13 Feb 09 Another vertical – Web analytics
I have added a second vertical slice to TwURLed News – web analytics. It is also available on Twitter at @TwURLedNewsWA. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that everything was dead for about 12 hours because my hosting company, Bluehost, shut it down for consuming too many CPU cycles. The culprit was a WordPress plugin that generates XML sitemaps. It was generating an updated sitemap for every post, with a fairly expensive MySQL query each time. No more. The plugin is set to only permit manual updates and I’ll trigger that every few hours, not at every posting. That should also make the site more responsive.
Live and learn.
Tags: sitemaps, twitter, web analytics, Wordpress
05 Dec 08 Measuring the value of point of view
Perhaps it is acceptable to be satisfied with today’s typical web metrics – page views, visits, conversion, even engagement in its many forms. They give us an idea of who is visiting, what they are doing and give some measure of the pulse of a community. These metrics can reveal informative trends – they certainly can alert us when something is wrong! However, I am not convinced that they show us when things are right.
As I have written here recently, I believe that the Internet’s world-transforming power arises from the incredibly low cost of sharing of points of view. Digitization and network have created information overload and now we get to figure out how to cope with the explosion by packaging and distributing points of view about which information matters.
The Internet arrived in a world where the vast majority of people received the vast majority of their information about the world beyond their immediate experience from advertising-based media, a highly consolidated industry that presented essentially one homogenized point of view – whatever attracted the most eyeballs.
Don’t misunderstand – I’m not arguing that everybody wants to see everybody else’s point of view. Some people aren’t even opinion leaders in their own homes! My argument is that even a relatively small increase in the number of available viewpoints can have a profound impact, especially when thinking is as homogenized as big media tends to be. If you don’t see this happening in today’s world, you aren’t paying attention.
So how do we measure the value of point of view? Start with the assumption that in any community, whether as tightly knit as a private mailing list or as wild and wide open as Facebook and Twitter, there are opinion leaders, people who have more influence than the rest. Figure out who they are by how often and how much others respond to them. Ultimately, I think that line of thinking leads to the idea of memes, ideas that move through community from one person to another. If there is a holy grail in social media analytics, I think it lies in our ability to track memes – in the commercial sphere, ideas about products, companies, brands and so forth – as they move through social media space, regardless of technological boundaries. Most of my work for the last eight years, starting with Opion (whose name came from a misspelling of “opinion” at a brainstorming session; now part of A.C. Nielsen), has been pointed in that direction, tempered by what is possible and what can be funded.
Tags: media, memes, point of view, web analytics
25 Nov 08 Medicine, vitamin or food?
As executives to look for places to save money, measuring web site outcomes becomes more important – at least to the people who do the measuring! Helping management resist the urge to cut analytics calls for knowing exactly why we do it. There is an old idea that products and services are either medicines that cure a illnesses or vitamins that maintain or increase health and strength. I’ll add a third category, food, without which none of us survive long.
If analytics is just food, expect your budget to be cut to the bone. Food, in my thinking, means that your company does analytics only because your competitors do. The problem with justifying your existence this way is that you’re a cost center. Costs are things that companies minimize, not places to invest. If analytics is funded and managed entirely out of your IT/Operations budget, face it, you’re food. You may have been gourmet food when times were good, but in this economy, if it isn’t rice and beans yet, it will be as soon as somebody takes a good look at spending.
Your job is more secure if you can show that analytics is a medicine and even more so if you’re a vitamin. If you are a medicine, your budget still might come out of IT, but you have the numbers to prove that without analytics, there will be trouble. If trouble would be in the form of reduced income, you can be reasonably sure that nobody will come at your budget with an axe. Well, not a big axe, anyway.
Aspire to be a vitamin. Numbers that show that investment in analytics increases revenue means job security in good times and bad. Even if your business is unable or unwilling to increase that investment, you’ll cause the people who hold the purse-strings to look elsewhere to do their cutting.
Tags: budget, web analytics
