Just read a lot of great comments from my last post Interesting Stories about Social Media Monitoring and Analytics which encourage me and I’ll answer them at the end of this post – but first I want to encourage all my readers to buy Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton, 2nd edition – due to be published in March 2010.
I found the first edition of the book (I own it) the best analytics book I have read. Brian thinks his writing wasn’t that good in the first edition ….
…Google Analytics has advanced so much in that time frame that my approach to optimising web sites had changed; Partly because I believe my writing style has improved dramatically since my first book attempt; And partly because since leaving Google, I have gained more experience of using Google Analytics with some great forward thinking people and clients.
….The result is 7 months of hard graft to bring you what I hope is a much better, easier to digest, up-to-date and engaging book. It is essentially a complete re-write – growing to just beyond the 500 page mark – the first edition is 360 pages and took me 18 months to write. Partly because I was a poor writer, and partly because I was working full time for Google at the time i.e. evening, weekends and holidays were sacrificed in the name of “knowledge transfer”.
Actually, I thought Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics was very well written – the analytics examples were relevant and surprisingly easy to read, considering this is a fairly high end technical book, that’s quite an accomplishment.
I am betting on the second edition being far better and having more stuff on Social Media Measurement.
….. two years ago social networking meant having a Myspace account and a Facebook page. Twitter was hardly even heard of, browsing the web on your mobile was quite simply a PITA (pain in the *ss) and if you used the term MVT most people thought you were referring to music television – not mutlivariate testing!
Now, social marketing is the new SEO, the presidential campaign was won on Facebook (not quite, but social networking was a very large part of fund raising and voter engagement – see the excellent presentation by fellow Xoogler Dan Siroker), eye witness tweets hit the news wire faster than CNN and smartphones are the fastest growing segment of the mobile market. Google is even selling a smartphone itself, as well as producing what is possibly going to be the mobile operating system of choice for the next 10 years.
Just one more time … buy Brian Clifton’s book – you won’t regret it – looking forward to getting my hands on a copy (too bad I have to wait till March …erh .. hint, hint).
And after an evening packed with three exciting events I attended. Jeff Pulver’s Jan #140conf NYC Meetup was great, but I didn’t stay that long, plus the Digital Media MBA happy hour with Featured Guest Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare, one of the most talked about startups in location based social networking. Finally, I went to the ARNY – Augmented Reality New York January Meetup which was also excellent.
Getting back to Naveen Selvadurai of FourSquare – I needed to talk to him as I’m interested in pulling data off of select locations and noticed the list of attendees seems much shorter than it should be. Naveen told me what is being shown is attendees of a location that have visited and checked in via FourSquare over the last 3 hours. Naveen cleared up a question about pulling data off of FourSquare pages, which he said is OK for now.
The Augmented Reality meetup made me feel as if the time is ripe for getting into Augmented Reality now. An interesting point – any time augmented information is shown it counts as an impression and can be tracked by back end analytics, along with who viewed that impression and where they were located at the time – very interesting!
Ok, here’s the replies to comments from the last post.
Olivier Blanchard points out (about my question about Social Media case studies)
.. The point of the conference (and more importantly, of the report that will come out of it) is to begin the process of creating a framework for best practices in this space. This includes properly aligning measurement to business objectives.
Premature? Absolutely not. We’re a year late, actually. How are companies supposed to figure this out if we don’t help them along with mechanisms like this one?
With the vast majority of social media “experts” and consultants still incapable of articulating something as simple as R.O.I. to their eager clients, it’s time we started moving the ball forward.
I hope you’ll join us.
I’m glad Oliver invited me though I can’t see how I’d be able to go (esp since I’ll be in London a month later for Social Media Monitoring Boot Camp) but if I could go …. I would – esp to the Castle. To be honest, I’ve given BrandBuilder a pretty tough critique – he’s doing good work and this year we’re beginning to see how to measure Social Media and ROI from it – so I’m hopeful and interested in what comes out of LikeMinds conf – and yes, if there was a way I could attend, I would.
Sean McVey brought up a point about filling Web Analyst positions I need to clear up …
… I’m not quite sure I know what you mean when you say, “companies are often looking for the wrong things – they are looking for a person that usually does not exist…” From my experience I would have to agree with Mr. Kaushik in that having the right analyst is the most important investment. His point is that you need to spent serious time and resources on people first, then technology. Are you agreeing or disagreeing?
What I meant – the requirements for filling Web Analyst roles often mix skills that are acquired in different settings – for example – statistics, mathematics, database programming on one side, and data analytics on the other – with the idea that Web Analyst roles are becoming more like business intelligence roles.
But a lot of people I know who went into Web Analytics didn’t program, don’t know database programming. On the other hand, a lot of Web Analytics is creative, and another part is listening to stakeholders and understanding their needs. It’s almost as if the reqs, in many cases are looking to combine two different types of disciplines into one – and that’s why I said …. the people that are being looked for … may not exist (at least, not that often, which is why those positions are so hard to fill).
Didn’t Avinash Kaushik say
you need a person with a planet-sized brain” to avoid becoming “data rich and information poor.” There is a feeling in the market that finding the right staff is difficult:
“It is arguable that companies are not investing in staff, simply because there is a shortage of people with the right skills in the industry. Web analytics requires a unique combination of skills that includes an understanding of statistics, business acumen and deep knowledge of digital and interactive marketing.”
The problem is, as I see it - someone who has a brain that is Planet Sized …. will be more on the creative side …. and if they do go into the statistics part … will probably end up wanting do something more high end than be a web analyst who is most often stuck doing reports.
That’s why I think … the person that is being looked for … often, doesn’t exist – instead of accepting someone who has enthusiasm who can grow into a position and surpass it – they want to find people to fit into a box. Maybe I feel that way because I don’t fit into boxes, well, myself.
Finally, Jimmy Gilmore talks about Social Radar -
I agree that an apples to apples comparison would be great see. You very well maybe right on 80/20. I honestly don’t see how they could be perfectly aligned. Certainly Google and Yahoo/Bing aren’t. And we’d all be lucky if our site or campaign analytics were off by only that much. Thanks again and look forward to future articles.
I think one of my goals this year is to produce an apples to apples comparison of different monitoring platforms using the same exact queries – as many of them as I can. Right now I have access to Techrigy, Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Sysomos, Biz360i, BrandWatch, Cision Social Media (white labeled Radian6). It’s likely that not every query can be replicated in the same exact way in every platform – but here’s a rough idea of what I plan to do.
- One Locational Query (same exact data entered into each platform)
- One news event Query (Same as above)
- One Brand Monitoring Query
- One Influencer List
In each case, I’d analyze how each platform produced the results and how useful I found them. Sound like a plan?
Ok, it’s really late – I write good stuff when it’s late – but often, I get long winded – time to end this post, at least, for tonight.
Hope you enjoyed the information and keep the comments coming.
