The obvious agenda of the next Toronto Web Analytics Wednesday is pretty obvious. When passionate developers get together, they usually hack. What happens when passionate analysts get together? That’s the question. I’ve put out a pretty basic call – bring 25 copies of a single sheet of paper to the next WAW. Have 3 bullet points and supporting data. Be prepared to distribute it and talk about what you found. It is indeed homework prior to the next one. It’s an opportunity for analysts to move beyond talking about web analytics to sharing what they do. There are loads of open data sets out there, with very, very rich datasets. Never before has there been so much opportunity. To that[…]
Shaking the next Web Analytics Wednesday, at Bar Wellington – second floor. You’re invited to bring 25 copies of a single sheet of paper that contains: Three bullet points of analysis, preferably with an actionable recommendation or finding Data that supports your analysis A reference to the data source Your name, company, contact info, website, blog, twitter handle, and so on It’s not a dashboard. It’s web ANALYTICS wednesday. Why? You’ll leave with something in your hand and feel smarter for experience. We rarely get a chance to share our craft with other practitioners. Why shouldn’t practitioners have a chance to put up? The agenda We’ll start at 6:30pm and we’ll get up and move around with our sheets. You’re[…]
One of the most instructive papers on serial innovation comes out of left field from Griffin, Hoffmann, Price and Vojak – the latter three out of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. (Which will bring a smile to regular readers of this space.) Their paper doesn’t reference Roger Martin, but it confirms much of what he’s described about the saliency phase of opposable thinking. The best piece that I’ve taken away from the paper is the definition of an Interesting Problem. A problem is deemed interesting only if: The firm can actually solve it and management accept the solution. (Feasibility) Customers will pay to have that problem solved. (Marketability) Will it be a big deal for the firm. (Impact) Prepare to[…]
It was only towards the tail end of the second year of university when anybody tells you about the pearson tables. It’s a glorious thing, all alone in there, hidden away in PASW. You run it for a number of variables, and it gives you a beautiful matrix showing the strength and direction of relationships among them. It can be disastrously misleading. Violence can dull sensitivity. Still, it can be used to rapidly validate mental models and rule others out. I cope when I’m confronted with a large dataset. I identify what is it that I’m trying to figure out. Then lay out all the independent variables that I think might relate into explaining that variation in something dependent. I[…]
Today is Steve Miller’s last day at Syncapse. He’s taking some time to enjoy the experience of welcoming his first child into the world. 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[…]
Fun was had by all – there were quite a few people from out of town who came out – and a very diverse group appeared to get along well. The venue of The Counter went over well, and will probably be the preferred place for crowds in the 35 person range. There were a couple of inside-track discussions, and I think we’re in for quite a shakeup in the next couple months. One theme that continued to come up are challenges in overlap and general effectiveness of our programs. Complaints about unresponsive institutions continue to roil, yet some wins were celebrated. We toasted Mike Sukmanowski’s victory in what appears to be a clean install of Omniture over at the[…]
Tonight’s edition of Web Analytics Wednesday Toronto is taking place at The Counter. A new venue that we’re going to try out. I’ve invited web analysts to get together with IA’s, Data Miners, Dev’s, and, for the first time in a long while, Creatives. Only good can come out of that sort of interaction. The openly visible agenda is all about forming weak ties. People getting together over beer and wine, talking to other people with a totally different perspective, in small groups, in an honest exchange, is valuable. It doesn’t happen very often because of the tendency to keep to ones own. I look forward to meeting everybody.
Yesterday I participated in my first TTMM event, and spoke on ROI. Like any first contact situation, you know they have their points of view, value systems, and language. And the least you can do is have knowledge of why you think the way you do, and why. I told the story about how different versions of ROI is rooted well before anybody in the room had been born. And it’s such a contentious issue because it goes directly to one’s being. ROI is the reflection of your own worth to an organization, and naturally, as such, it’s going to be contended. The approach taken in the Syncapse Value of a Fan study was selected for a very specific reason[…]
What kind of Return can you expect from Social Media? The legitimacy of the answer has a lot to do with your mental model of the world. When I talked first in this space about it in January, I made the distinction between how Direct people and Brand people would answer the question. It turns out that the difference predates the invention of Radio and TV as mass mediums. There was a difference between Claude C. Hopkins approached it, and how Earnest Calkins approached it, as far back as 1890. Hopkins argued for the hard sell and scientific advertising. Hopkins view of time was narrow, short-term, and of instant reaction. Calkins argued for the soft sell and branding. Calkins view[…]
There’s a new type of HTTP cookie that exploits an HTML5 hack. The long and short of it is that the cookie becomes immortal. The cookie is capable of leaping across browsers on your computer. It re-instates itself after a user has deleted it. It’s not right. And analysts should reject it. I’ve long been dissatisfied with the concept of ‘unique visitor’, by and large because it’s a highly unstable proxy measure for a person. People go into private browsing during key points in their day, anti-virus programs tend to root out these ‘tracking cookies’ as malware. and owing to an unfortunate three fiddy event in 2000 – people of a certain demography routinely clear their cookies. A commenter on[…]