Just had lunch with Mike Moran at my IBM office little more than a month ago - and Mike Moran has been a good friend to me, fellow Web Analytics Association Member, and a member of my Social Media Committee at the WAA. Oh yes, he was also my first real boss at IBM, almost 5 years ago.

I just found out, according to Lee Odden that there's an Internet Marketing Podcast with Mike Moran & Lee Odden:

"…There are 8 podcasts in the series and they cover a range of Internet marketing and new media marketing topics applicable to any business that’s trying to understand online marketing. For most of the podcasts, we use Mike’s books, “Search Engine Marketing Inc” written with Bill Hunt and Mike’s new book, “Do It Wrong Quickly” as starting points for discussing a range of topics related to how Internet marketing is changing and what organizations can do to take advantage."

Mike Moran's new book Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules  was just published by IBM Press last month.

I have to admit, I like the "Search Inside" feature and found myself mentioned 3 times (a reference to the 50,000th visit to my blog, Webmetricsguru.com is on page 38 - I like that - right now, 700,000 visits later, i'm remembering the momement when 50,000 visits seem an awful lot).

Have to admit, I read the book in Manuscript - I was reading each chapter and weighed in, with a few others on what I thought - how much of that got into the final version of Doing it Wrong Quickly, I don't yet know.

Mike Moran's book is quite good, and I sincerely say that - not because he's a friend, not because I once worked for him, not because he's on my Social Media Committee at the WAA - I really think Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules was better than most marketing books I've have come across - and Mike put a whole lot of information you'd have to search for in other books into this one book - so I suggest buying a copy or two copies (give the other to a friend).

When a site is redesigned to be more personalized several things change.  Page views, especially for some pages, may go down drastically, due to Ajax and Navigation changes - at least, that's what I've noticed.

Another sticking point - Analytics for a site that personalized is more complicated; if you go all the way with personalization, no two people would see the same page - and recreating the page someone else sees at a certain point in time may be next to impossible to accomplish (with the web tools that exist today - perhaps this will change in a year or two).  And storing all that data - plus aggregating it into usable segments - demands a lot of thought.

But that's the structural and technical aspects of personalization …. what about the behavioral part - is a highly personalized web experience the right way to go?

According to Holly Buchanan at GrokDotCom …. the answer depends on how much control the visitor retains over turning on/off personalized results (and being aware they're happening when you think they're not…IE: transparency).  In Why "Personalization" scares me, Holly mentions why Personalization could be a bad idea:

"…What I'm talking about is, displaying different content for different customers. The customer is no longer in control of what he or she sees.

Do you really have enough insight into what someone is thinking, or what they truly want, from their observable behavior?"

The problem is that no one can predict, for sure, 100% of the time, what a visitor actually wants to see or what they're really searching for; Personalization is based on being able to determine, through various means, what your visitors want to see ahead of time or as they are interacting with your site.

"…Don't get me wrong. One of the most powerful things about the web is the ability to deliver customized experiences. Future Now is all about creating different experiences for different customers or personas. But nobody can't predict with 100% accuracy exactly what every customer wants to see. That's why we create different pathways or scenarios [define], but we let the customer choose which one s/he will take.

Instead of dictating what customers will see, we allow customers to decide which pathway is best.

And it's entirely possible that visitors don't actually know what they want, in some situations.  That's why I think Mike Moran's approach of doing changes in small steps and measuring the result is the right way go with personalization testing….don't over personalize your site and let people easily turn of personalized results when they want to.

I found that one statement about happiness in Penelope Trunk's new book, Brazen Careerist (which I reviewed here) to have stood out more than any other, for me, in her book.  And I know it's true (but I'd argue, in NYC, make it 55,000 or 60,000 instead of 40,000) and she talks about it today in her blog post on How a Job can Save You:

"…When we think about a job saving someone, we usually think about people in poverty. For example, Richard Easterlin, an economics professor at the University of Southern California found that earning enough to pay for food and rent can drastically change the lives of people in poverty–and give them the ability to achieve happiness. But he found that anything beyond around $40,000 a year does not have much impact on your level of happiness."

Shortly after 9/11, living in NYC, I was out of work for a while and while 40K was a fraction on what I used to make, it looked like Gold at one point.

"…The reason for this is that our happiness comes, for the most part, from the amount of optimism we have. Daniel Gilbert, in his book Stumbling on Happiness, spends 300 pages talking about all the research that shows how misguided we are about our ideas of happiness. The biggest mistake is thinking we can influence it much. Mostly, we can’t. Mostly we have no idea what will make us happy in the future–although we think we do. "

One thing that's nice about Penelope's post is the measurement of the potential for a job to provide happiness being tied to 4 qualities (which we all should look at):

"..attributes that The Economist reports that your job must have in order to make you feel productive and happy about your work:

1. Stretches a person without defeating him

2. Provides clear goals

3. Provides unambiguous feedback

4. Provides a sense of control

She also goes on to say:

"…The range of jobs that meet these requirements is wide. And they include jobs you might not expect. For example, hairdressers report they fire clients who treat them poorly, and janitors say that they get feedback from the people who are happy the floors are clean. Conversely, lawyers report having little control over their goals, since the clients frequently change them, and that they have little control over outcome because they are beholden to a judge, jury or ambiguous law.

So a job cannot make you happy, even if you wish it could. But it can save your life. People report that in times of extreme negativism and sadness — depression, poverty, or complete lack of connection to the world — a job has saved them. I have found in my own life, and experts agree, that work can rescue a dangerously unhappy life by providing  routine, a connection to other people, and the feeling of contributing to the world."

It's nice reading Brazen Careerist (the blog) and having reviewed the book, to be reminded of what the metrics of happiness are - it's often not what we think.

Often, life gives us what we need, but not necessary, what we want in the way we wanted it.  And, as far as optimism, I can use more.

In a recent meeting with Mike Moran, one of my former bosses at IBM and good friend, that he mentioned he used to be overweight and made a fundamental change to his diet (I think he talks about that in his new book as well - coming out in a couple months - I have read the manuscript and it's GREAT). It had to do with an attitudinal change - and he's been able to maintain his weight for several years now.

Message being (and I hope I learn this too) that while changing your happiness set point is hard, it's not impossible, just as changing your weight set point is hard, yet -  not impossible. Difficult to maintain - initially, yes, but impossible? No.  You just have to want to enough - for long enough, and you can be the weight you need to be and at the happiness level you need to be at.

Thanks to Panelope Trunk, for the insight about happiness.

It was a long day - wasn't having much luck with getting wireless internet connectivity or a phone connection; either the network was not properly set up or there were too many people using the wireless hot spot at one time.

But here are the highlights of Day 1, and I'll do another post about tonight.

I did not attend most of the sessions today - captured the end of the BIG SEO session featuring Bill Hunt and Marshall Simmonds that I wrote about in Zoom-In.

As I was finishing lunch, over walks Avinash Kaushik, who's at SES NY supporting Google and we spoke for about 10 minutes; it was great seeing him again. Avinash said he now has an office in the GooglePlex (building 4, I think … I don't know for sure, I was never at the GooglePlex).  I mentioned that if all goes well we will be fellow board members of the Web Analytics Association  soon; he said he was not even thinking about running but was asked by Bryan Eisenberg (same as me).  Said he does not know how I do it all, blog so much, work full time at IBM, Paint, have so many SEO Clients - and I replied back that I don't know how I do it either - but somehow, I do.  Avinash gave me his card and then he had to run to the Google sponsored lunch session which I did not attend (I was busy trying to post something here - but lost my internet connection and my computer also crashed).

Next, Sonal Shanker, a coworker from IBM who is attending SES NY, came by and hung out with me for lunch.

Later in the afternoon, I met with one of my clients, GCS, who run several travel distributor sites for Irish and Scottish vacations about their recent website re-design and the metrics around the new sites.

And finally, I ran into Mike Moran, a friend and my former boss at IBM; we ended up talking for a while and going to party later that evening, a very, very exclusive party that I'll cover in another post.

I went over the the Metaverse Meetup last night that was really, really, rocking!  I tried to take some pictures but hardly anything came out - I'm sure others will be posting pictures and I'll include links to them in a later post.

However, I do want to say a couple of things about yesterday - one that I'll be working on a internal Second Life Project providing Metrics at IBM and also met and some wonderful people last night as well as seeing some pretty amazing stuff at the Meetup.  I just got done emailing all the people I'm mentioning here - or I hope I have got most of them as I had several conversations last night.

CombinedStory - Boris Kizelshteyn - I met Boris at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference earlier this week while talking with Ancient Shriner - Jared Freedman.  Boris is really nice guy and seemed to know a lot about the SL Community and it's really rich.  His company, CombinedStory, is actually right around the corner from where I work at IBM.  We were discussing getting me some SL immersion training and I learnt a lot from talking with him.

I also spoke with Melody Chamlee, of Ziff Davis who was really someone I can speak with - some one of like mind - I rarely meet someone who I am that tuned in with.  Hopefully Melody will get back to me with some questions for input she can use on some of her Ziff Davis articles.   I think Melody was also involved in one of the 4 projects we briefly looked at last night - www.DearIDea.net - I'll go into that in another post.

I ran into Nathanial Freitas last night again - he's the guy responsible for me being at Virtual Worlds 2007 in the first place! - had I not spoken to him at the Etsy party last week, I'd never know to ask for the Press Pass that allowed me to meet all the rest and know about all of this wonderful stuff - including the Metaverse Meetup that happened last night.

Funny thing, I did not immediately associate him with the party last week and feel really bad that he had to come up and introduce himself to me - I've met so many people lately sometimes it gets blurred - but as soon as he mentioned the Etsy party, I remembered, and we had corresponded last week.

I'll do a post or two about www.Cruxy.com, Nathanial's company very soon; we're setting up to meet in Park Slope soon where I'll interview him about www.Cruxy.com.   I will say that one thing people don't know about Cruxy.com is that it's hosted entirely on Amazon Web Services and Nathanial does not have to pay for any kind of hardware - I had no idea Amazon had gone so far into Web Services! I turns out Amazon did what HP and Sun talked about, years back.   But I'll leave that all for another post.  Meanwhile, check out www.Cruxy.com - especially if your a musician or artist (and I'll cover that in my art blog, www.artnewyorkcity.com ).

Also had a nice conversation with Jean-Ann Mills, an Events Producer for Electric Sheep Company in Second Life.  She said that planning an event in SL is just as involved as it is in real life except she does not have to worry about the food!  I told her….that's not true… Avatars need to eat too - just like the Pharaoh's of old - who went to the next life with all the most cherished objects of their physical life on Earth, including food. 

I also asked Jean-Ann to try to facilitate a meeting with Electric Sheep Company and me (she's an event planner - so maybe she can also help setup this "event") -so I can see their metrics backend. 

I need to see it before I can write about it (that is .. if they want me to write about it).  I had talked to Jerry Paffendorf and Sibley Verbeck over the last two or three days but nothing really concrete about a discussion over metrics - and I'm a Web Analyst - so I need to see what they're doing - especially now.

Ran into John K. Bates again, from www.EntropiaUniverse.com and we spoke again briefly last night - it was great to see the support the Virtual World Community has for all it's members.  I think John did a pretty good job of showing why someone would want to go into Entropia instead of, or in addition to Second Life.

Briefly spoke to Adam Broitman of Morpheus Media - his company sounds like the place to go if you want to get a basic implementation in Second Life and don't have a ton of money to spend.  I'm going to try to plug that service to some of my SEO clients, like www.Mascord.com that really should consider SL but haven't been willing to take the plunge.  Most of the Architects I've dealt with are kind of the conservative sort - then they wonder why the conversion rates are low or the audience is not broad enough. Seth Godin has the answers - it's just that few really want to listen to them and follow through to the logical conclusions.  What can I say … I'll keep plugging away.

And Mike Moran, who was not at the meetup, but comes into this context because of one thing he says in Chapter 6 of his new book, as yet unpublished, about Doing it Quickly.  A lot of these SL ideas I'm proposing could be doing quickly and not very expensively …. but the idea, as Mike proposes, is to do things in a small way first, and Quickly…and fail often to succeed in the long run. 

I think Mike Moran has a message a lot of people need to hear - about metrics, conversion process and Trying new things Quickly …. Testing.  I think Second Life projects, that I'm proposing is are a way in - to address the low conversion rates - or at least, to build Branding - which is what sells the Architect's plans anyway…. so maybe now, when I say, go into Second Life - I have resources and people I can send my clients to.

I spoke with Peder Burgaard at the dinner last night before the MetaVerse Meetup and he's doing a research Project and had worked with several at IBM and I offered to help him with in any way I can with people I know at IBM.  Peder had some really good ideas and I'm sure we will correspond.

Honestly, I can't be totally sure  Dan Benzakein is not the guy living in Paris who I spoke with yesterday or someone else I spoke wit the day before at Virtual Worlds 2007.  I think it's the former, not latter; in either case, we had a great conversation - both cases.

And I think I was speaking with Prokofy Neva, manager of Raven glass Rentals a couple of times over the last 3 days - and we had a nice conversation about Metric last night at dinner.

And at the end of the long evening - I saw the 4 projects being talked about at the Metaverse Meetup, including a Wii interface to Second Life that is pretty neat and Open Sourced that was just thrown together in the last couple of days.

Yes, Momentum is moving very quickly in Second Life - now might be the time to jump in - that's my prediction …. the time is now.

If you wait 6 months or a year, you'll be behind the wave.

I was reading Avinash Kaushik's post on The Great Web Capture Debate (logfiles vs. JavaScript tagging) when I noticed Avinash also did a great interview with Mike Moran of IBM (and one of my former bosses a couple of years back).  I'll focus on both posts here.

First off, I want to say that I read Kaushik's entire post on Web Capture using Google Reader on my SideKick 3 and I find I can process the content better on a small PDA like device….maybe it's just me.

I found out reasons to use JavaScript vs. logfile analysis, because I read Avinash Kaushik's Web Capture post, that I did not know about, like:

"….Increasingly we are heading towards doing a lot more measurement and customer experience analysis beyond just clickstream. Two great examples of this are experimentation and testing (especially multivariate testing) and personalization / behavior targeting. In both cases “add-on” solutions are tacked on to the website and testing / targeting happens. Often these solutions come with their own methods of collecting and analyzing data and measuring success…………………….."….Integrating with these add-on solutions (which often also use javascript tags and cookies and url identifiers) is significantly easier if you use javascript tags. It is easy to read cookies in web logs etc, but he pace at which you can integrate and the ease at which you can integrate is faster if you are using javascript tags."

I've tended to accept logfile analysis as a given with JavaScript (single pixels web beacon) as the improvement over logfile analysis but both work, more or less.  Avinash make it clear why you'd want to use one over the other and the need for a third way - something neither data collection method provides.

Ten Minutes With….. Mike Moran, IBM was a good read for me; currently I'm looking at Mike's manuscript, as yet unnamed, about Marketing.  If I were to pick a title - I'd call it "Marketing 2.0" (sorta after "Web 2.0").  Getting back to the interview, Avinash Kaushik focuses on Mike's 4 Patents.  

IBM, in general, really is rich in Patents and when I started at IBM 4 years ago, I was working in the IBM Hawthorne Research facility and there was a wall with all IBM's Patents (including, I'm sure, Mike's 4 Patents).  I can imagine that some of what makes search engines effective (to the extent they are effective) touches one of Mike Moran's Patents in some part of algorithm process.

Avanish focuses the interview with Mike Moran on SEO/SEM - but to me - Mike is much broader than Search Engine Optimization; his experience encompasses Personalization, which his team at IBM.com had a lot to do with architecting.  

A couple of months ago Mike left IBM.com to work for IBM Software Group managing OmniFind - IBM's Search Engine that works with WebSphere. Last week I wrote up OYE! (Vay?) -IBM-Yahoo Search Engine for Enterprise and Internet Search about the OmniFind OYE! edition that was just released.

Avinash's interview with Mike Moran worth a close read; and I'm glad that I know and worked for him (in fact, Mike was one of the 7 or 8 people who interviewed me initially to get into IBM in the first place).

I got an email from Jonathan Mendez who "tagged" me ….

"….This was started by Jeff Pulver http://pulverblog.pulver.com/. I don't usually like or participate in these chain ideas but there is an interesting aspect to it since it is blog-centric.  Since I had to choose five people to tag and I don't know many bloggers I thought that I'll tag you all since I obviously respect all of you and would love to know something more about you as well."

The rules are layed out here.  I was trying to figure out how I'm sopposed to respond.

Here are 5 facts about me that maybe you don't know (and this is hard for me to come up with - because I write in stream of consciousness).  I don't think I can compete with Jonathan Mendez because he's got 400 more bottles of red wine in his cellar than I do!

1. Everyone knows I'm a painter as well as a web analyst - but what you don't know …. is that my favorite color is green and my favorite artists from the past are Paul Cezanne  and Edward Manet.  When I was a teenager I painted several still lifes and landscapes in a style similar to Cezanne - but I learned that while I might admire Cezanne, my approach is much different - probably closer to Van Gogh (if a comparison could be made).

2. I don't actually read that many books, but the ones I remember being most influential on me were the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon, The Social Contract by Rousseau, The Lives of the 12 Caesars by Suetonius. The Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky, the Letters of Eugene Delacroix and the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.   Stuff like that.

3. I spent five years living in the Midwest, in Minneapolis in early to mid 80's and froze my mitts off and actually saw Purple Rain while I was living in Minneapolis.

4. Don't travel much (and don't really like to either) but I did send myself to Paris in 1988 and spent 8 days romping around the Louvre and speaking to American woman (as I don't speak French and hardly anyone else would talk to me).  Around that time I also painted, what I think was one of my finest paintings of that period, After the Bath and Homage to Manet.

5. For a while one of my favorite hobbies was/is alternative medicine and, when I could, would spend money testing out all kinds of alternative health therapies and even biofeedback devices like Wild Divine (which really should be done in Second Life now - but with Wild Divines biofeedback device).

I'm scraping the barrel here………. and my story is not half as interesting as what Mendez wrote about his life.  I just wish I had the 400 bottles of wine - red wine - I don't care for white wine (I'm a colorist).

OK, by blog tags are……… assuming their all web analytics and seo people (who can link back to me and have blogs) Lee Odden has been supportive of this blog and he's got a cool picture of Aladdin's lamp on his blog today which I just copied  plus Timothy Seward of the Unofficial Google Analytics Blog and a Google Analytics Channel Partner (who I need a favor from - help me understand the problem I wrote about yesterday about getting GA to work in my environment at KMM); I think Tim also should link to this blog.  Also, I got to meet Jason Van Orden a couple of times this year at the NYC Podcasting Meetup and do read his blog - recently I helped Jason out with metrics for Podcasting.   Also Mike Moran of IBM, who was also one of my bosses, has been very helpful and influential in my thinking about calling things the way I see them - as he does - Mike currently manages OmniFind Search Engine for IBM. Also, Mike Levin of Connors Communications and now of HitTail fame  is someone I've bumped in to several times over the last year or two and have enjoyed talking with. Finally, I need to round out this list by naming a woman, Liz Camps, of Green Media Inc.  I just got to know Liz this year and am now also doing some posting to Big Green Blog. Green Media is a small interactive ad agency that's really cool - and I definitely recommend "GM" as I like to call Green Media (but they don't make cars - however they do handle many automotive clients for SEO/SEM and Analytics.

Again, I thank Jonathan Mendez for Tagging me in the first place. 

I'm a subscriber to Mike Moran's Biznology newsletter - the one just published for December 06 is pretty detailed about Web Metrics Measurements - pretty good read.  Here's what stood out to me and what my thoughts about it are:

"…If Web metrics makes your brain hurt, don't worry. We can simplify things for clarity. If we end up oversimplifying things a bit, that's the price you pay. As mathematician John von Neuman observed, "There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."

I don't believe anyone has Web Analytics "nailed down" - there's imprecision in just about any metric.  Kinda weird - we have the ability to record everything that happens on a page - on a site - yet - we often can't get all the numbers we want and the data we can pull can be interpreted in a number of different ways. 

Mike goes on to put forward basic measurements - and we can't even agree on that:

"….Did they see it? The first thing we want to know is if our content was viewed by the customer. Was the ad shown? Was the e-mail seen? Was the blog post viewed? We call this measurement the impression.

Did they choose it? If seen, was it acted upon? Did they click on our message to go deeper? This one is called the selection. (Because AJAX user interfaces allow selections without clicks, we shouldn't call this a click through, although usually selection is done by clicking.)

Did they do it? What did we want the customer to do? Buy something? Fill out a contact form? Call our toll-free number? This metric is called the conversion".

First of all, most of the packages I've been working with …..there's no "They" - there's a bunch of clicks - but you don't know who people are behind that.  You can tell how many of those that click on ad or link on a page - but as Mike Moran points out, with AJAX and Flash ….it's hard to even know that.   What they did…you can probably figure out (if you can record it).  So at best - even the simple thing that any story should have (who, what, where, when and why) is very difficult to answer with Web Analytics.

However, with good web structure and design - you could segment your site a head of time - make sure only the people who are interested in an offer - see the offer (by making them click to it - not sticking it on the homepage). 

The problem here ……. we are asked to measure promotions already existing - when no thought was given to how to present the information in a way that allows us to collect the information we want- one reason why Web Analytics is imprecise.  We have to make some educated "guesses" in cases like that.

It's good that "web beacons" was mentioned - I never knew that was the name of a single pixel transparent image as defined by IAB.

Then we get into RSS Subscriber measurement

"….Some metrics experts suggest that you send short excerpts of your blog posts in your blog feed, rather than the full posts. Doing so makes it easy to count impressions of the full post, because customers click through to your Web site to read it, thus making it as easy to count as any other Web page view. But many usability experts decry this practice because customers prefer to read everything in their feed readers, without bouncing back and forth to your Web site. Don't annoy your customers just to solve a measurement problem—just accept that blog feed impression counts are not terribly precise. Until something better comes along, we can make the simplifying assumption that the impressions of your blog posts in blog readers are equal to your number of subscribers."

That's an area of contention right now.  I'm of the mind you should put the entire post in your feed than a portion of it….I'm also annoyed at having to take that action - click on a link to see the rest of the post.   I don't know about counting the number of impressions of your blog posts as the number of subscribers. 

Blogs are a different entity than a normal web page - for one thing - people come back more often (if they like the blog) and they can click on multiple posts during the same session -and in most cases …they do that.  I would not go with blog post impressions as a measure of anything except that people are looking at the post.

As far as subscribers - FeedBurner is still your best bet - but if you don't use FeedBurner AND you use XML readers like Google Reader - and your entire post is in the XML feed - I don't see how your metrics will pick up that you post was seen.  In other words - your screwed both ways - because …

- if you use FeedBurner AND the whole post is in the feed - you read the post (or not - your reader gets it anyway …maybe from Google - maybe cached - so you don't know how many times Google fetches the actual feed …maybe only once) without clicking on anything …so what does FeedBurner know about how many subscribers are reading the post?  Nothing much.

- if you don't use FeedBurner and your post shows up in Google Reader …and you click on it go to the site - yes - you know there's a visit - but you don't know for sure if the visit was a subscriber.

Your screwed both ways …… the best thing you can do is take two aspirin's, look at FeedBurner's estimated subscribers for your blog and up the number by about 20% to 50%….. how's that for precision.

Read the rest of Mike Moran's December Newsletter here.  To end this post - there's no Unified Field Theory of Web Metics and now you know why.