Facebook: first impressions, Vol1

So, I finally got a Facebook account yesterday. Instantly I had 15 friends, yay. Of course, these are people I know and are from work circles, and from my personal life, and a little of both. My partner has had a Facebook account for a few months now and he's been a great usability subject for the site. He is a BIG fan of the site and I can see why, he showed me different things to add, how to get around, how attack, and how to grow things. It all clicked that the reason its popular is because it reflects life, and prospers on what 'people are doing right now'. They're not looking for a log of a persons life (although this does give it), but people just want to know what Neil is doing today, for lunch, right now. Its fun, it works, and I only have it right now because a critical mass of my network has it right now, and I've succumed to the 'I cant-not have one' feeling. Its good though, a right of passage thing I guess...getting some 'net-cred if you will.

More to come on my first impressions with Facebook... stay tuned!

Ctrl+Enter: A quicker way to browse

Tired of typing in w..w..w..dot.../...c..o..m? Or searching in your Google toolbar for a company, and then moving your mouse to click the site?

Just type in the domain name (e.g.: 'nytimes', 'aol', 'microsoft', etc...) directly into your URL bar and hit 'CTRL + Enter' on your keyboard at the same time. IE & Firefox will automatically fill in the syntax (http://www/. and the '.com')

Now, if your site isnt a typical '.com' it may end up redirecting anyway to the correct directory so dont worry about that, try it and see. It saves time from doing a Google search in your search bar, and then mousing to the site, or typing in the entire address in the oh-so-tedious URL bar. Enjoy =)

Technorati: infuse new ideas into your analysis

I've heard of it for a while now, but never went to the site and for some reason thought it was like Engadget, or Gizmodo. I didn't realize that its a site that scours millions of blogs and can give a great pulse on whats new in the blogosphere regarding technology. It indexes some 27 million blogs and gives you the most relevant and recent postings. Check more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati

I thought it might be a great way for new (ok... and experienced) analysts to get ideas on what people are saying about the site they are performing analysis on, or the client they're working with. Chances are if folks are blogging about it, they've been to the site and are directing more people there as well, with the bloggers sentiments in mind. It may sound elementary but its a great way to correlate what is being said to what is actually happening on the site. Is the blogger really liking a new product, do they hate the new technology?

Think to yourself, by them blogging about something, are people going to take them seriously and if so how can we use this to our benefit and recommend actions taking what the the data, shows, and the qualitative audience is talking about it? Obviously there are a lot of tools that do this, and take much of the manual work out of it, but sites like Technorati are a quick gut-check to brainstorm new ideas.


Here are some other really great resources a peer forwarded to me that allows you to do the same thing:

Searching Blogs:
Google Blog Search
Ask.com is also a good source for searching blogs.
IceRocket (can track conversations over time and display trends in graphical format; good for monitoring buzz. Also indexes MySpace posts and images)
Feedster
BlogPulse (tracks conversations like IceRocket. Also profiles top bloggers with info on who they are and what they write about).
Opinmind.com (classifies results by bias, i.e., tone)
TalkDigger (blog search engine aggregator)
BlogBlusiness.com (directory of blogs about different business related topics)
Technorati also has watch lists, like google news does. Also has a top 100 blogs list to see most influential bloggers, based on hos many links they have from other bloggers. Let’s you narrow your search by authority of blogger too.
Sphere.com results based on influence also.
Another good source for finding good blog search engines and directories: http://masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

Searching Podcasts
Harder to do but not implossible.
Podscope.com and Podzinger.com
Enter search term and get taken to a list of podscasts that mention that term. You can click on a control button and listen to the exact segment in the program where the search for term is spoken. Pretty damn cool. However, they don’t cover every podcast out there, so that’s a limitation.
Podcast Alley (owned by PodShow Network; is a podcast directory)
Podcasting News (also a directory)
Podcast.net (directory)
iPodder.org (directory)
Another good source for finding podcasts: http://masternewmedia.org/news/2005/05/20/where_to_submit_your_podcasts.htm

Trust your Instincts - Adding UX hints in your analysis

I had an interesting experience about a month ago when I partnered with a UX resource on my team and presented a heuristic review for one of our clients, looking at their product pages and what could be done to improve them. It was a quick project, about 40 hours in total, but my UX resource gave some very good insight to what could be fixed. A few of the suggestions he made were items I had thought of as well, but many I hadn’t. For the ones that I had thought of, because UX isn’t my background and I sometimes have an uneasy time telling what would work or not, I tend to not add them in my recommendations. A lot of what was said was very tactical and actionable, and items like that would be great to include in an analytics analysis.
I had the idea of creating a brown bag series with the Analytics and UX team where each session a member of the analytics group would partner with a UX person ahead of time and do a little prep-work on a current analytics-clients website, discussing goals, objectives etc… Then during the session, the pair would talk through the site, as a mini-review, giving advice on what could be done to help improve the goals. I believe this will be a great way for the analytics group to see what UX does, and vice-versa, because it applies to their specific-clients work. The analysts can then take the pointers from the session, apply it to the data, and make recommendations based on that because they will feel more confident in what they are suggesting.
I'm going to be setting up the first sessions in a few weeks, I'll let you know how they go...

Standard Deviation and Goal Setting

It seems to be that time of year, a few of our clients are asking us to help set goals for the upcoming year. Typically my experience with goal setting has always been the edict of the management, and arbitrarily increasing goals by 5% or how ever much they wanted to grow. This has always seemed odd to me and I wanted a way to back up the goals to see if a) they were achievable b) if they made sense for the coming year and c) if they were too achievable and we'll always be going above the goal.

To do this, we've started using Standard Deviation based on prior months data to get this new goal. Ironically, its a pretty simple way to tell where you want to be next year, and back it up.

A little background..
Businesses today are all about six-sigma, a system originally created by Motorola to improve processes by eliminating defects. You'll hear the term mentioned in nearly every corporate boardroom about the nation. Standard Deviation is the core to this whole process because it shows what a 'significant change' actually is, in whatever youre measuring. Pretty cool stuff.

Avinash Kaushik had a great post on using Control Limits to judge swings in traffic. The method he discusses uses Six-sigma and standard deviation to work it all out. Its a great way to show clients if the change is indeed good, bad, or just doing what it normally does.

So how does this apply to goal setting ? Because based on prior performance, you can say with a certain amount of confidence that your can actually get to your goal.

I'll grab a sample on how to do this soon, but you basically find the average of your data points, find the standard devitation of the data points and add them together. This will give you one standard deviation above the mean. Add the average plus twice the standard deviation, you have two... and so on. The more data points you have the better but overall thought is to get an idea of where we want to be going forward. You can then present options of what a 'good', 'better', and 'best' goal is.

To go a little deeper into this, a goal in the 'Good' range will be hit 34.1% f the time, a goal hit in the 'Better' range will be hit 13.6% of the time, and a goal hit in the 'Best' range will be hit 2.1% of the time. This is based on the typical 'bell curve' . Ideally, everything would be 'Best' but 2.1% of the time isn't always realistic (and depending on your data, ever achievable). If the difference between the whole deviations is too large, you could pare it down to half of a deviation.

Overall- its a pretty neat way to show what a good goal for the upcoming year should actually be, and you can have a bigger drive to reach it if you know that it might actually happen.

Web Analytics Wednesday @ ZAAZ

ZAAZ hosted Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) again last evening. It was the fifth or sixth time I hosted the event for the group, and they keep getting better. We had people attend from ZAAZ, Microsoft, Razorfish, Farecast, Neutrino, and Whitepages.com. Its interesting now that after having done this a few times, we are seeing recurring people which is great because you get the feeling of community now among the group instead of everyone not knowing each other and having to play the get-to-know-you dance. The main topic I heard going around a lot last night was Google, Google, & Google. Why the heck not? They're hot right now. Snapping up Doubleclick just to Microsoft couldn't have them and the latest release of Urchin there is a lot to talk about in the space. Mostly the talk is generally about the industry and whats going on, rather than best practices- which to some extent is okay. Best practices is what gives you a slight lead among the competition, which essentially is what all these people are anyway. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer I suppose right? Regardless of all of it- WAW is really panning out to be a good event for Web Analytics professionals to develop community among themselves and finally feel like they belong. Most companies right now just have one or two web analytic FTE's, and its hard to play in a game like that when you have all this creativity but no outlet. This definintely provides that.

ta-da

finally thought of a fun name for my blog that represented a fun creative side, combined with the nuts and bolts of what I do for a living. Hmm, sounds an awful lot like my employer =)

More to come... stay tuned, we'll be covering a lot of thoughts on Web Analytics and how it applies to the ever expanding reach of the internet