Measuring Influence and so Attention – New York Times

April 23, 2011 at 6:06 am · Filed under Adoption, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Innovation, Interaction, Marketing, Measurement, Media, Network Effect, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Objects, journalism

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The Context of “Intent”

July 31, 2009 at 4:25 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Innovation, Intent, Interaction, Social Media, Web 2.0

Two differentiating attributes of 2.0 are adaptation and emergence. Adaptive systems rely on feedback loops for continuous assessment. Emergence is the result of self-organizing adaptation. The more fluid a solution architecture, the more readily it can adapt. But fluid architectures are not yet the norm and there will always be situations where more structure is needed. In both cases, we will still rely on individuals to call out a need for adaptation, effectively — change.

Collaborative Web 2.0 environments like getsatisfaction.com, while self-organizing — allowing people to solve problems among themselves — do not adapt. There is no real problem solving going on. People are either sharing information for things that aren’t really problems (lack of knowledge) or they’re devising workarounds. Until the workarounds are acknowledged, there will be no changes to really ‘fix’ the problem.

Consider the volume of money spent on marketing, sales and even customer service — all focused on gaining customers and business transactions. What ratio is that compared to money spent to ‘allow’ individuals to interact with a business, clearing the rubbish that gets in the way of people who ’show up’ to do business? I’d like to call this the intent ratio: how intent businesses are at addressing the intent of their consumers.  Companies might focus on measuring ‘retention’, but are inattentive to the business ‘machine’ and its health, starting with the points of interaction — the touchpoints — assessing them from the perspective of the individuals.

In Web1.0, one prevalent means of assessing interactions is via Web Analytics and Web Metrics. I hold the highest respect for two leaders in this space, namely Eric T. Peterson and Avinash Kaushik.

This work, however, is only part of a larger domain of interaction assessment: Design Research. This generic term applies equally to all interactions and related design (online and offline). For some audiences, I also use the label “Consumer Insight” (in E2.0, the predominant ‘consumer’ is the employee).

This model was devised to differentiate key research sources and related activities:

• Transactional Analytics
  For online interactions, this typically = clickstream. The clickstream captures the interaction or transaction. While relevant, this data is nearly useless in isolation. It lacks the necessary context to draw meaningful conclusions. Knowing how many people visited a site is not nearly as relevant as why they visited (intent) and how successful they felt they were. Having a heartbeat tells you little about your health.
• Behavioral Analytics
  This is the marriage of action and intent. If you don’t know why people are interacting with the business, little can be inferred about their actions. Some transactional (clickstream) tools infer intent — stacking one inference on another — the potential for erroneous conclusions exponentiates. Knowing the intent is also useless without the transaction — there is no way to truly assess the say/do gap (which is often significant).
• Feedback Loops
  While most of what we’re talking about here can be considered feedback, this is called out to address two specific goals: gathering data from all the touchpoints and intentionally designing better loops in the touchpoints. This is a huge area of focus: key touchpoints are typically buried in divergent/competing organizations (website, customer service, call center, sales, marketing — for employees, the touchpoints of interaction are less well-defined). Coordinating a total experience and the feedback associated with all touchpoints is a major undertaking. Often the touchpoints don’t gather relevant feedback, they focus too much on ‘resolving’ an issue and not ’solving’ it. The ’solving’ of repeated issues doesn’t happen where there is no awareness. Awareness comes from the synthesis and sharing of the findings.
• Usability Studies
  I’m not an advocate of usability studies because they are isolated from many relevant factors, are often laden with prescribed intents, and people tend not to be as ‘honest’ as is needed. If they’ve already been done, leverage the relevant findings. Most real ‘usability’ issues can be identified via the other methods. Usability studies may still be valid for production models that rely on major releases (as opposed to the continuous change of 2.0) or for situations where no other form of research is possible.
• Ethnographic Discovery
  One of the best ways to gather relevant context — observing and/or talking to people as they engage in an activity — it can provide rich insight. There is often relevant contextual findings gathered during projects, but it is rarely synthesized/packaged and made available for others (it often gets buried, repurposed as requirements — focusing on the ‘what’ not the ‘why’).

Most companies I’ve been exposed to, either:

• Address none of these to any real degree
• Focus on Transactional Analytics only (e.g. clickstream)
• Focus on some aspect of several, but in isolation from each other
• Rely on ‘market research’ methods (ineffective here)
• Fail to collectively capture, synthesize and leverage the findings

The goal is to bring together relevant facts to inform discovery (the possibilities) that then lead to design — especially adaptive design to support individuals interacting with or on behalf of a business. Such facts are often difficult to find and difficult to effectively interpret and leverage — the barriers to ‘use’ are too high. Lowering these barriers is game-changing.

Various technologies (esp. web analytics) often include dashboards. Such dashboards include relevant data but they often include data focused on Search Engine Optimization and performance, which is of lesser relevance here.

For this model there’s potential for a collection (a dashboard might be one form) with related details and views that continuously offer and highlight new findings across various touchpoints. A more 2.0 approach would bring the facts into the context they’re related to, featuring (draw attention to via teasers) certain findings in tidbits, leading to more detail. Set up as an open ’social’ collection, individuals can share their discoveries and be the storytellers of what they’ve witnessed by both introducing new discovery findings or commenting on the data gathered from the touchpoints: a conversation flowing on the stream of work.

By bringing together the ‘witness’ of both automated touchpoints and human reports, the health of the business machine is given a ‘voice’ — the implicit becomes more explicit, providing a context and a means to:

• Suggest new actions or changes
  (inherently different than the ‘idea’ model for innovation)
• Validate proposed changes

If an E2.0 initiative does not include provisions for such context, wherein does adaptation occur? If not adaptive, is it 2.0?

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Size Matters – When Small is Big

March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Barriers, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, Metadata, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted – he wanted to be a retailer – but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields – not the least in Social Media – tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there – how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of – who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site – it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care – Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web – he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is – an open and vulnerable man – is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist – this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision – the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is – the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is – the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

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What will drive the change in media? Measurement and Money

March 27, 2008 at 6:04 am · Filed under Analytics, Brian Hurlburt, Google, Measurement, Social Media, Video, YouTube

Today Google announce that content providers on YouTube will get real time analytics form those who watch the video. In TV terms – real time personal ratings!(NYT)

In a move to provide better data to its users, YouTube formally announced late Wednesday that it had added a free feature that will show video creators when and where viewers are watching their videos. With this, the company hopes to turn YouTube from an online video site into a place where marketers can test their messages, Tracy Chan, YouTube product manager, said.

This program, called YouTube Insight, provides a detailed view of a video’s popularity, both over time and geographically, broken down by state. (Internationally, YouTube Insight is not as insightful, providing only popularity by country.)

YouTube has provided basic analytical information to creators of videos since its introduction, including the number of views, the viewers’ ratings of the video, and the number of comments left. Advertisers received a slightly more sophisticated summary.

With the Insight information, video creators can dig into the specifics of a video’s performance and find, for example, that it peaks on Fridays in winter months, or it has taken several weeks to get traction — information that can help better promote their work. The information, presented as a color-coded map and a graph of a video’s popularity, is accessible through a link from a video creator’s account page on YouTube. The company will update the data once a day.

What does this mean? How will this accelerate the shift from traditional to social media?

[photopress:yarmouthweb.png,full,centered]

Next week I will be publishing an interview with Brian Hurlburt who is doing a Sam Walton in local news/publishing in Yarmouth Nova Scotia. Brian has become the most important source of what is going on in a small town. One of the most important tools in Brian’s kit bag is measurement. He can show the local B & B, the church group, the activist group, the tourism folks what kind of traction they are getting on the web. They know exactly who is looking at them and how and why. Of course traditional advertising cannot do this.

Brian’s story I think is at the heart of the shift to come and the YouTube announcement fits into this context.

Brian’s experience is telling him that the money will leave the traditional media once there is only an initial base of people online. They will go to the new, even when the pool is not that large because what is there is so clearly measurable.

For isn’t mass media is really a lottery? Even when you win, you may not know enough about what happened. But with highly measurable new media, you can refine and refine until you get exactly what you want.

Now a small business in a small town can have TV ads. Access to the media itself is cheap. Making the video is cheap. With measurement you can tailor the offering to suit you best. Now even large businesses can have video ads that are fully measurable.

Why would you pay a regular TV station or a local newspaper for an offering that costs so much more and where you have no idea what will happen?

I think that we are going to see a major move here. I think that, just as Craigslist gutted Personals, so measurable web-based media will gut the rest of mass advertising. As the money flows so will the attention and the shift to online will accelerate.

The money will move because of measurement and it will move before the masses move to online. There is less time to respond that conventional TV, Radio and Print think.

This is surely why Google are working so hard on Analytics.

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Tom Davenport, consultant, author

February 19, 2008 at 1:56 pm · Filed under Analytics, Enterprise 2.0

Tom discusses the use of analytics in the corporate world and what it takes to get people up to speed with the tools.

Bio: Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, is an Accenture Fellow, has been ranked by Consulting magazine as one of the world’s Top 25 consultants, and is the author of a widely respected string of books on the evolving workplace of today’s knowledge workers. His 2007 book, Competing on Analytics, has won wide acclaim. He continues to practice at the forefront of research and thought leadership on issues confronting the information worker of tomorrow.

 

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