They know that there’s a high reading completion rate on such a list. That is to say, the probability of a person clicking through to another page, right below the list, is high, thereby increasing overall ad impressions on a single visit.

6. They know that some of the most effective list titles contain a promise of insider information.

5. They know that a small percentage of the population creates lists, but a large percentage of the population cares about them.

4. They know that some people love to be ranked by other people. More specifically, the adulation that goes with being top ranked.

3. They know that at least 200,000 US People (Quantcast definition) visited one of the top five sites dedicated entirely to top 10 lists. It’s an industry unto itself.

2. They know they are an effective layout to embed ad units.

1. They know that lists are an effective, engineered, design pattern designed to evoke a very specific reaction.

And they really don’t care if you know it.

And there’s your jolt below:

ICE is not the successor to Value of a Fan, abbreviated VOAF. We asked different questions.

Last year, in response to VOAF, many of my cohorts came forward with brilliant follow up questions, and the dialogue that ensued contributed to the subsequent study and model design. Work continues.

I welcome, in the spirit laid out by Tsang, engagement on the topic.

What do you think about Increasing Campaign Effectiveness using social media? What would you consider and explore?

My original hypotheses are rejected. A piece of the world doesn’t really work the way that I expected.

The great news is that I’m forced to look beyond the clean dataset and write new hypotheses. Even failures can be great. However, it doesn’t make for good commercial reading. Instead of having that nice, clean, nugget:

Brands that did x realized y.

There’s a much messier message:

Neither a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i , j, k, l, m, n, nor p had a significant impact on y.

That messier message works among marketing scientists. Usually a sound of surprise. Then acceptance when they see the summary tables.

It’s not commercially actionable.

It’s far more effect to give very clear ‘to do’ recommendations than clear ‘do not’ recommendations. Memory and recall is precious. It’s hard to get things to stick and even harder to fish it out. A laundry list of ‘not significants’ is not effective. Moreover, being unethical and pulling out a statistically insignificant term doesn’t quite settle it, either.

So instead, tomorrow, I’ll have to change the dependent variable. Y will be e. Or f. or i. It’s a lot more work, but there are actionable recommendations in there. It has to be commercially interesting- knowing full well that if I poke without hypothesis in mind the odds of being fooled by randomness increases. And, I’m energized by having more justification for a chosen paradigm of social media analytics.

In sum, it’s been rough. And I’m charging on.

It’s what we do.

Steve Miller and I have worked fairly closely over the years – he as an Information Architect and myself as a Marketing Scientist. We were both part of the landmark NASA.gov redesign. Since then, we did major sites in the healthcare and retail sectors. He welcomed me into Syncapse on my first day, and since then, we’ve iterated on social media measurement experience design.

His contributions in terms of usability in data driven insight generation are well reflected both in the interfaces and in roadmaps. He’s a champion for user centric design. And, I believe that we have learned more in a 1 year period here than we ever could anywhere else.

As IA continues its inevitable fracturing into UX, their importance as a glue between Tech, Creative, Science and Strategy will intensify. With so much risk comes great opportunity.

Steve will return to a market that, confusingly, will still emphasize the role of waterfall IA. The market for that, at least in Toronto, is huge. However, Steve will be one of the absolute few that will be capable of taking on Lean-IA or Lean-UX. He’ll be one of the few to identify early feature creep. He’ll be one of the few to understand the challenges of MVP and speed-to-market.

I hope, for Toronto’s sake, that he’ll come back in such a role. We need more Lean-UXers.

The same should go for everybody. From commenting, blogging, to writing books. Repeating somebody’s work in its entirety is pretty unnecessary when a citation would do. What you build off others, how you do intellectual parkour and create something new out of many things old, is what’s valuable. You advance everybody that much further and faster by doing so.

And a gap in the literature doesn’t always need to be filled. There might be a very good reason for such a gap.

It’s finally time for me to make an original contribution because I have something original to say. There’s a gap that needs to be filled. And I can fill it. I should fill it.

The question is how.

I know I have to fill the gap with a story. A story is stickiest and understanding more complete when I tell a story.

I know it has to be accessible.

I know it has to be sound bytey and meatey.

I’d love to be able to say that I’ve spent 8 months putting Original Content together and can share it now. I can’t. There’s loads of OC to be sure. It’s just not in any sort of coherent format. The hiccup is because I’m less skilled at inserting conflict or drama into a story.

My good friend Romy Klaus, head of Unlike.net, insists that I must triumph over myself and do so. This notion of a protagonist and an antagonist is absolutely vital to produce drama. And she’s right.

I’ve had four false starts in eight months. Each time I’ve tried I’ve fallen into traps.

The degeneration of unpacking the onion until even I’m in tears.

The degeneration into scapegoating.

The purposeful avoidance of saying anything people don’t want to hear.

It’s a trap.

I’ve come back around to my original position. I’m going to tell a story. I’m going to do it my way. And even if it’s in a buzz killington style, dammit, I’m going to try.

Here’s to a DRY Original Contribution.

The invite:

“Developers make it possible to measure anything, statisticians and dataminers work models, IAs finesse interfaces, analysts mash and managers action. Effective Analytics takes an orchestra. Lets talk to each other and see whats possible.”

Historically, WAW’s attract a strong contingent of web analysts, social analysts (many from Syncapse), IA’s, a few dev’s, recruiters, vendors, and yes, two dataminers. And it’s a great mix. Let’s keep that mix and expand it. Additional invites to business strategists, eScientists, Marketing Scientists, and specialized developers.

The results of that study were presented at Internet Week on Friday morning and can be downloaded here.

I have hopes.

I hope it throws some wind into the sails of people who are doing good social media marketing strategy. Absolution is frequently sought in simple numbers. The importance of activation strategy should be very clear in the charts and text of the paper.

The second is for the lack of misquotes. It would be really nice if it wasn’t misquoted.

The third is that I hope you’ll find it useful.

In sum, take a look, and feed on back.

I’ve been dividing my time between a major initiative and product development. Much of my involvement revolves around Evidence Based Marketing – and it’s literally that deadly. It’s that level of sustainable competitive advantage. It’s like a Philosoraptor armed with an RPG, riding a shark. Yeaaaaaaaaaaah.

The most interesting aspect has been the integration of measurement science with information architecture with development with creative with product development. There are continuous collisions between the desire for intuitive simplicity with utility with robust functionality with elegant design with data accuracy – all within budget and a desired launch date of yesterday.

The best business models are those which you solve a problem for a group of customers and they give you money in exchange for doing that for them. If the problems were were trying to solve were easy to solve and the integration of multiple considerations were easy – well – we’d either be doing it wrong or we wouldn’t be successful. I know that based on the quality of the discourse, the attention to detail, and a disposition towards evidence that we’re doing well. The market is voting and we’re winning.

Many of us come from a very orthodox user-centered design thinking school. Many of us come from a very orthodox product development lifecycle. Much work and time is spent doing aggressive inquiry – asking why somebody has come to a particular conclusion with a desire to understand. And when people not only come from very different professional backgrounds – but actually use different languages that within themselves have very specific meanings and biases – well – it’s all the more challenging. Much to the credit of the teams – there’s a lot more meaningful discourse aimed at solving very specific (and frequently wicked) problems.

Within socialTALK, a product that helps you manage and measure your social media presence and impact, we have an evidence based marketing experience. The initial version of that tab was designed to be very simple and laid out in an intuitive cause/effect, count and ratio, format. The initial dashboard communicated, clearly, that this is what you’re doing – and this is how people are responding. The evidence is right there. Subsequent versions of socialTALK are looking more robust – with the same attention to detail. When you put a lot of thought into it – it just naturally looks easy. (That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to actually make it that way!).

The ability to actually optimize the experience for your communities through a single interface is particularly exciting. The unification of reaction-action-reaction-action is coming together. I’m working extremely hard to make the experience of doing and learning and doing better again as elegant and clear as possible. In effect – working hard to solve your problem so you don’t have to.

The second reason why post activity has been reduced was eMetrics London. It was a whirlwind 48 hours – 18 of which were spent in airplanes and preparing for it. I went over. I listened. I said my piece. I was heard. I got some very good feedback.

In sum, I’ve been spending a lot of time feeding the shark and making sure the RPG is ready to go. Philosoraptor is always on my side.