Archive for 'Key Performance Indicators'

This week is somewhat bittersweet for me because it marks the very first time I have missed an Emetrics in the United States since the conference began. And while I’m certainly bummed to miss the event, knowing that my partner John is there representing the business makes all the difference in the world. If you’re at Emetrics this week, please look for John (or Twitter him at @johnlovett) and say hello.

If you’re like me and not going to the conference perhaps I can interest you in one of the four (!!!) webcasts and live events I am presenting this week:

• On Tuesday, October 5th I will be presenting my “Web Analytics 201″ session to the fine folks at Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) who we partner with on The Analysis Exchange. You need to be a NTEN member to sign up but if you are I’d love to talk with you!
• On Wednesday, October 6th I will be doing a free webcast for all our friends in Europe talking about our “no excuses” approach towards measuring engagement in the online world. Sponsored by Nedstat (now part of comScore) all attendees will get a free copy of our recent white paper on the same topic.
• Also on Wednesday, October 6th (although at a slightly more normal time for me) I will be presenting our Mobile (and Multi-channel) Measurement Framework with both our sponsor OpinionLab and a little consumer electronics retailer you may have heard of … Best Buy! The webcast is open to everyone and all attendees will also get a copy of our similarly themed white paper.
• On Thursday, October 7th I will be at the Portland Intensive Social Media workshop presenting with Dean McBeth (of Old Spice fame) and Hallie Janssen from Anvil Media. I will be presenting John and Jeremiah’s Social Marketing Analytics framework and am pretty excited about the event!

All-in-all it promises to be a very busy week presenting content so I hope to hear from some of you on the calls or see you in person on Thursday.

Today I am really excited to announce the publication of our framework for mobile and multi-channel reporting, sponsored by OpinionLab. You can download the report freely from the OpinionLab web site in trade for your name and email address.

This paper builds on our “Truth About Mobile Analytics” paper we published with our friends at Nedstat last year and focuses on both measurement in mobile applications and, more importantly, a cross-channel measurement framework built around interactions, engagement, and consumer-generated feedback.

• Interactions occur in every channel, digital or not. Online and on mobile sites we call these “visits” (although that is a made up word for interactions); in mobile apps the interaction starts when you click the icon and ends when you click “close”; in SMS it starts when you receive the message; on the phone it starts when you dial, and in stores interactions start when you walk up to an employee.
• Engagement is simply “more valuable” interactions. Regardless of your particular belief about the definition of engagement, we all know it when we see it. Online it happens after some number of minutes, or clicks, or sessions, or whatever; in mobile apps it happens when you’ve clicked enough buttons; on SMS it happens when you respond to the message; on the phone it starts when you begin a conversation, and the same is true in a physical store.  We say engagement is “more valuable” because without engagement, value is unlikely to manifest.
• Positive Feedback happens when you do a really, really good job. Measuring feedback is a critical “miss” for far too many organizations. Apples “app store” and the value of the star-rating system has essentially proven that there are massive financial differences associated with positive and negative experiences … but most companies still make the mistake of ignoring qualitative feedback altogether.

These three incredibly simple metrics can be applied to every one of your channels, your sub-channels, and  your sub-sub-channels (if you like.)  When applied you can create an apples to apples comparison between your web, mobile web, mobile apps, video, social, etc. efforts.

Then you can apply cost data, and you’re really in business.

I don’t want to say much more than that but I would really, really encourage you all to download and read this free white paper. When we put something like this out — something we believe has the power to really transform the way everyone thinks about the metrics they use to run their business, and something that has the potential to force dashboards everywhere to be scrapped and started over — we’d really like your collective feedback.

DOWNLOAD  THE WHITE PAPER NOW

Thanks to Mark, Rick, Rand, and the entire team at OpinionLab for sponsoring this work. If you’re the one person reading my blog that hasn’t seen their application in action, head on over to their site and have a look.

I was reading a post recently outlining a somewhat incomplete attempt to measure something called “Influence” as a measure of success in Twitter. Being a champion for complicated and easily misunderstood metrics based on cognitive and behavioral psychology I was immediately drawn to the article but walked away unsatisfied … that is, until I found Twinfluence.

Twinfluence is this nifty little Twitter tool that lets you explore a Twitterer’s “influence” based on their reach (size of their network and second-level network), velocity, social capital, and centralization (see the explanation page at Twinfluence for the details behind each.) For example, here are some of the people I follow in Twitter analyzed by Twinfluence rank:

• Rank #19: Jeremiah Owyang (jowyang) from Forrester Research
• Rank #660: Bryan Eisenberg (thegrok) from Future Now, Inc.
• Rank #2,893: Marshall Sponder (webmetricsguru) from Monster.com
• Rank #3,577: Avinash Kaushik (avinashkaushik) from Google Analytics
• Rank #6,124: Anil Batra (anilbatra) from ZeroDash1
• Rank #7,195: Aaron Gray (agray) from WebTrends
• Rank #7,591: Jim Sterne (jimsterne) from Emetrics
• Rank #11,209: Omniture (omniture) from, yep, Omniture
• Rank #11,786: Dennis Mortensen (dennismortensen) from Yahoo! Web Analytics
• Rank #11,940: Nick Arnett (nick_arnett) a social media blogger

Whee, what fun! I could Twinfluence my friends and folks I follow all night and day if only client work, my family, and copious powdery snow didn’t get in the way. In case you were interested I have a rank of #5,754 based on my nearly 700 followers who are followed by over 375,000 other people and a very resilient social network.

However, after a little while I started thinking that measuring someone’s “influence” in Twitter was the wrong way to think about success in social media in general. Especially since people who have been dubbed “influential” and successful in the blogosphere have a tendency to think about their popularity in somewhat ridiculous ways … say perhaps stating publicly that they’re going to charge to re-tweet content because they want to buy expensive stuff?

Anyway, when I went down this path I immediately thought “Hey, the two things I spend the most time on in Twitter is trying to find great people to follow and trying to share interesting ideas.” To find great people I use Tweetdeck and to a lesser extent MrTweet to find folks who are having a conversation I’m interested in. To share interesting ideas I limit the majority of my updates to the sharing of links on web analytics related topics.

These combined efforts have helped me find and share ideas with hundreds of folks in Twitter interested in web analytics. So I started thinking “So perhaps the true measure of success in Twitter is being as good a listener as you are a source of information!” Being a balanced participant in your efforts, not just a “social media rock star” who spends all their time talking at people, not to them …

Of course this line of thinking let me to Dave Donaldson’s Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio (or the Twitter Ratio for short.) The Twitter Ratio is dead simple: the number of followers you have divided by the number of people you follow — the perfect Twitter key performance indicator! Dave even provides benchmarks against which we can be measured:

• A ratio of less than 1.0 indicates that you are seeking knowledge (and Twitter Friends), but not getting much Twitter Love in return.
• A ratio of around 1.0 means you are respected among your peers. Either that or you follow your Mom and she follows you.
• A ratio of 2.0 or above shows that you are a popular person and people want to hear what you have to say. You might be a thought leader in your community.
• A ratio 10 or higher indicates that you’re either a Rock Star in your field or you are an elitist and you cannot be bothered by Twitter’s mindless chatter. You like to hear yourself talk. Luckily others like to hear you talk, too. You may be an ass.

(The emphasis on that last sentence is mine … I laughed out loud when I read that!)

I think Dave’s Twitter Ratio of 10 or higher is the same thing as Perry Belcher’s “Twitter Snob” (funny YouTube video if you have 5 minutes.)  Perry comments that if your Twitter ratio is super high you may not be participating in “social media” but rather “solo media” — perfect!  Perry’s point is why are you even in social media if you don’t have time to listen to the conversation?

If I apply the Twitter Ratio to all of the fine folks I analyzed still ranked using their Twinfluence score here is what we get:

• Jeremiah Owyang earns a score of 2.95 indicating that Jeremiah “may be a popular person” and “people want to hear what [Jeremiah] has to say” plus he “may be a thought leader in [his] community.” Sounds pretty much perfect to me, but I like Jeremiah.
• Bryan Eisenberg earns a score of 1.04 indicating that Bryan is “respected among [his] peers” (or that he follows his Mom and she follows him, but with 1,951 followers we can assume the former is the best explanation)
• Marshall Sponder earns a score of 2.30 which is pretty similar to Jeremiah’s score against his 851 followers.
• Avinash Kaushik earns a score of 105.5 indicating that Avinash is “either a Rock Star in [his] field or an elitist [who] cannot be bothered by Twitter’s mindless chatter” who “likes to hear [himself] talk” but “luckily others like to hear [him] talk too.”
• Anil Batra earns a score of 1.27 putting Anil in the same category with Bryan above although with only 266 followers his reach is somewhat lower than Bryan.
• Aaron Gray earns a score of 1.49 pushing Aaron more towards Jeremiah Owyang than Bryan Eisenberg, at least on Dave’s scale.
• Jim Sterne earns a score of 17.48 which is in the same “Rock Star” range as Avinash (although an order of magnitude less rock-starry  than Google’s own analytics evangelist)
• Omniture earns a score of 1.26 indicating respect among the company’s 247 followers
• Dennis Mortensen earns a score of 13.85 showing that Dennis, like Jim and Avniash, is a true web analytics rock star!
• Nick Arnett earns a score of 0.58 which indicates that Nick is trying but alas, “not getting much Twitter love in return.”

My own score is 3.13 against 697 followers which I’m pretty happy about (especially the part about not “being an ass!”) Incidentally Perry Belcher’s Twitter Ratio is 0.98 … about as balanced as it gets!  If you have 30 seconds you can go to Dave’s site and calculate your own Twitter Ratio.

What do you think?

Is “influence” the best measure of success in social media? Or should we pay closer attention to something like the Twitter Ratio as a measure of our likelihood to actively participate in the larger conversation? It’s not hard to imagine the Twitter Ratio combined with a measure of tenure or update velocity or even something like influence to come up with a system to help us better discover which members of Twitter are providing real and substantial value to the community.

I welcome your thoughts, comments, suggestions, and perhaps more selfishly, recommendations for great and interesting people to follow and tools to help with the discovery process.

Web Analytics Wednesday in San Francisco this week was an amazing success by every conceivable measure. But don’t take my word for it, here are the metrics and key performance indicators:

• Budget for the event: $10,000.00
• Actual amount spent: $14,500.00
• Percent over budget: 31%
• Percent extra expenses graciously covered by ForeSee Results and Tealeaf: 100%
• Planned number of sponsors: 4
• Actual number of sponsors: 5
• Percent sponsors interested in this event: 120%
• Estimated satisfaction of sponsors based on feedback sample: 100%
• Projected number of attendees: 200
• Projected expenditure per attendee: $50.00
• Actual number of attendees: 400
• Actual expenditure per attendee: $36.25
• Percent of actual budget spent on drinks: 50%
• Estimated number of drinks served: 1,450
• Estimated number of drinks consumed per attendee: 3.6
• Number of hours spent serving drinks: 1.5
• Estimated number of drinks consumed per hour:996
• Estimated number of drinks consumed per hour per person: 2.4

I think the key measure of success is really satisfaction but I totally forgot to ask Larry Freed’s folks at ForeSee Results to conduct a survey during the event, we weren’t tagged with Coremetrics tags, and SiteSpect wasn’t able to test due to incredibly cramped conditions so we’ll have to rely on your comments and June’s pictures for the time being to make that determination. Maybe someone will post Tealeaf-esque replay video so we can estimate satisfaction based on qualitative data…

Speaking of the sponsors, I really want to thank all five sponsors of the event for their participation, willingness to help out, and excellent attitude … especially when the crowd volume prevented them from getting a word in edgewise during their 15 seconds of fame.

Suffice to say we could not have thrown a party like this without the help of these fine organizations.

I was also really pleased to see some of our industry thought-leaders out for the event, folks like Gary Angel, Jim Sterne, Larry, Judah Phillips, Brett Crosby, and Avinash Kaushik who has never attended Web Analytics Wednesday as far as I know but who just joined Google full-time, eschewing independent consulting for good old-fashioned job stability — congratulations Avinash and congratulations Google!

I was even more pleased to see many members of the Web Analytics Board of Directors at the show including Jim, June, Avinash, Bryan Induni, April Wilson, Richard Foley and probably a few more I am forgetting. I think this is great since the WAA has what can only be described as an estranged relationship with Web Analytics Wednesday … hopefully we can get that relationship worked out in 2008 so these two great organizations can work together for the benefit of our entire community!

Anyway, thanks to June, David Rogers, and all the volunteers and sponsors who made this great event happen. Mr. Sterne hinted that he’d like Web Analytics Wednesday to happen concurrently with every Emetrics conference around the world so hopefully we can work that out and take this great party on the road.

This morning the fine folks at Nedstat in Holland published a white paper that Michiel Berger and I co-wrote titled Measuring Multimedia Content in a Web 2.0 World.  This free white paper explores the emerging direct measurement model for multimedia content by examining several common business cases for deploying video and provides a new set of definitions and key performance indicators (KPIs) designed to help companies effectively track their investment in video based content.

The timing is somewhat ironic because Judah has been writing a fair amount about Video Analytics over in his blog — I guess great minds think alike!

While video measurement has been around for awhile, the new social media certainly increases the complexity associated with determining the efficacy of video from a business perspective.  The folks at Nedstat are committed to helping their customers resolve these issues, and are generously making our white paper available without registration requirements.

You can read the press release about the paper’s availability or download your own copy right away.