Jascha's Blog

The freely available Google Analytics service has been wonderful for the Analytics Industry. It has made analytics accessible to nearly everyone whom has a website. Unfortunately, today, widespread reports indicate an international outage for Google Analytics, Gmail and possibly more services. This outage has serious impacts on websites around the world and the businesses they are in that their customers depend on. CNet’s coverage of the outage has a great quote from Twitter user Tadiera: “The Internet dies without Google. Can’t get to my bank Web site because it’s waiting on ‘google-analytics.com.’ This is made of lame.”

This isn’t the first time a Google outage has outraged users. There was the 2008 incident. And there was the 2007 incident. Interestingly, each has occurred at roughly the same time of year, but not sure if that’s anything more than coincidence.

As the old saying goes “You get what you pay for.” Thom Craver astutely points out that “I repeat what I wrote earlier this week: If you’re a large company, you do not want to rely on Google Analytics. At this point, the little guy is now suffering.”

It’s a constant challenge for small businesses to afford high reliability services. Free options are great until something negative happens. Then they are forced to do nothing but wait for the service to restore. In reality they aren’t paying for the service so an outage here and there shouldn’t be upsetting technically…try telling that to anyone using a service that goes down though.

It’s unacceptable, however, that large companies are using free software on mission critical operations like analytics. It’s not just about data loss, it’s also about a hanging Javascript that can cause a page on their site not to load, which interrupts customer facing business operations.

Google is not the only one that suffers reliability issues. Just this past January Omniture also left it’s customers in the lurch during it’s outages. As Forbes reported, “…customers of Omniture’s Web-based data services have experienced sporadic hiccups for days on end since the beginning of December, receiving data as much as two days late–long after it would be useful, in many cases.”

The fact is that both Google and Omniture sample their customers data to begin with. It should concern their customers that these providers are having outages even when they are pulling sampled data.

Webtrends has made significant investments in our infrastructure to ensure that these kinds of incidents don’t happen. Do a search on Google for Webtrends outage. The only thing you’ll find is a one hour outage from a customer that uses our software, not our hosted service. We know it’s not sexy to talk about SaaS and other backend infrastructure topics when everything is running smoothly. But, when s*%@t hits the fan, then our customers love us for our reliability, scalability, and availability.

Update: The best coverage of the Google outage today was from Larry Dignan on Between the Lines

Google explains what happened here on their Official Blog.

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.

It was a great pleasure for the Webtrends staff and myself to host our customers, partners, and media at Engage 2009. Many thanks to our speakers and sponsors for making this event fun and informative to attend. Our minds are already swirling with plans for next year’s event! While this one is fresh in everyone’s mind, we’d like to ask for your feedback on how the conference was for you. How was the space? The speakers? Was the food good? Did the wifi hold up well? Anything you thought was missing? What was your favorite part? Last question…February of next year…Engage 2010…Orlando, New Orleans, Atlanta….?

I read Silicon Florist, Rick’s Turoczy’s blog. I’d highly recommend it if you haven’t checked it out.

Yesterday I stumbled onto a post about  Eric Peterson’s Twitalyzer and a geo mapping it has done to call out PDX twitter influencers. You can read the post here: http://siliconflorist.com/2009/04/02/twitalyzer-top-100-twitter-types-in-portland-by-influence/

It was cool to be on the list (#67). I’m new to the community and appreciate the mention.

Congratulations to Eric on the continued adoption of his cool new tool. It’s clearly useful now and seems to get better the more he invests in it and with more people added to the database.

Eric’s comment on Rick’s blog makes a nice joke about the nonsensical locations so many have in their Twitter profiles…As Eric points out, Twitalyzer searches based on people using Portland in their location. I’d echo his comment and encourage people to update their Twitter profile location if they want to be included.

All said, it is moderately ironic for me to have made this list being that I don’t live in Portland yet

Regardless, it has been a pleasure beginning my introduction into the local PDX tech community. I’ve met some wonderful and really smart people in the past few months. I look forward to actually, physically, moving to Portland once we sell our home in Seattle (DM me if you know a buyer!).

If you are interested there is a real time Twitalyzer list for Portland available here: http://twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/list.asp?l=100&f=&c=Portland&cn=Portland

It only shows top 10 so you have to scroll to see rest.

Jascha

We are just over one week away from WebTrends’ user conference, Engage09, April 7-9, and I am incredibly excited. I’ve attended this particular customer conference a couple of times but this will be my first as an employee of WebTrends.

If you have ever been involved in an event of this magnitude you know just how much work goes into the event, and all the hard work a marketing department, and company, contribute to pull it off. I am fortunate enough to work with a ton of dedicated people across many departments and partnering organizations that are pulling out all the stops to make Engage09 a truly great event.

Over the past few months we have been making a concerted effort here at WebTrends to express how we are an open and transparent company. I am confident that those customers, partners, sponsors and market influencers attending will see this in every aspect of Engage09. From the people who help in registration on day one, to the impromptu conversations in the hallways, the customer workshops and even the news we’ll distribute at the event, this is about one thing – an open exchange of ideas, thoughts and examples of how we can make the world of numbers more clear and actionable.

I wanted to take a quick moment to say thanks to all those who have registered, and also let others know that if you do want to attend, there is still time. In addition to our truly amazing customers and partners, sponsors and WebTrends employees there will be other notable names from across the industry.

Just some of them include:

Bill Gassman, Research Director, Gartner
John Lovett, Forrester Research
Derrick Harris, a blogger for GigaOm’s network where he writes about automation and cloud computing. At WebTrends we’ve been doing marketing analytics in the cloud for 15 years so I’m really looking forward to speaking with Derrick
Douglas Karr, VP of Blogging Evangelism for Compendium Blogware and an AdAge Power150 blogger. So, I can learn from him
Craig McLurg, someone with a ton of software development, project and business analysis experience and who will be blogging daily for Web Analytics World
Jacques Warren, who always delivers insightful conversations on the integration of web analytics with enterprise systems
Eric T. Peterson, a man everyone knows and who will have a lot of content that week for the Web Analytics Demystified blog
Jim Sterne, one of our industry’s great experts who will have lots of things to tweet about during the keynote events and break out sessions.
Anil Batra, a great #wa mind whom i’ve had the pleasure of working with prior to joining WebTrends.

I’ll see you in Vegas….baby !

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.