Jascha's Blog

The Industrial Revolution gave rise to the middle class’s social equality becoming comparable (albeit within the often harrowing conditions of the then modern-day workplace) with the then ‘noble’ class. In the same way that the technological advancements led by textile manufacturers, metalurgy, and mining distributed the financial juices for social mobility to a greater number of people, we find ourselves in an oddly similar pattern of revolution empowered by social networks like Twitter, Facebook and their peers.

The information revolution lead by Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft has made a limited number of sources king by defining social equity largely through the empowerment of ‘link juice’, aka SEO. When we want to find something we ‘Google it.’

Social networks have introduced a new source for social equity, and what is arising from that equity is social equality. They empower the middle classes to communicate with the masses, so to speak. Last week’s news of the paid inclusion of Twitter feeds on Google and Bing searches could change the effect of the kings of information on social relationships for good. Just as we now talk about the importance of link juice (and often complain about the tactics people use to pursue it), will we soon speak of “Tweet juice”?

Will this force us to question the authenticity of our social relationships? There is an organic quality to the growth of social networks, but the lure of Tweet juice injects an unprecedented level of self-interest into the social web. How will the nature of our online social interactions change when we must wonder whether someone is following us earnestly or whether they’re using us for our Tweet juice? Will Tweets become a commodity, with hash tags and handles bought and sold in the social media marketplace?

Will this, in other words, mark the rise of social capital?

Last week at the Web 2.0 summit, Microsoft and Google announced the integration of Twitter’s search results into their search streams, effectively pushing their customer experiences closer to real time. While on the surface this seems to be a benefit for users of their services, the preceding weeks surfaced some confounding positions by the two software juggernauts, namely the submission to pay Twitter for access to their information and, therefore, mine (and yours if you use a non-protected Twitter account).

Clearly there are multiple angles one could take in response to this movement. I for one am still on the fence as to my position…so let’s review some of the gestating ideas:

• Google has fought copyright lawsuits in the past for indexing content. Now they’ve set a precedent and demonstrated that they’re willing to pay to index content. This could potentially be leveraged against them in future or ongoing lawsuits.
• Microsoft, on the other hand, has paid to index content in the past. Is this another sign of Google chasing the tail lights of Microsoft, which seems to be more prevalent these days?
• Conspiracy theory angle: Google wants to digitize and tag all the world’s information. This is another step down that path. Should we expect to see Google pay to index Facebook, MySpace, etc.? What are the implications of having the world’s social data at your disposal? Also, does indexing social content devalue the ‘closed’ social network over time?
• What will including paid content do to the integrity of search rankings? If you’re paying to index content, you’d want to make sure it was delivered enough to justify the purchase, right?
• As Twitter data makes its way into direct search results and also starts influencing ranking signals, SEO success will become inextricably linked to Twitter success (a practice that Justin calls SSO). Should we expect that Ashton Kutcher will become the king of SEO as he current sits atop the largest twitter following? If so, what impact will that have on his relationships?

As we each grow our own social influence through creating content on our blogs, Facebook, Twitter and creating a following within those channels; are we seeing the growth of social capital as a new means of wealth in modern day marketing? What are your thoughts?

Running a business is hard.

"Analytics...form the connective tissue."

The ecosystem surrounding a business – developing IP, building a brand, motivating people, managing operations – often appears disjointed. We employ separate technologies, have separate (often competing) departments, separate sets of processes, even separate offices. Thus it’s easy to forget that business does indeed operate within an ecosystem, that all these seemingly separate entities must work together to make business flourish. Managing your business ecosystem is hard, but truly successful business – that is, to understand the problems we’re solving and take care of our customers:

1) They understand the business problem they are solving.
2) They take care of their customers.
3) They innovate.

All of our businesses have problems, whether they’re related to internal processes or those of our customers, and we face an ever-widening array of tools we can use to address them within the business ecosystem. Analytics are one of the most basic parts of that ecosystem. They form the connective tissue that intertwines with marketing automation, multivariate testing, business intelligence and a bevy of maturing technologies that make it easier for us to run a successful business that understands the problem they are solving and takes care of their customers.

Yet all too often there is an expectation that analytics are removed from your business. That they are a business within your business. That only from identifying separate processes and separate resources can analytics be successful. I’ve heard businesses say more times that I care to share in the last year that they need to “make analytics successful.” We’ve got it wrong.

Technology can’t be beneficial to your business if it operates in a vacuum of resources and expertise. Maybe your business can be stronger with the newer tools (or maybe the new tools get in your way), but they can’t replace a good recipe and a skilled cook.

Success happens because of people and process supported by technology, not technology in and of itself. Web Analytics is not hard, running your business is. I think you’ll agree, however, that when operating within the context of a well-run business ecosystem, analytics can help you solve your business problems better, take better care of your customers and support innovation. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be exploring how marketing plays a role in a successful business. How the practice of marketing iteration is practiced and how it is supported by a recipe of analytics, mvt, a myriad of emerging technologies and, most importantly, skilled cooks.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what makes your business hard, what challenges you are facing, and how you use process and technology (like analytics) to make your business better.

What a day! I spent it at the eMetrics conference in San Jose. It was really nice to see Jim Sterne continuing to evangelize the growth of the industry, to proselytize that this ‘this is our time’ as an industry, and as individuals, to step up and lead the maturation of our industry. It’s been great for me to have a chance to meet up with people I have a tremendous amount of respect for and don’t get to see every day like: David Alston, Douglas Karr, Anil Batra and I’ve had a chance to meet people that I’ve not had the chance yet like Jason Burby, Sean Powers and Richard Sim.

In all, it’s hard to find a more targeted audience that has the know-how, the experience, and the passion for analytics that this crowd does. At the same time, I was disappointed not to see more of our industry influencers here. It appears that the economy has taken it’s toll as I was told by the eMetrics staff that and that many attendees backed out at the last minute. Regardless, I was glad that I attended.

At events like eMetrics we talk about taking a step forward as an industry, together. Yet not everyone’s actions speak the same voice. In my observations I’ve seen some unfortunate behavior that I believe has the potential to kill the industry from the inside out if it isn’t culled. A few weeks ago, Omniture’s CEO Josh James called competitors in the industry ‘nuisances.’ Here in San Jose, Omniture decided to not wear our sponsored lanyards in favor of their own. I’m not sure if it is company policy or just in bad taste by the team in attendance but it is my opinion that respecting your competition means embracing them when it is appropriate. At an industry conference shedding something as innocuous as a sponsored lanyard in favor of your own is an unfortunate act.

I for one respect my competition. Their ideas, their capabilities, their people.

hang up the gloves to champion the industry

For example, I love what Google is doing with APIs. I wrote about it on my blog.  I applaud Google Analytics’ community evangelist Avinash Kaushik for publicly complimenting us in twitter and on our blog in a position piece about Webtrends Social Measurement and the sentiment tracking. It’s time we realize that if we don’t grow up and work together our industry will suffer as a whole. Standards, benchmarks, best practices, and models are our real challenges. Not so much each other. We still have market share to reach before we need to worry about a grudge match.

Today we offered the Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3) to provide a framework and objective criteria for assessing the strategies, skills, tools and best practices that support the successful measurement of all digital marketing activities. The other industry models focus exclusively on web site measurement. The Webtrends Digital Marketing Optimization team developed the model based on 15 years of experience helping top brands build successful measurement programs. We’d love to talk more with everyone about the DM3. We’d love to support work that our partners and competitors are doing to push this industry as a whole forward. What initiatives are you working on that you’d like to see more Webtrends support? What initiatives do you think we as an industry need to get behind?

At Webtrends, we’re excited about the announcement of Google Analytics public beta for their Data Export API.  Why would we be excited?  It’s simple really, because we understand that value is derived not solely from the data, but the insights you get from this data that lead you to action.  Action enabled through integration of the data into enterprise systems and processes of YOUR business. 

Gone are the days of the all-in-one suite falsely promising it can be everything to everyone.  Today’s business owners should refuse to pay for the convenience of getting at their data through vendor APIs. We launched public beta of our web services on April 7, and customer response has been fantastic – we have about 20 times more accounts (customer and developer/technology partner) enabled today than we did at the end of our private beta period a few weeks back.  The release of the Google API a few days ago reinforces all the reasons we were so excited to announce the Open Exchange to our customers.  We believe you should be able to get to your data in a way that makes sense to your business and that includes the integration of the data into tools/processes that provide true meaning of the data – whether it is a complex business intelligence tool or Microsoft Excel, a tool that most people use every day.  Providing unfettered access to your data is why we announced Open Exchange at our Engage customer conference a few weeks ago and why we talked about it during our seminar series last November.  Having Google join us in this effort is exciting.

We believe that our new web services, and the developer network community we launched, provide powerful tools for integrating Webtrends data with everything from Excel or your own custom reporting apps and everything in between.  We created these new web services so that our customers can:

• Build their own powerful applications by integrating data directly in to their apps. Custom dashboards, widgets, and analytics apps just got a lot smarter with REST URL methods
• Build dashboards in Excel by bringing in live data from your Analytics reports. In Excel, you can use the “import from web” option to import report data.

Why build something that makes it easier to get data into Excel?  Excel is the most widely used analytics tool in the world.  Fortune 100 companies to small businesses us it to analyze, understand, and present this data throughout their organization.  A typical barrier is that most business users aren’t programmers or developers, and think that REST is something your body gets at night when you are asleep.  We had a challenge to ensure that our business users could take full advantage of our new REST API from within Excel.  To support the typical business user, we developed the REST URL Generator tool as part of the new web services.  Check it out and see how easy it is to get this data out of Webtrends and into Excel.

So maybe you are reading this and thinking you’re a programmer, what’s in this for me?  The same powerful and elegant solution we’ve created for business users is what we’ve set out to accomplish for developers as well.  As I mentioned, we’re using REST, which is a powerful standard that is widely accepted to program on. Our simple XML and JSON formats are easy to consume into applications you can build.  The JSON format is a less verbose option than XML, which will make performance better for applications that can consume it.  Plus we have an Excel-specific XML format to make data appear in Excel the way you want it to – in case you are programmer building powerful Excel applications for business users described above.

Open Exchange doesn’t end with web services.  We’ve released enhancements to our solution for managing the complexity of javascript tagging, Tag Builder, to allow for easier partner connections and more efficient tag management.  We’re building a new Data Collection API to further enable customers to derive value from our partners, which will be out in beta this summer.

In all we believe that the future of the analytics industry is going to be driven by enabling customers to get their data, in a way that works for their business, that gets them to insight and leads to action.  We fully expect that all the other players in the analytics space will be moving this direction too.  We welcome it because it ultimately benefits our customers – and that is what truly excites us.

I imagine that I’m not alone in that I depend on several communication clients: Outlook for email, Jive & SharePoint for collaboration, Tweetdeck for Twitter, Trillian (Y!, Live, GTalk, and Office Communicator if the network isn’t letting Trillian work) for IM, iPhone for text messaging, WordPress for my blog, and Netvibes for feeds.

I’m not sure that integrating all of these communication channels requires integration at the protocol or web services level. That might be nice, if possible…but it probably isn’t.

What I do believe is that we need to keep track of all of our conversations in a better client. So, to restate the title of this post in a different way:

Why isn’t there one communication client that works with all these protocols?

Why all the fuss? Why do I care? Why should you care? Why is this painful?

If only ____ would work with ____!!!!!

Let’s take Twitter as an example. I have no archive of my previous Tweets; nothing in a usable way as I do for sent email. I can’t see threaded discussion like I can with collaboration software. I’ve seen attempts at it, but nothing that can be depended on for business. Email, on the otherhand, solved these problems long ago — and did it on the client side.

It seems to me that, after looking at the components of the various message formats, they share a common pattern. They are either single part or multi-part discussions:

Single part examples:

• Twitter
• SMS
• IM

Multi-part examples:

• Email
• Blog posts
• Feeds
• Collaboration Software

Some have attachments. Some have addresses. Some have meta data like tags. I don’t think I’m oversimplifying it in believing a single data entry form could cover them all.

As a communicator, I need solutions that allow me to live a layer above the protocols. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a luddite…and am always trying to stay ontop of what is the latest and greatest tool for my trade. I just want software to do the heavy lifting of staying on top of protocols for me.

Who do I think is best positioned to create the universal communication client?

The Leaders

Microsoft’s Outlook already integrates RSS feeds. They also have a calendar, address book, and project management features. Now they just need IM, Twitter, mobile, and a blog editor. The drawbacks are that it’s not consistent between Mac and PC and, even with the advances with their 2007 release, still needs a more refined UX.

Tweetdeck is on it’s way with support for multiple services such as Twitter, 12seconds.tv, Scoop, and more. They have good integration for adjacent services like URL shortening and media sharing. All they need now is a feed reader, IM, blog editor, and mobile integration. My biggest concern is that it’s an AIR client, which is a resource hog and it is notorious for memory leaks.

Emergent Challenges

The biggest challenge to figuring out how to integrate all of these messages is how to bring them into a unified view. This problem doesn’t emerge until one attempts to unify the inbox…have you ever tried to use ALL the services available with Exchange Server in only outlook? If I have to switch between applications or inboxes within the system, then it doesn’t really help me see my communications any more clearly.

We need visibility, which ideally means our theoretical inbox is just a view for the linked conversation that exists in a central, scannable place. We need the ability to track open conversations and prioritization of what we read and respond to. Tracking means we need conversations to be logged in our CRM system. We also need analytics to know how our communication supports or detracts from our business objectives which helps up prioritize. To effectively prioritize we need more robust filtering and linked messaging.

At the moment, I can use a number of free and paid tools to help me listen. I wish they were powering my feed reader. I also wish I had those kind of tools for Twitter, email, SMS, and IM.

In addition to the universal communicator, we need to employ tactics that cut down on bad communications, such as writing good emails, collaborating on documents using wikis, and not emailing stand-alone files. But, those tactics are the subject of other blogs posts.

Universal Communication Client Business Requirements:

Supports linked conversations
Tracks and prioritizes open conversations
Supports CRM integration
Works with analytics tool
Allows for easy filtering

If you could order this dream communicator, what else would you define as the business requirements?

I have a huge amount of respect for anyone in Sales, I’m also (sometimes) a bit jealous. Aside from the fact that their jobs are incredibly difficult there is one luxury they do have that we in marketing do not. Clear goals and defined metrics. In marketing it’s often our responsibility to define what we should care about, what tools and business processes we use, how we should collect data to support its use, and ultimately how we consume it. Suffice to say we have a lot of metrics to be ontop of to do our jobs effectively. Website analytics are just one piece in a much larger web of data.

To get this conversation going, here’s a list of the tools we’re using:

• WebTrends
• PostRank
• Feedburner
• Radian6
• TwitterCounter
• Twitalyzer
• Yahoo! Pipes
• Netvibes
• Twitter Search
• SalesForce
• Quantcast
• Technorati
• Digg
• Filtrbox
• PopURLs
• Google Trends
• ZapTXT

This is by no means a complete round up of all available solutions out there. These are just the tools we use at WebTrends. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive list, try these lists:

• Companies that Measure Social Media, Influence, and Brand
• Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking
• Social Media Metrics Superlist
• 20 analtyics tools for your blog
• 10 promising free web analytics tools
• 10 terrific Twitter tools
• Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools
• 8 essential free social media monitoring tools

My question to you is: What tools to you use to monitor for marketing?

I’m the IT guy at our house. Are you? If we have a problem with our Y! Small business email, blog, with FB or twitter I’m typically trying to QA and find the fix in whatever spare time I can muster. Sound familiar?

If you work for a company and you have a problem with your email, who do you talk to? IT?

So, if you have a problem with your blog (that you talk about work stuff with sometimes), who do you talk to? Maybe IT, but chances are it depends on the problem or how your IT department feels about supporting blogs. What if you have a question about your work Twitter account? Or LinkedIn? Or Facebook? Now, who do you talk to?

help? anyone? anyone?

We need a Social Media IT department.

Our Social Media IT department wouldn’t solve all our problems would they? If we are lucky, and I’m lucky with the talented folks on my IT team, they’d be able to help us with the technical half of our challenges.

Our challenges are so much bigger. We need support at our place of work for the social and cultural issues we face on the social web. Employees need direction on the protocol and etiquette. If we’re participating on the social web to support our business, we also need tips on how to be successful in our communications. We have to have guidance on win friends and influence people toward our goals. That opens up a whole other can of works, metrics; we have to know what what is effective after all.

Zeldman talks about our need for a web division. He correctly identifies that we typically hand our websites to IT or Marketing. Any guesses where WebTrend’s website lives? While each of these respective departments have skills and interests that should influence the site. Traditionally neither is well suited for the whole responsibility. The same is true for the company Facebook group or the corporate Twitter account.

I’m not convinced we need a web division, but I think Zeldman is on to something. I am convinced that we need support for these newly emerged communication tools. And, not by dumping the responsibilities on existing departments that are ill-equipped and already bootstrapping. We do need Social Media IT for daily support of social media tools. It’s probably more accurate to say that we need a web division with social media capabilities. Or, better yet, a Communication Department.

Where does social media IT support live in your company?

From Wikipedia: Middleware is computer software that connects software components or applications.

Look at the conversation prism. It attempts to round up all of the 2.0 services out there. While many more have sprung up or died off since Brian Solis remade Robert Scoble’s Social Media Starfish, the visual metaphor does a great job telling the story: There are more communication services out there than you know what to do with.

Brian Solis' Conversation Prism

I am big fan of Mashable; I follow them on twitter and I read their blog daily. Their answer to managing the conversation prism…a 5 step process. I don’t think so.

Where’s the software that ties them all together? Who’s got the software stack infographic that shows how they all interoperate? Who is doing the legwork on the protocols and APIs to make sure we don’t have to think about them?

Oh, wait that’s right: No one.

Shit.

The burden is on us. *We* are the social media middleware.

Maybe that’s what Eric Schmidt was trying to say when he bagged on Twitter as a poor man’s email system. Maybe he was talking about the lack of basic robustness that a “real” business needs to operate. Not that Twitter should evolve to become email, but it could certainly stand to learn from it. Kinda like the way we learn lessons from the mainframe world of 20 years ago on topics like virtualization.

As I was saying last Friday, we’re inundated with data these days and much of it is from some form of communication. Each service has it’s own interface, user experience, APIs, and clients. There are so many valuable insights we could gain from a system that ties them all together. Do I have any volunteers? It can be our ’side project’. I’m not joking.

More platforms and more applications come online everyday. We know this. They all create data. We know this. Our businesses collect data, it comes at us from everywhere and from every channel we operate in. We know this too.

NYTimes News Data

In truth we are attacked by data. The sheer volume that is available. Some of us run from data. Some of us stay afloat in data. Some of us channel our data into value. Regardless, we are surrounded by data.

The Library of Congress with 130 million items on about 530 miles of bookshelves, including 29 million book, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts, can be stored on 10 terabytes.

IDC says that 161 exabytes of digital content was created, captured, or replicated in 2006. That’s 161 billion gigabytes, for those of you counting (I lost count at 6,979,563). By 2010, IDC suggests that number will increase sixfold to 988 exabytes.

To put that in perspective, in 2006 alone we created 16 million times more data than exists in the whole Library of Congress. In 2010 we’ll create 96 million times more data than the LoC.

What is all of this data? It’s memories like photos, documents, and videos. It’s communications like emails, phone calls, IMs, Facebook messages, and tweets. It’s business operations customer campaign management, general ledger, CRM and so much more. Is it fluid? Yes. Always? No. Some of it is purely for storage to comply with omnipresent edicts like Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI compliance, etc.

It is not humanly possible to parse all of this data; and to be clear some of it shouldn’t be. Our only way out of this web of data is to embrace it. We need software to help us make sense of it. We have to embrace its complexity, gain insight from it, and take action with it.

Fifteen years ago when WebTrends entered the web analytics space, the data we captured and processed was about onsite activity. Over a decade ago this was revolutionary and it has been largely manageable since. However, today’s enterprise businesses, of which mine is one, have our own web of data. It’s comprised of CRM, BI, BPM, social media monitoring, and more. The business ecosystem necessitates an ability to plumb together this data and expose new patterns, insights, and more valuable actions from the interconnected data.

Interconnected data is part of our Open Exchange focus and there are more details to come at Engage. See you there.