Get “Officially Good” at Analytics
For digital managers, being analytics savvy is as much an executive requirement as financial acumen. Though most management programs don’t focus on web analytics, there is a straightforward way to get a great introduction through the world’s most-used system: Google Analytics.

Last year, Google started Conversion University, which provides a comprehensive set of free online presentations. As discussed in an earlier post, user skills are what really drives web analytics success. The leading web analytics systems, Omniture, Webtrends and Unica, use similar methods.  The systems are largely interchangeable; getting a grasp of one will benefit your use of any of them.

Your proficiency can be validated and recognized through Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) certification. And yes, there’s even a logo and certificate suitable for refrigerator display.

Last year I took my team for training, and then encouraged them to pursue certification.  So last weekend I finally took my own advice and completed the training program and qualified on the exam.  I did it all in one night, while solo-parenting my kids.  This made it intense, but a great goal. If you’re motivated, it’s a program I’d enthusiastically recommend. Just take your time (unless, like me, you sort of dig intensity).

What You Should Know Before Taking the Google Analytics Certification Exam
You should already be using Google Analytics daily to manage the digital operation of something. Seriously, if you’re interested in this medium, start using this in your work, or start a personal project. There’s no better substitute for learning a tool than using it every day.

Continued

Back in July of 2008 we covered the story of Terry Childs, a network administrator for the City of San Francisco, who was imprisoned after taking sole control of the city’s network.  Though services were not interrupted, he locked out the rest of the city’s IT staff from the city’s network.

After the Mayor of San Francisco  secretly met with him in prison, Mr. Childs provided the new password, which allowed other city employees access after nearly two weeks of being closed out.

Information Week has details of the conviction and sentencing, which could range from release to a five-year prison sentence for computer crime.

Imagine you’re at a digital marketing conference today; there are four sessions about to start.

Come on in.

• Are Online Marketers Over-Spending On Acquisition? Yep!
• Is Simplicity the Good Manners of Our Age? Laws of Simplicity and Simplicity in Laws
• Website Competitive Intelligence: Don’t Manage to Bogus Data
• Add Video to Your Marketing Mix Now: 10 Reasons Why Even in B2B “Reading is for Suckers”.

In case you haven’t noticed, these are spectacular days for Apple.  Its stock is trading at an all-time high, and its last report to the street showed a 90 percent increase in profits.

In fact, Apple’s  growth has made it a challenger to Microsoft in terms of market valuation.  The chart to the right shows the growth rate of their valuation and highlights Apple’s tremendous success in popularizing new categories of technology. S&P now lists Apple ahead of Microsoft on the S&P 500 Index, which uses factors beyond capitalization.

Analysts have upgraded iPad sales forecasts to 5.5 million units over its first year, with “the ultimate near-term upside primarily limited by components/supply.”  Realistically, this growth rate will cool, and Apple will have growing pains. However, iTunes, iPhone, and now the iPad show the company knows how to grow in new directions.

Charting iPad sales through analytics
A month ago, industry analysts concluded that Apple’s iPad sales estimates were wrong. And so the game to guess the correct iPad sales number began. Some visited stores; others gathered sales estimates through store and credit card data.

Chitika Labs took the approach of wildlife biologists monitoring a species. They began sampling what happens in part of the Internet, and then used that data to calculate the the total population of the “new species.” See their real time iPad sales estimate here.  As of a few moments ago, they estimated 969,660 units have been sold.

This is an interesting case of web traffic analytics being used to validate the market of a new technology.  Watch for Apple’s Safari browser to battle for third place with Google’s Chrome.  And Apple just announced its  continued plans to keep Adobe Flash off the iPad and iPhone, as it continues to promote its own media viewer, QuickTime, as an alternative.

Yes, while on vacation I watched the Oscars and cheered this film’s victory.

Logorama is festooned with trademark and copyright questions, right down to the Shapard Fairey “OBEY” street art in the background on a scene. During my time with trademark research firm Thomson CompuMark, we used to see how many trademarks we could spot in different environments. This film is that game wrapped up as a somewhat violent film that asks the question, “Aren’t we all products too?”

Trademarks are, after all, romance.  And I’m thrilled to have found code for online viewing again.

Digital marketing is different from traditional media channels because it is inherently measurable.

All the other great attributes of this channel — user participation, mobility, video, personal networks — are built on top of this quantifiable benefit. Measurability is our medium’s killer app.

So why do most organizations and websites fail to use web analytics effectively?

Here are the myths digital marketers need to recognize (and combat) in order to deliver on the promise of accountable marketing investments that can be improved over time.

1. Analytics Requires a Specialist
   If you are a digital marketer, you need to measure how your content (tweeting, emailing, or whatever it is you do) contributes to business goals.  Nobody will have richer insights about your campaigns than you. In order to actively manage your piece of the online business, you need direct access to analytics.
2. Web Analytic Success is Technology, and it’s Automatic
   Most companies with analytics code on their pages have never set a goal, instituted filtering, or defined visitor segments.  Web analytics is no more automatic than business intelligence is.  CMS project success is 20 percent determined by tool selection and 80 percent driven by training, culture, planning and governance.  Web analytics success is driven by the same factors.
3. Having the Best Tools Provides an Advantage
   Nope. Having the best people drives insight and success. While some tools may have more built-in testing or quantitative capabilities, these are peripheral. Arguing that advantage is based on system is like arguing that the Special Forces are a deadly fighting unit because of their gear.  Marines can kill with a spoon; a good analyst can use Google Analytics and Excel to optimize your business.
4. Sitewide Dashboard Stats Matter.
   Pages have different purposes. Audiences segments have different goals. Mixing them together dilutes an analyst’s ability to spot actionable factors.  Knowing the average AMEX bill may be interesting; knowing your own bill is actionable.

These myths are cutting marketers off from using online measurability to foster accountability for driving new business revenue.  Social media has been desperate for this over the last year — and so are the businesses investing in digital initiatives.

Give your business a competitive advantage, dedicate staff power to gaining analytic insight.

Take a lesson from social media
Don’t consolidate web analytics tools or expertise to just a few users. Over the last few months I’ve established and trained several dozen new internal web analytics users.

Bringing colleagues in to the mix has been empowering for everyone.  Why?  More people can do the heavy lifting of turning data in to reports, and there are more hypotheses and insights we can turn in to next steps.  More brains and eyes are a winning combination, and we’re seeing that on a daily basis.

In the cloud, nobody can tell if you’re a web page.

In talking with people about the post The Siteless Web and the End of Brand Website Rule: Web 3.0, I found myself suggesting that online visitors will encounter us through three types of experiences:

1. Sites we control: traditional, publishing-based information distribution.
2. Sites others control: content and social networks that put our message under others’ control.
3. Applications: either as interface, such as Tweetdeck, or as aggregation point, such as Salesforce.

Of course, sites others control are quite likely driven by applications.  Facebook is an application; so is Google search. But they typically appear to users as websites.

The move away from a page-based user-experience to an application metaphor has been slowly approaching for years. The “portal” was said to break that metaphor.  Same with the idea of the application put on online and sold as a service. This has been a slow shift.  Video, AJAX, and data-driven services all exceed the page metaphor. It’s been hanging by a thread for some time.

However, there is a huge change happening in how people access the web. The move from “screen” to “hand-held” is the continental divide that will shift development away from the page metaphor.

• 75% of Twitter access doesn’t come through its web page at all. It’s through API-integrated applications, which provide a richer, easier-to-use application-type experience, particularly via mobile devices.
• Consider the proliferation of mobile applications for iPhone and iPad – the internet will be increasingly used as a medium for people interacting with applications, not browsers and HTML pages.

The Web Has No Pages, Really.
Web pages are not pages at all. In some ways they are still inferior to their printer counterparts.  Turning a page is instant; loading a page is still far from that. Viewing a page is consistent with the designer’s execution, while web pages render in a variety of ways, based on programming and browser technology.

As we move from the screen to hand display, we will consume ever more information through applications.  They provide more consistent, space-concentrated, responsive user experiences.  Web and application design will completely overlap.

Will Corporate and Brand Websites Still Have a Place?
Continued

Online changes seem to happen quickly, but their beginnings are often apparent years in advance. And legal factors provide signals to business about the stability of these new systems.

This is an idea I hope we can start to discuss in all the places we talk about the future of the Web.

It is from one of this blog’s first posts, in 2007, Web 3.0 – Envisioning the Web’s Next Big Change.

Here’s the idea:

Web 3.0 will be characterized by integration of the web into application-driven experiences. If user-generated content is a mainstay of 2.0 – then machine integrated content is the base of Web 3.0.

The result will be a web experience that at first is highly distributed and less centered on home pages. This, I believe, will easily transition to applications experiences that don’t rely on the conventions of pages, sites, or even being online.

This systematic integration is already changing the web.

• Its technical drivers include the use of XML, ASP business models, open id/federated identity, rich media applications and open APIs. (Think of Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter).
• Its legal driver is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Web 2.0 is enabled through this provisions subsidy of legal immunity for republishers.)
  
• Its market drivers include the desire to organize and unify (mash-up) information from distributed sources such as social networks to create consolidated user experiences (think Salesforce and Hootsuite).

In many cases (Web 3.0) won’t appear to be the Web at all. Applications will consume and produce public web content — but the user experience will be increasingly mediated. The online experience will be increasingly an application experience.

In a Web 2.0 world, brands built their own sites, and customers said what brands stood on them and on social sites. In a Web 3.o world, the concept of specific sites evolves into offsite experiences and mash-ups that integrate content.

The Web 3.0 world is less about place (or domain) than voice and identity.

Section 230 Protection Is a Root of the Siteless Web
As this is both a legal and tech blog, I should point out that most of the “siteless web” today is hugely “subsidized” by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Our current connected network of application sites that aggregate or host ideas contributed by others would likely not exist without this legal structure.

Example 1: Brand Sites Don’t Frame Brands; Web Applications Like Search and Social Media Do.
Go type Modernista.com into Google. Click on the first result.

Modernista! doesn’t produce or promote a home website at all. It has created an interface to the web.

The firm’s customers make a considered purchase that is more influenced by what others say than how an agency describes itself on its brand sites.

The Modernista! site is an interface to a distributed set of links to other websites. Their “About Us” section is Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter. Their portfolio is on Delicious.  Their news section is what Google News and Google Blog Search say about them.

Their authority is not from the endorsement of these sites. It is from the ideas posted by those who use them. Modernista!’s credibility comes from the sites they don’t control — and ironically, those sites don’t control the content either.

The truth from outside the company can be rewarding and risky.

Did they just win an award, lose an account, post an idea? Customers know that truth and brand are in fact different things. Modernista! realized this early, and has managed to that new reality.

Example 2: Brands Migrate Off-Site to “Fish Where the Fish Are.”
Some businesses are choosing to skip building their own sites or to promote their off-site presences ahead of the brand website.

The kayak rental shop I went to on vacation decided to forego the work of building, maintaining, and promoting its own site.

Instead, it set up an easy-to-remember Meetup account and positioned itself where its demographic was already going.

In the past, brand sites have tried to build their own communities. Most failed. Brands aren’t naturally good at aggregating audiences, and most people are too busy to create multiple identities in what are essentially walled gardens run by beer companies, film distributors, or potential lawyers.

But what if brands were in social networks with their clients, and brought something of value to the party? It is easier to do this, and the market-reach results are greater.

Continued

This is  a story about Eric and Jack, who both blog about the law with an eye on topics that are enlightening, ennobling, or at least entertaining.

By now you’ve probably heard about Eric Turkewitz, who wrote an April 1st post in his NY Personal Injury Law Blog announcing he was the new Whitehouse blogger. He recruited other legal bloggers to echo the post, so they could punk unsuspecting political bloggers who type first and check facts later.

The stunt captured a wider set of dupes than expected. In fact, none other than the New York Times ran with the story. Suddenly, the little geeky joke was everywhere. Here’s Turkewitz’s explanation of the stunt.

Why the hell would I go to all this trouble for an April Fools’ stunt?

I’m glad you asked: Lawyers often deal with misery. Peoples’ lives can be forever changed in a fraction of a second in an accident. Divorce. Child custody. Bankruptcy. Arrests. There is no real end to the chain of human misery that clients bring to the doors of practicing attorneys.

Eric’s explanation matches my own for blogging. Personal injury law is how people and families attempt to recover when they “become statistics” though no fault of their own. I hear about explosions, poisonings, fraud, catastrophic medical errors, and — toughest of all — kids whose lives will be forever framed by the careless act of another. I understand the need for a joke, and I try to provide some of that here. In my opinion, lawyers with character rock. I’m fortunate to know more than a few of them.

Can’t a Lawyer Make a Joke?
After the joke, the recriminations began. After all, reminded Jack Marshall of the EthicsAlarms blog, lawyer advertising is  highly regulated. Counselor Turkewitz misrepresented himself, and the codes of legal conduct are not suspended on April Fools’ Day.  This both put Turkewitz’s professional livelihood and reputation at risk and made Mr. Marshall the target of vitriol for being a complete April Fools’ Grinch.

Continued

Last week, UsefulArts had its 1,000th subscriber join us on Twitter.  For those of you who have encouraged me, thanks. Its been fun joining you on Twitter!

If you’re a new reader from Twitter, welcome. And thank you to everyone who has pointed out topics,  and kicked around first takes on ideas that later show up as full posts here.

Likewise, if you use Twitter, please come on by to @usefularts, and say hello. I’m looking forward to reading your Tweets, and hearing new voices in our discussion of legal, advertising and online branding issues.

All the best,
Dave Wieneke